Five Reasons to Hate “Earth”

    Whatever flaws Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel “Cracking India” may have the film adaptation “Earth” is even worse. Much of what was best about Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel was either totally absent or horribly distorted in the movie. In fact, there are five reasons to tell all your friends to leave “Earth” on the shelf at the video store:
    1. the characterization of the protagonist Ayah,
    2. the absence of key female characters from the novel,
    3. the “crunch” of time from four years to what seems like a few months,
    4. the “out” given to Ice-Candy Man, and
    5. the ending!
    In the novel, Ayah is a curvy, sensual woman. With her “extra servings of butter, yogurt, curry, and chapatti” she is not one of those “stringy, half-starved women in India whom one looks at only once – and never turns around to look at twice.” Her “globules” draw the looks of men of every race and creed. It was refreshing to have womanly curves praised over the androgynous build of a 12-year-old girl. But, in the film, the lead actress is more akin to the latter than the former — not that she didn’t have a few well-placed curves of her own. However, she definitely did not have enough to warrant the use of the word “globules.”
    Furthermore, when the unwitting Ayah realizes that while she’s been chomping down nuts her male admirers have been ogling her cleavage she becomes uncomfortable and seemingly embarrassed, quickly covers herself up. The Ayah in the novel would have eaten those nuts fully realizing that the men were watching her every move and she would have loved it.
    But at least Ayah appears in the book. Some of the most important and interesting characters in the novel don’t even appear in the film. For instance, Godmother and Slavesister and the replacement Ayah are totally absent and Papoo appears only briefly as the child bride. For a film that is part of a trilogy about women and nationalism in post-colonial India, women are strangely absent from “Earth.” This seems strangely contrary to Sidhwa’s intentions and this is even more complicated by her appearance at the end of the film as the grown Lenny. This seems to suggest that the author put her stamp of approval on what appears to be a rather anti-feminist directorial decision. Weird.
    And to add insult to injury the time span of the novel (four years) is crunched to what seems to be a matter of months. Although the difficulties of working with child actors is understandable (how does one actress pull off growing from four to eight years old as Lenny does in the novel, for instance?), but “fudging” the timeline came off as offensive. Loving neighbors do not go from dinner parties to massacres over night and to suggest that this is what happened in India rubbed me the wrong way.
    To make matters worse, the “melding” of the characters of Ice Candy Man and Imam Din (the cook) also sat wrong. In the novel, it is Imam Din’s family that is massacred on the train, but in the novel Ice Candy Man finds his Muslim sisters butchered. This seems to give him an “excuse” for betraying Ayah and gives us a reason to not hate him. This was an unnecessary and again, offensive, device. One of the best things about Sidhwa’s novel was that it lived in the “gray areas.” Lenny’s world was turned upside down and flipped around and in the ensuing chaos right became wrong and wrong became right, but there are no excuses because there are no excuses good enough. No explanation satisfactorily explains why friend betrayed friend, or why lover became rapist so to make it as simple as x + y = z, as the film did in Ice Candy Man’s case, trivializes the horrors of partition.
    And finally, the film’s hopeless ending sat in direct contrast to Sidhwa’s tragic, but not hopeless ending. I don’t know if I would go so far as to call the novel’s ending hopeful, but it is certainly not hopeless as the limping, lone woman who never saw her betrayed Ayah again at the end of the film certainly is. In Sidhwa’s novel the women of India are slowly putting their country back together again, working together to rescue stolen women and even “punish” their betrayers. They are not left powerless, crippled figures bowled over by the crushing hand of partition. They may be damaged, but they are not broken. Ayah may have lost her brilliant glow, but she has enough life left in her to leave her husband.
    So, after all of this, if you are at the video store and your friend reaches for that copy of “Earth” with “the chest” on it SMACK THAT HAND! Put that DVD back and take a trip to the bookstore instead.