R5A Final Essay
Narrative threads can be transformed and presented differently between an adaption and original text to allude to separate and various layers of the significant historical background, characters, and themes of the same story. Satyajit Ray’s adaption of Premchand’s “Chess Players” attempts to delineate the historical scene in nineteenth-century Lucknow, a city distinguished for its Nawabi or aristocratic style, its potent civic decadence and its relished taste in music and the pleasures of the palate, to show the diminishing regal and the doomed lifestyle of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, who has an obsessive indulgence in arts and literature, and the two unmotivated aristocrats, Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali, who are likewise immersed …show more content…
Premchand’s ‘The Chess Players’ articulates upon the declining Mughal feudal tendencies and weakening feudal lords who represent the customs, traditions, and art of a previous era they have so willingly and deliberately attempted to preserve. While consecutively, in the text like the film, there runs a separate but parallel study of the decaying noble class and the decline of their social values. The point is to show a certain comparison between the independent rulers and the elite class in colonial India, and how they are led to their demise by luxurious pursuits. There is a differentiation between the film and text marked by the manner and mood of how similar narrative threads run within the two mediums of representation because each chooses to emphasize and pursue the storyline differently. Ray’s film shows how the larger role of the British’s political game over Wajid Ali Shah’s obsessive indulgence in artworks in nearing the end of feudal culture in India paralleled with the smaller chess game that performs a slow robbery of masculinity and duties from the two aristocrats. Premchand’s text emphasizes more how overindulgence of Nawabi style results makes for the nobles to become decadent and incompetent civilian beings, and Nawab of the nineteenth-century kingdom, Awadh, to become an inaptly …show more content…
The premise builds up to an ultimate demise to both aristocrats and king with the collapse of the reign of the Wajid Ali Shah in the British’s annexation of his kingdom and the climax: the last quarrel and death between the two noble friends. The beginning Premchand’s “Chess Players," the original text, begins its narrative by silhouetting in-depth the setting of the story in the courteous and flamboyant nineteenth-century city of Lucknow within the last of the Mughal rulers’, Wajid Ali Shah’s, kingdom of Awadh. During the introduction, the way Premchand sets the aura of the milieu in 19th century Lucknow is by speaking authoritatively and firmly to the readers in alluding to them as if general truths about the time. Premchand’s text starts off by an inductive generalization in equating the various luxurious pursuits, such as poetry, cuisine, games, music and dance, to the elite class whose lifestyles contained only aspects pertaining to obscenity, sensuality, enjoyment and pleasure as if trademarks of that higher class (182). When Premchand introduces the two jagidars, Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali, he elicits the topic of their well-off wealth and
Narrative threads can be transformed and presented differently between an adaption and original text to allude to separate and various layers of the significant historical background, characters, and themes of the same story. Satyajit Ray’s adaption of Premchand’s “Chess Players” attempts to delineate the historical scene in nineteenth-century Lucknow, a city distinguished for its Nawabi or aristocratic style, its potent civic decadence and its relished taste in music and the pleasures of the palate, to show the diminishing regal and the doomed lifestyle of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, who has an obsessive indulgence in arts and literature, and the two unmotivated aristocrats, Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali, who are likewise immersed …show more content…
Premchand’s ‘The Chess Players’ articulates upon the declining Mughal feudal tendencies and weakening feudal lords who represent the customs, traditions, and art of a previous era they have so willingly and deliberately attempted to preserve. While consecutively, in the text like the film, there runs a separate but parallel study of the decaying noble class and the decline of their social values. The point is to show a certain comparison between the independent rulers and the elite class in colonial India, and how they are led to their demise by luxurious pursuits. There is a differentiation between the film and text marked by the manner and mood of how similar narrative threads run within the two mediums of representation because each chooses to emphasize and pursue the storyline differently. Ray’s film shows how the larger role of the British’s political game over Wajid Ali Shah’s obsessive indulgence in artworks in nearing the end of feudal culture in India paralleled with the smaller chess game that performs a slow robbery of masculinity and duties from the two aristocrats. Premchand’s text emphasizes more how overindulgence of Nawabi style results makes for the nobles to become decadent and incompetent civilian beings, and Nawab of the nineteenth-century kingdom, Awadh, to become an inaptly …show more content…
The premise builds up to an ultimate demise to both aristocrats and king with the collapse of the reign of the Wajid Ali Shah in the British’s annexation of his kingdom and the climax: the last quarrel and death between the two noble friends. The beginning Premchand’s “Chess Players," the original text, begins its narrative by silhouetting in-depth the setting of the story in the courteous and flamboyant nineteenth-century city of Lucknow within the last of the Mughal rulers’, Wajid Ali Shah’s, kingdom of Awadh. During the introduction, the way Premchand sets the aura of the milieu in 19th century Lucknow is by speaking authoritatively and firmly to the readers in alluding to them as if general truths about the time. Premchand’s text starts off by an inductive generalization in equating the various luxurious pursuits, such as poetry, cuisine, games, music and dance, to the elite class whose lifestyles contained only aspects pertaining to obscenity, sensuality, enjoyment and pleasure as if trademarks of that higher class (182). When Premchand introduces the two jagidars, Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali, he elicits the topic of their well-off wealth and