The Netflix young adult crime thriller Class — released on February 3 — is an Indian adaptation of the Spanish show Elite. Class is the newest addition to an already massive catalogue of Indian adaptations of foreign films and series. The upcoming Sandeep Modi series The Night Manager (2023), Zoya Akhtar’s movie The Archies (2023), and many more are set to follow suit.
The reason for this recent proliferation of adaptations is to keep up with audience tastes. Since Indian viewers have had access to streaming services and all that they offer for a brief duration — Netflix and Amazon Prime were launched in India in 2016, while Disney+ Hotstar came in 2019 — they’ve been spoiled for choice. Moreover, owing to the pandemic, and the endless hours spent twiddling our thumbs, audiences were forced to broaden their content choices. They opened up to more media in other languages: K-dramas, European shows, Israeli shows, and films in foreign languages.
How does one judge the quality of an adaptation? Is there a “formula” to it?
Considering the script of an adapted show emulates that of the original show, the scope for an original idea is low. The characters are generally modelled on the basis of characters from the original show and are given similar personal narratives (how similar they tend to be, however, depends on the nature of the adaptation). The skill, then, is in the nuances of their depiction. From setting up a different context to the detail of a character’s social media profile — each element must be thoughtfully considered. The intersection of caste, class, gender, religion and sexuality axes in India produces a different version of the self than in the West. Hence, thorough knowledge of our context and the ability to accurately bring it to bear on the film or series is expected.
Popular adaptations in the last few years included the mafia thriller Aarya (2020), the legal drama Criminal Justice (2019), the crime thriller Hostages (2019), and the romantic comedy-drama Four More Shots Please! (2019).
While Criminal Justice is considered a well-made show, charting 8.1/10 on IMDb and 4.5/5 in terms of audience reviews, it fell short in its depiction of India’s prison system. The original show was made in the UK in 2008, followed by the American adaptation in 2016. The American adaptation had a Muslim man convicted for the murder of a white woman, which spoke to the pervasiveness of Islamophobia in the country. When adapted for India, the show could have featured a main character with a similarly marginalised identity to represent the starkly different treatment of lower class and lower caste people in India. But the makers resorted to identifying class as the only potential disadvantage for its protagonist. Similarly, adapting a show like Elite and placing the narrative in a new context, India, more realistically, requires an exploration of the issues that ail this country.
The plot of Class is exactly the same as Elite, with an almost frame-to-frame similarity in the visuals. But the focus and details have been changed. The show is set in the contrasting worlds of South Delhi and “purani Dilli”, and centres around a murder. The story begins with three children from a poor government school being plunged into the world of the wealthy when they win scholarships to join an elite Delhi school.
Both Class and Elite feature a cast of characters with complex intersectional identities that define where they fit and what role they play in the plot. In Elite, however, the inequality stems solely from a class issue, given that it is centred around the political and economic realities of Spain, where the wealth gap is rooted in class structures. In India, inequality is a combination of class, caste, religion, sexuality, and gender. There cannot be a critical analysis of class in India without accounting for these. Yet, Class fails to deliver on this count.
For example, in India, the policing system is plagued with casteism. In a particular scene in Class, two policemen who are questioning a pair of Dalit brothers only allude to the lower class of the two characters as opposed to the casteist slurs that the brothers are likely to be subjected to. In another instance, the rage of one of the wealthy characters — upon finding out that his sister is impregnated by a Dalit boy — stems from his disapproval of the boy’s class, rather than his caste.
Discrimination on the basis of caste in our country is representative of a rot that we must confront. Brushing past it may be routine in shows that don’t seek to explore social inequalities, but shows such as Criminal Justice and Class are formulated on the idea that society treats those outside the norm much more cruelly. Their plots pivot on this crucial observation. So, while we can laud the attempt in Class to bring caste into the classroom — a feat not achieved by any other young adult show in India yet — we must demand more. Adaptations such as these require a deeply political understanding of the intersectional identities that frame our social standing. We must begin to take seriously the matter of making content our own.
adya.goyal@expressindia.com
