Quick on the heels of the just-launched TV series, Ek Tha Chandar, Ek Thi Sudha, based on the work of Hindi writer Dharamvir Bharati, comes another series drawn from literature: Lajwanti, scripted around a short story by Rajinder Singh Bedi, set against the backdrop of – what else? – the Partition.
Television writer-producer Ila Bedi Datta, who is Bedi’s granddaughter, is adapting his work as homage to the Urdu writer’s body of work. Lajwanti has already made into a telefilm in 2006, with Neena Gupta playing the lead.
The cliché-making machine that television often is, it has turned this classic story into "another addition to the list of the timeless love stories of history". We're hoping that Bedi's extraordinarily sensitive story about the aftermath of the abduction and then return of women by both Indians and Pakistanis is not turned into maudlin drama. Unfortunately, nuanced tales of the human heart have inevitably been pulped by television into broad-stroked romances.
Earlier this year, when the 2010 Pakistani serial Dastaan, a Partition-era love-story based on author Razia Butt’s book Bano, was re-edited for Indian sensibilities and presented with a new title, Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam, viewers complained that it was anti-Hindu and anti-Sikh, depicting Indians as perpetrators of violent acts against Muslims.
On Indian television the sensitive topic is usually soft-sold through a love-story angle, with the Partition acting as a mere backdrop to high-voltage emotional romantic drama. As Lajwanti’s lead actor Sid Makkar explains his and co-star Ankita Sharma’s role in the serial, “He is a man of the 1940s era, who takes pride in the ownership of a woman till Lajwanti walks in and shakes him up, makes him question things and even makes him fall in love.”
That's just not what the original story is, Sid.