Journalism of Courage
India’s first military thriller novel,Lashkar,is on its way to Bollywood fame
Tom Clancy. WEB Griffin. Alistair McLean. Entire generations have grown up reading about the exploits of literary daredevils in the West. In India,we have always enjoyed these escapades,as,till very recently,there had been no local representation for us to turn to. This changed when Mukul Deva,an ex-army officer,wrote his first book Lashkar in 2008,which is widely agreed to be India’s first military thriller. Now,film-maker Shubho Shekhar Bhattacharjee is planning to take the book on to the silver screen,and he is excited about it. I picked up Lashkar one day and started reading it around midnight. The book was so enthralling that I was simply unable to put it down,and only halfway through I knew I just had to make it into a movie, says Bhattacharjee. I was awake the whole night,waiting impatiently for a decent hour to call the author,so that I could start working on the movie.”
Lashkar joins a new club of books making it to Bollywood. Why don’t many Indian books find space on the silver screen? Bhattacharjee opines,We have a bounty of literature here in India,but the space for pulp fiction is very small. However,in the recent past,this pattern has changed,and pulp fiction has claimed its own niche in the Indian market,which is why movies like 3 Idiots were made. However,he feels that while this phenomenon is new to Bollywood,it has been around in India,as a whole. The pulp fiction market has interested Bengali,Tamil and Telegu film-makers for at least a decade, he concludes.
