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English, August Screenplay
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117 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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About the author
Upamanyu Chatterjee
18 books209 followersUpamanyu Chatterjee is an Indian author and administrator, noted for his works set in the Indian Administrative Service. He has been named Officier des Arts et des Lettres (Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters), by the French Government.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 1, 2021
English, August the film was my first exposure to the book - I'd seen it lying around at a local library, but the horribly written blurb, led me to believe it was likely to be a self indulgent snoozefest that was best avoided.
In the years since its release in 1994, I have romanticised the film beyond belief - to the point where I'm unable to disentangle my feelings about it.
How many of the impressions I have of it today occoured to me at the time? And how many came later, as I lived long enough to realise the EXTENT to which the film was a never to be repeated fluke (and as it would turn out), a possibly never to be seen again freak of Indian filmdom?
I remember being amazed at what it seemed to represent - the possibilities of what an Indian film could look and sound like, after having seen mainly different variations of the Indian masala formula in Hindi and Tamil flavours
I am quite sure though, that I wasn't highfalutin enough at 19 and/or lacked the situational awareness at the time, to think of the film, as I'd come to regard it later: A fantastic capsule of a certain sort of person (the English type - defined in the book as Indians who are more comfortable in English than they are in any Indian language), who had come of age in the bleak sluggishness of pre-liberalisation urban India.
Nothing else we'd seen at the time captured the alienation many of us felt - I can at least speak for myself and most of my close friends at the time. 'Real' India was terrifying and our reaction to it nervous laughter and irony, that we were quite confident would get us killed, if deployed irresponsibly.
Anywhere else would take a lot of effort to get to and tremendous hard work to make yourself assimilate - with no guarantee that you would ever 'belong' in a non-superficial way.
The larger fear was maybe this alienation had nothing to do with the environment, and was an intrinsic inescapable character flaw; something that would blight our lives the moment we ventured past a carefully constructed bubble populated with just the right friends who shared a very, very narrow sliver of interests.
To see all that laid out and articulated so well was a devastating, exhilarating experience - unbelievably moving and impactful.
English August was a lightning in a bottle film - no one associated with it, not the author Upamanyu Chatterjee; nor the director Dev Benegal or actor Rahul Bose would ever create anything that came anywhere close to its emotional resonance.
I'd go so far as to say the output from all three has been actively and aggressively awful, especially Chatterjee who created a sequel to EA which was the self indulgent snoozefest I'd feared the original would be*.
To return to English, August, the film never made it to DVD. With the master prints destroyed in a flood - the sort of cussed, strange-but-not-really incident that the book and film are so full of - there seems to be little scope of its re-emergence. Benegal keeps tantalisingly teasing the few fans who still remember and love the film, talking about a print squirreled away with some Taiwanese director or in a film festival archive somewhere, and most recently about a previously undiscovered master print in the National Film Archives.
Let's just assume its never going to be released. This screenplay is the next best thing.
I have docked a star because frankly if this is ALL we are going to get of the film I wanted so much more.
Where are the interviews with the director and the cast? Where are the discussions that would never make it to a DVD commentary track? Do the people who created it apprehend its significance? Do they feel anywhere near as strongly about it as the people it spoke to?
What you get is a depressingly bare-bones package that does not even include some of the sequences that I remember, which were perhaps, ad-libbed during the shoot.
For instance, Agastya slogging disinterestedly through Telugu language lessons, brightening up when his tutor says "Sir, may I please take your leave?", only to realise it is part of the class. Even if this was not in the original screenplay, I feel (in an admittedly entitled fanboyish way) that whoever was putting this together, should have had the bare decency to include such a detail.
And yet, the screenplay as it stands, is so immensely satisfying. I was amazed by the its ability to jog my memory - not just the parts that I remembered from the film like the brilliant (and possibly unlicensed?) use of Bohemian Rhapsody, but the ones I'd forgotten, like a lot of the conversations with local cartoonist Sathe.
If you know EA only by the book, this is essential. If you've spent the last two decades being yanked around by Dev Benegal and his "Its finally going to be released, you guys!" rhetoric, it is arguably even more essential.
*For years, I read the Mammaries of the Welfare State by Upamanyu Chatterjee as a last resort when I was afflicted by insomnia and would 8 times out of 10, drop into a deep sleep about five pages in. I strongly recommend it to anyone who reads this who is similarly afflicted.
It was so effective, I think it should be classified as a "safe" sleep aid - pending clinical trials and independently verifiable lab tests, of course.
In the years since its release in 1994, I have romanticised the film beyond belief - to the point where I'm unable to disentangle my feelings about it.
How many of the impressions I have of it today occoured to me at the time? And how many came later, as I lived long enough to realise the EXTENT to which the film was a never to be repeated fluke (and as it would turn out), a possibly never to be seen again freak of Indian filmdom?
I remember being amazed at what it seemed to represent - the possibilities of what an Indian film could look and sound like, after having seen mainly different variations of the Indian masala formula in Hindi and Tamil flavours
I am quite sure though, that I wasn't highfalutin enough at 19 and/or lacked the situational awareness at the time, to think of the film, as I'd come to regard it later: A fantastic capsule of a certain sort of person (the English type - defined in the book as Indians who are more comfortable in English than they are in any Indian language), who had come of age in the bleak sluggishness of pre-liberalisation urban India.
Nothing else we'd seen at the time captured the alienation many of us felt - I can at least speak for myself and most of my close friends at the time. 'Real' India was terrifying and our reaction to it nervous laughter and irony, that we were quite confident would get us killed, if deployed irresponsibly.
Anywhere else would take a lot of effort to get to and tremendous hard work to make yourself assimilate - with no guarantee that you would ever 'belong' in a non-superficial way.
The larger fear was maybe this alienation had nothing to do with the environment, and was an intrinsic inescapable character flaw; something that would blight our lives the moment we ventured past a carefully constructed bubble populated with just the right friends who shared a very, very narrow sliver of interests.
To see all that laid out and articulated so well was a devastating, exhilarating experience - unbelievably moving and impactful.
English August was a lightning in a bottle film - no one associated with it, not the author Upamanyu Chatterjee; nor the director Dev Benegal or actor Rahul Bose would ever create anything that came anywhere close to its emotional resonance.
I'd go so far as to say the output from all three has been actively and aggressively awful, especially Chatterjee who created a sequel to EA which was the self indulgent snoozefest I'd feared the original would be*.
To return to English, August, the film never made it to DVD. With the master prints destroyed in a flood - the sort of cussed, strange-but-not-really incident that the book and film are so full of - there seems to be little scope of its re-emergence. Benegal keeps tantalisingly teasing the few fans who still remember and love the film, talking about a print squirreled away with some Taiwanese director or in a film festival archive somewhere, and most recently about a previously undiscovered master print in the National Film Archives.
Let's just assume its never going to be released. This screenplay is the next best thing.
I have docked a star because frankly if this is ALL we are going to get of the film I wanted so much more.
Where are the interviews with the director and the cast? Where are the discussions that would never make it to a DVD commentary track? Do the people who created it apprehend its significance? Do they feel anywhere near as strongly about it as the people it spoke to?
What you get is a depressingly bare-bones package that does not even include some of the sequences that I remember, which were perhaps, ad-libbed during the shoot.
For instance, Agastya slogging disinterestedly through Telugu language lessons, brightening up when his tutor says "Sir, may I please take your leave?", only to realise it is part of the class. Even if this was not in the original screenplay, I feel (in an admittedly entitled fanboyish way) that whoever was putting this together, should have had the bare decency to include such a detail.
And yet, the screenplay as it stands, is so immensely satisfying. I was amazed by the its ability to jog my memory - not just the parts that I remembered from the film like the brilliant (and possibly unlicensed?) use of Bohemian Rhapsody, but the ones I'd forgotten, like a lot of the conversations with local cartoonist Sathe.
If you know EA only by the book, this is essential. If you've spent the last two decades being yanked around by Dev Benegal and his "Its finally going to be released, you guys!" rhetoric, it is arguably even more essential.
*For years, I read the Mammaries of the Welfare State by Upamanyu Chatterjee as a last resort when I was afflicted by insomnia and would 8 times out of 10, drop into a deep sleep about five pages in. I strongly recommend it to anyone who reads this who is similarly afflicted.
It was so effective, I think it should be classified as a "safe" sleep aid - pending clinical trials and independently verifiable lab tests, of course.
September 28, 2022
I am currently understanding the nuances of fitting a book into a screenplay - so this was a valuable reading. For a detailed review, please visit my book reviews blog
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