ABSTRACT
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones emerged in the cinematic fi eld at a time when the fi rst major Indian TV hit had just begun to air: Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan TV serial (1987), with its seventy-eight episodes (Ganti 217) and an “estimated astounding 80 to 100 million viewers” (Desai 114), was an unsurmountable success.1 Arundhati Roy wrote the script of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones in 1988 based on her own experiences at the School of Architecture and Planning in Delhi. It was shot the same year and screened on Indian national television, the Doordarshan, only once. Roy comments on the response: “It was screened late one night on TV (Doordarshan) when most decent folks were fast asleep. The earth didn’t move. The world didn’t stop and take notice. Film festivals ignored it. Reviews were mixed” (“Foreword” v). So, unlike Ramayan, the fi lm did not reach audiences, and similarity Roy had previously tried her hand at script writing without much luck, the fi lm did not get a follow-up, either.2 In this chapter, I give a textual analysis of the script on which Suchitra Behal comments that “it aptly conveyed the frustrations and idealistic dreams of a generation” (par. 11). The recently published screenplay has not merited much discussion, so it is worthwhile to see how it conveys these dreams.
