Literarily Speaking: Best book-to-screen adaptations on Indian OTT in 2023

In our column, Literarily Speaking, we recommend specially curated book-to-film adaptations that will leave you spell-bound

Whether they are short stories, novellas or novels, we read stories through deeply personal lenses and imagine the setting, the characters and the plot. Wherever there are gaps, our minds perform an ‘auto-complete’ based on what we know. The greater our engagement with the written word, the more details we retain or imagine.

When a story is adapted from a written medium to a visual medium, change is inevitable. The director brings to the movie or series not only their expertise with the visual medium but also their own personal lenses. Seemingly making matters worse for us, the director may either do away with a minor character we loved in the book, change the protagonist's gender or even cast the wrong actor for the part!

Movie or series adaptations are perhaps best approached with a mindset where we regard the essence of a book or short story as reimagined in the visual medium. It’s like meeting a familiar soul in a new body.

In 2023, we’ve had several such adaptations from International and Indian short stories and books to screen or directly to OTT. Here’s a list featuring secret agents, arms dealers, a fourth-wall-breaking amateur detective, Chola warriors in love and at war, squabbling college students from 1970s Karnataka, a Jiujitsu-practising Maths teacher in Kalimpong, and even a vengeful poltergeist from Kerala!

The Night Manager (Hindi) Disney+Hotstar

A suspenseful espionage thriller, The Night Manager by John Le Carre (1931 – 2020) was adapted into a British TV series in 2016 featuring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. Season 1 of the Indian series of the same name created by Sandeep Modi features Aditya Roy Kapoor as Shantanu ‘Shaan’ Sengupta (Aditya Roy Kapoor), the night manager of a hotel in Shimla. Providence brings to the doorstep of the hotel, Shailendra ‘Shelly’ Rungta (Anil Kapoor), an arms dealer whom Shaan has an old personal score to settle with. Shaan infiltrates Shelly’s inner circle and in the ensuing battle of wits, Shaan tries to conceal from Shelly his identity and connection to RAW, while also seeking personal redemption from the incident in his past.

Neelavelicham (Malayalam) Amazon Prime

Vaikom Muhammad Basheer (1908 - 1994) holds a special place among readers of Malayalam fiction. His timeless stories are full of wit, and colloquial expression, and reveal his keen eye for the human condition. Aashiq Abu’s 2023 film Neelavelicham draws attention to the iconic movie by A. Vincent, Bhargavi Nilayam (1964), known to be the first horror movie in Malayalam based on a script by Basheer himself. Both movies are based on Basheer’s short story, Neelavelicham.

The protagonist, simply called The Writer (Tovino Thomas), moves into a house rumoured to be haunted by the man-hating spirit of the previous resident, Bhargavi (Reema Kallingal). She is presumed to have faced failure in love and killed herself by falling into the well in her backyard. As The Writer delves deeper into the inconsistencies in the stories surrounding Bhargavi, he also develops a deeper relationship with the spirit herself and unravels the mystery behind her death. Most of M. Baburaj’s original songs from the 1964 movie, were recreated for the 2023 movie by Bijibal and Rex Vijayan.

Ponniyin Selvan 2 (Tamil) Amazon Prime

Mani Rathnam’s magnum opus in two parts, Ponniyin Selvan, is based on a swashbuckling Tamil tale of espionage, war and romance set during the time of the Chola empire in Tamil Nadu, written by Kalki Krishnamurthy (1899 – 1954).

The second edition film that was released earlier this year picks up from the point where the first one left off, with the question of whether Arulmozhi Varman (Jayam Ravi) and Vanthiyathevan (Karthi) survived the shipwreck. The many threads of the story, from Aditya Karikalan’s (Vikram) obsession with Nandini (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) to the identity of the elderly speech-challenged woman who rescues Arulmozhi Varman, are all neatly tied up, with an ending that aligns with recorded history of how the succession to the throne occurred in this period of the Chola reign. Vanthiyathevan’s and Kuthavai’s (Trisha Krishnan) relationship gets much less precedence in this palace intrigue story where trust is violated, spies are everywhere, but allies emerge when least expected.

Daredevil Musthafa (Kannada) Amazon Prime

The work of beloved Kannada writer, K.P. Poornachandra Tejaswi (1938 – 2007) has been extensively adapted to stage and screen, and the latest of these adaptations is Shashank Soghal’s film, Daredevil Musthafa, made admirably as a fully crowdfunded effort.

In Soghal’s movie, set in the 1970s, the students, lecturers, and staff in a college in Abachuru are forced to confront their prejudices about the sole Muslim student in their midst. Ramanuja Iyengari (Aditya Ashree), along with his friends, hatches several futile plots to get Musthafa (Shishir Baikady) inconvenienced, punished, or suspended. Their petty fights escalate to a wager to win a cricket match to reclaim the school’s cricket kit lost by Iyengari and his friends in a previous bet to Sulthankeri Usman (Poornachandra Mysuru). In the end, does Iyengari’s hatred for Musthafa get resolved, or does it cost them the cricket match that has the college’s reputation at stake?

Charlie Chopra & The Mystery of Solang Valley (Hindi) Sony Liv

Two of Vishal Bharadwaj’s releases this last year are based on books.

Along with Anjum Rajabali and Jyotsana Hariharan, Vishal Bharadwaj brings his unique sensibility shaped by his depth of experience with adaptations (from Shakespeare’s plays like Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet) to the series, Charlie Chopra & The Mystery of Solang Valley.

Based on Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery which had several parallels with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of Baskervilles, the series features Wamiqa Gabbi as Charulata ‘Charlie’ Chopra who investigates the murder of Brigadier Meherbaan Singh Rawat (Gulshan Grover) for which, her fiancé Jimmy Nautiyal has been arrested.

The casting coup for this atmospheric series is not only Naseeruddin Shah who plays the bohemian Dr. Rai but also his children who play Hanif’s wife (Heeba Shah), Billu Nautiyal (Imaaduddin Shah) and Jimmy Nautiyal (Vivaan Shah), along with Shah’s wife, Ratna Pathak Shah who plays Ms. Bharucha.

The series also stars Neena Gupta, Lalit Parimoo, Lara Dutta, and a pitch-perfect Priyanshu Painyuli as the opportunistic local journalist. The background score is expectedly sinister.

Khufiya (Hindi) – Netflix

Adapted from Amar Bhushan’s Escape to Nowhere, Vishal Bharadwaj adds texture to this slow espionage drama and changes the gender of the book’s protagonist to a female secret agent called Krishna ‘KM’ Mehra (Tabu) who is seeking retribution for a loss that is professional as well as deeply personal. She shadows a double agent called Capt Ravi Devilal Mohan (Ali Fazal), and also trains a young mother, Charu (Wamiqa Gabbi) as an operative so she can rescue her child. The movie also features Azmeri Haque Badhon, Ashish Vidyarthi and Atul Kulkarni.

Jaane Jaan (Hindi) Netflix

Sujoy Ghosh’s Jaane Jaan is an adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s Japanese novel, The Devotion of Suspect X. A single mother, Maya D’Souza (Kareena Kapoor Khan) lives in Kalimpong with her daughter, Tara (Naisha Khanna). Maya’s reclusive neighbour, Naren Vyas (Jaideep Ahlawat) is a mathematics professor and a Jiujitsu practitioner who is secretly in love with her. Maya’s ex-husband, Ajit Mhatre (Saurabh Sachdeva) turns up at her doorstep, and with Maya and Tara trying to protect themselves from him, ends up dead. Naren offers to help dispose of the body, but a body is soon found matching Ajit’s description. Inspector Karan Anand (Vijay Varma), a composite of two characters from the original novel, is brought in to investigate. While Maya comes under suspicion initially, it is the impassive Naren, who is also Karan’s classmate from college, who infuses the story with a unique dynamism.

Upcoming releases

At the time of this article going live, an eagerly awaited release on OTT is Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Hindi film 12th Fail, adapted from Anurag Pathak’s non-fiction book about the struggles and eventual success of IPS officer, Manoj Kumar Sharma.

Adapted from Indian freedom fighter Sane Guruji’s popular Marathi autobiographical story about his mother, Sujay Dahake’s Shyamchi Aai, is bound to draw comparisons with the beloved 1953 movie of the same name by P.K. Atre.

Karmma Calling is an upcoming Hindi series on Disney+Hotstar, headlined by Raveena Tandon, remade from the American series, Revenge, which was in turn inspired by Alexandre Dumas’ book, The Count of Monte Christo.

We can also look forward to Blessy’s long-delayed, much-anticipated Malayalam survival drama, Aadujeevitham, featuring Prithviraj Sukumaran, based on Benyamin’s award-winning and popular novel of the same name.

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Saritha Rao Rayachoti)