ABSTRACT
When Deepa Mehta’s Netflix adaptation of Prayaag Akbar’s acclaimed debut novel Leila (2018) – frequently dubbed an “Indian Handmaid’s Tale” – was released in 2019, a social media debate erupted in the wake of a call for banning Netflix on claims of the defamation of Hindus (#BanNetflixInIndia). Alongside Leila, the adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s 2006 novel Sacred Games (Netflix’s first directly produced original series for India) and further series were accused of similar misrepresentations. Taking its cue from this debate, this chapter traces the adaptational shifts from Akbar’s English-language novel to its televisual format in the English and Hindi versions and delineates their respective shifts in language use. The political reverberations of Leila are contrasted to Dhruv Sehgal’s Little Things (2016), which depicts the everyday lives and globalized patterns of consumption of middle- and upper-middle-class “millennials” living in Mumbai. Little Things started as an English-language web series and was picked up by Netflix for its second season in 2018. Rebranded as a “Netflix original,” it shifted from an English to a Hindi “original” audio track with an English “dubbed” version. Taking into account questions of genre, authorship and globalized contexts of production and reception, the analyzed shifts of language use and patterns of cultural representation are discussed in relation to broader debates surrounding World Anglophone Studies.
