ABSTRACT
This chapter considers films that adapt tales of the river. The tales here originate in Bengal, but they seem to cross borders in more than one sense. We take a look at Titas ekti nadir nam (Ritwik Ghatak, 1973) adapted from Advaita Malla Barman’s novel (1956) and Jago hua savera (A. J. Kardar, 1959) based on Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Padma nadir majhi (1936), and also Megh mallar (I Jahidur Rahman Anjan, 2016), adapted from Akhteruzzaman Elias’s short story ‘Raincoat’ (1997?). The last is not about rivers but has a deep connection to water. We shall look for the presence of elements that seem to connect forms and territories in these works. We also ask what logic of transformation informs the content as the material moves from one shape to another, from fiction to film. And we try to connect all this to the construction of worlds in terms of regions and borders.
