Naga in Videsh: Reading Deepa Mehta's Heaven
on Earth as a Transnational Adaptation of Girish Karnad's Naga-Mandala
Dr. Sunman Kaur Bains
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Maharaja Bhupinder Singh Punjab Sports University
Patiala, Punjab, India
Abstract: This paper undertakes a comparative and transnational
reading of Deepa Mehta's Videsh – Heaven on Earth (2008), examining the film as
a layered cinematic adaptation that travels from Girish Karnad's celebrated
play Naga-Mandala through Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry's Punjabi theatrical version
Naga-Chhaya before arriving at its diasporic incarnation on screen. Employing
Sarah Cardwell's comparative framework of generic, authorial, and
medium-specific contexts alongside Hamid Naficy's theory of accented and
transnational cinema, the study argues that Mehta relocates Karnad's folk
parable of a serpent-lover from rural Karnataka to a Punjabi immigrant
household in Brampton, Canada, thereby transforming a tale of marital
confinement into a meditation on migration, isolation, and the diasporic search
for home. Through close analysis of the protagonist Chand and the ensemble of
characters around her, the paper traces how the cobra-myth survives translation
across language, geography, and medium while accumulating new meanings tied to
dislocation and gendered labour. Drawing on Avtar Brah's notion of home as
simultaneously 'roots and routes' and on feminist film criticism concerning the
marginalised woman in Indian cinema, the paper situates Videsh within Mehta's
wider women-centred oeuvre and within the expanding canon of transnational
Bollywood adaptation.
Keywords: Adaptation
Studies; Transnational Cinema; Diaspora; Naga-Mandala; Feminist Film; Magic
Realism
1. Introduction: Cinema as the Newest Art of Translation
Of all the art forms that have emerged to give shape to
human experience, cinema remains the youngest and, in many respects, the most
omnivorous. Barely more than a century old, the moving image has absorbed the
conventions of theatre, the structures of the novel, and the rhythms of oral
storytelling, repackaging them for an audience that is simultaneously visual,
auditory, and emotional. Maxim Gorky's famous description of early cinema as
the “kingdom of shadows” captures something of this hybrid status: cinema is at
once a serious art form and a vast entertainment industry, an intimate medium
and a mass spectacle (qtd. in Pramaggiore and Wallis 3). It is precisely this
dual identity – art and commerce, illusion and document – that has made cinema
such a fertile ground for adaptation, the practice by which stories migrate
from one medium, language, or cultural context into another.
Indian cinema's own trajectory, from the anti-colonial
ferment of the silent era through the studio systems of Bombay, Calcutta, and
Lahore, to the global reach of contemporary Bollywood, has been substantially
shaped by adaptation (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 19-20). Yet adaptation as a
critical practice has long been treated with suspicion, dismissed by literary
purists as derivative and by film critics as commercially opportunistic. Robert
Stam's insistence that all texts are “tissues of anonymous formulae… conscious
and unconscious quotations… and inversions of other texts” (qtd. in Smith
195-96) offers a useful corrective, reframing adaptation not as betrayal but as
an inevitable and productive form of intertextual dialogue. Within this
reframed understanding, the present paper turns to Deepa Mehta's Videsh –
Heaven on Earth, a film that exemplifies how a single narrative kernel – the
folk-tale of a woman who falls in love with a cobra disguised as her husband –
can be carried across genres, languages, and continents, accumulating new
significance with each crossing.
2. Deepa Mehta: An Accented Auteur of the Indian Diaspora
Any adaptation bears the imprint of its adaptor, and
Deepa Mehta's biography is inseparable from the thematic preoccupations of
Videsh. Born in Amritsar in 1950 to a family displaced by Partition, Mehta grew
up listening to the silences and stories that surrounded that historical
rupture – a history she would later revisit directly in Earth (1998). After
migrating to Canada in 1973, Mehta built a career that moved fluidly between
documentary and feature filmmaking, culminating in the celebrated elemental trilogy
Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005), each of which examines the
position of women within rigid social, religious, or economic structures.
Mehta's films have consistently provoked controversy
precisely because they refuse the comforting fictions that both Western and
Indian audiences often prefer. In one widely cited interview she observes that
Western perceptions of India oscillate between an exoticised “spiritual India”
and an undifferentiated image of poverty, and that any attempt to move beyond
these clichés necessarily “de-exoticises” the subject, forcing audiences to
encounter Indians “as real people” (qtd. in “Worlds Socialist Website”). This
refusal to flatter either a diasporic nostalgia for the homeland or a
host-society fantasy of immigrant success is the authorial signature that
Videsh inherits and intensifies. Mehta's casting choices for the film – drawing
Preity Zinta away from her established image as a bubbly Bollywood heroine, and
recruiting theatre actors associated with Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry's Punjabi
repertory – further signal a deliberate effort to anchor the film's emotional
register in lived, regional authenticity rather than glamorous spectacle.
3. From Naga-Mandala to Naga-Chhaya to Videsh: The
Adaptive Chain
Videsh – Heaven on Earth occupies an unusual position in
the history of literary adaptation because it is, in fact, an adaptation of an
adaptation. Its most distant source is Girish Karnad's Naga-Mandala, itself
drawn from Karnataka oral folk-tales narrated to Karnad by the eminent
folklorist A. K. Ramanujan. Karnad's play tells of Rani, a young bride confined
by her husband, who is visited nightly by a cobra that has taken her husband's
shape; when Rani is accused of infidelity, she undergoes a snake-ordeal to prove
her chastity, an ordeal that paradoxically secures her happiness. In 1989,
Mehta encountered this story not on the page but on the stage, in Neelam
Mansingh Chowdhry's Punjabi-language production Naga-Chhaya, a performance she
has described as leaving a “powerful mark” on her imagination.
Almost fifteen years later, at a function in Edmonton,
Mehta met Mona Gill, a Punjabi woman whose account of an abusive arranged
marriage and eventual escape to independence struck Mehta as a contemporary
echo of Rani's predicament. The genesis of Videsh thus lies in the deliberate
superimposition of two narratives: the mythic frame of Naga-Mandala, with its
serpent-lover and trial-by-ordeal, and the documentary-real testimony of
Punjabi-Canadian women like Mona Gill and Amandeep, whom Mehta had encountered
through her earlier work on the documentary Let's Talk About It. The result is
a film that retains the folkloric skeleton of Karnad's play – the cobra who
becomes a more tender alternative to an unkind husband, the ordeal that
resolves the plot – while transplanting it wholesale into the world of Punjabi
immigrant life in Brampton, Ontario. Following Brian Macfarlane's argument that
the fidelity debate obscures the more productive question of “adaptation as
inevitable artistic… progress” and the “influential production determinants”
that shape any remake (qtd. in Smith 1-8 passim), this paper treats the gap
between Karnad's Karnataka and Mehta's Brampton not as a failure of fidelity
but as the very site where the adaptation generates its meaning.
4. Theorising Transnational Space: From the National to
the Accented
To account for this geographic and cultural translation,
this paper draws on Hamid Naficy's concept of “accented cinema,” the body of
work produced by exilic, diasporic, and postcolonial filmmakers operating on
the margins of dominant national industries. Naficy combines the idea of
authorship – the “interstitial” film-maker working between cultures – with a
generic understanding of accented cinema as bound together by recurring themes
of memory, desire, loss, longing, and nostalgia. Asuman Suner extends this
framework by arguing that transnational filmmaking practices interrogate
questions of national identity and belonging by foregrounding the multiplicity
of displacement, de-territorialisation, and migration, thereby demonstrating
that the “problematisation of the relations of belonging and identity is not
the monopoly of the exilic/diasporic subjects residing in the West” (qtd. in
Tay 112).
Videsh fits this paradigm not because Mehta herself is a
diasporic victim, nor simply because the film was produced, distributed, and
received across national borders, but because its directorial practice
foregrounds what Sharon Lin Tay describes as “complexities of geopolitics,
mobilisation, displacement, desires and identity” (114). The film's binary
structure – the warmth and colour of the Punjabi sangeet contrasted with the
grey, snow-bound interiors of Brampton; the open fields of memory contrasted
with the cramped two-bedroom house shared by seven people – stages precisely
the kind of spatial negotiation that Naficy associates with transnational
cinema, in which “the boundaries between self and other, female and male,
inside and outside, homeland and hostland are blurred and must continually be
negotiated” (qtd. in “Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics”).
5. The Diaspora's Burden: Migration, Home, and
Unbelonging
Migration, the Oxford Dictionary of English reminds us,
is defined simply as “the action of coming to live permanently in a foreign
country” (qtd. n. pag.), yet this dictionary definition conceals the immense
human cost that the term so often carries. For Chand, the film's protagonist,
migration is not a chosen adventure but the fulfillment of a transaction: her
father sends a substantial sum of money to Canada as part of the arrangement, a
payment the film frames less as a wedding gift than as the price of her passage
into a household that has no genuine desire for her presence. Gay Wilentz's
observation that diasporic communities “retain many of the residual traditions
while attempting to cope with the alien- and most often dominant- society
around them” (365) is vividly dramatised in the Brampton household, where
Punjabi food, language, and “family values” persist even as the family's
economic and emotional life is shaped by the demands of Canadian working-class
existence.
Avtar Brah's influential distinction between “homeland”
and the lived “homing desire” (16) is especially useful for understanding
Chand's predicament. For Brah, home is best understood not as a fixed
geographical origin but as the place where one feels secure – a sense that can,
in principle, be cultivated anywhere. Yet for Chand, this “homing desire”
remains stubbornly attached to Punjab: she is, in Martin Heidegger's term as
filtered through Vijay Mishra, perpetually unheimlich, – “not-at-home” – within
her husband's house, even though that house is, by every legal and social
definition, now her home (qtd. in Mishra 98). Significantly, the other adult characters
in the film – Aman and Baldev in particular – do not share this condition; they
are, in Brah's terms, oriented toward “routes” rather than “roots,” working to
convert their rented rooms into an owned house and thereby to naturalise Canada
as home. Chand alone remains suspended between the two, her psychological
landscape literalised in the recurring image of the cobra that migrates,
impossibly, from the gardens of Punjab into the snow of a Canadian backyard.
This sense of suspension is compounded by what Malti
Agarwal terms the “miserable lot” of diasporas who “do not feel secure and
comfortable with their non-hyphenated identities” (qtd. V). Vijay Mishra's
reading of V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas – in which the protagonist's
house is “as open to the elements as any sieve,” a structure that fails to
convert “route” into “root” (98) – offers a striking analogue for the cramped,
leaking domesticity of Chand's new home. The house in Brampton, like Biswas's
house, promises shelter but delivers only a more elaborate form of exposure.
6. Chand and the Ensemble: Character as Social Diagnosis
Mehta's screenplay deliberately avoids the conventional
moral economy of heroes and villains. Each member of Rocky's household – Biji
the domineering mother-in-law, Bhapaji the ineffectual father-in-law, Baldev
the humiliated and unemployed brother-in-law, Aman the overworked sister-in-law
– is presented less as an individual antagonist than as a node within a larger
structure of displaced frustration. Rocky himself, the husband whose violence
drives the narrative, is shown to be as much a victim of circumstance as its
agent: burdened with the responsibility of sponsoring an extended family on a
taxi-driver's wages, he channels an inherited and unresolved rage onto the one
person with even less power than himself. As the narrative makes clear, “unable
to express his anger, he finds other ways to release it,” and it is Chand who
absorbs the brunt of this displaced frustration.
Chand's own arc is the film's emotional centre. She
arrives in Canada “as naive” and hopeful, carrying with her mother's parting
advice to “use her strength whenever needed” – advice delivered, tellingly,
through the very same folk-story of the saint and the Sheshnag that will later
structure Chand's escape. Stripped of money, dignity, and even the ability to
telephone her family, Chand's only act of self-assertion in the film's first
half is to scribble her name and address on a washroom wall, an almost
involuntary attempt to preserve a fragment of identity against its erosion. The
brilliance of Preity Zinta's performance, much remarked upon by reviewers, lies
in her ability to register this erosion through small physical details – a
downcast gaze on a city bus, a flinch before a raised hand – rather than
through melodrama. Subeshini Moodely's argument that Mehta constructs Indian
women as “metaphors for the resistance of nationalist ideals as opposed to…
symbols of nationalist ideals” (80) captures precisely this shift: Chand is
never simply a symbol of suffering womanhood, but becomes, gradually, an agent
of her own re-fashioning.
7. The Cobra in Canada: Magic Realism and Mythic
Continuity
The film's most audacious gesture is also its most
faithful inheritance from Karnad: the cobra that, having consumed a love-potion
intended for Rocky, assumes Rocky's appearance and becomes Chand's secret,
tender lover. Where Karnad's Naga-Mandala situates this transformation within
the unquestioned conventions of folk narrative, Mehta relocates the same device
into the ostensibly realist setting of suburban Toronto, producing what Stefnia
Basset describes as a form of magic realism in which “India superimposes on
Canada, something not at all uncommon in diasporic literature but still unusual
in mainstream cinema” (qtd. 6). The cobra's appearance in the family's Canadian
garden is thus not a lapse into fantasy so much as the visual manifestation of
Chand's “double shock” of displacement – her forced relocation from Punjab to
Canada, and her parallel displacement from her natal family to her husband's.
In Indian mythology, the serpent occupies a position of
profound ambivalence: feared as a creature capable of inflicting death, yet
venerated as a protector, an attribute of Shiva, and the cosmic bed of Vishnu.
Mehta exploits precisely this ambivalence. Through her relationship with Naga,
Chand experiences – for the first time in the film – a partner who listens, who
is curious about her life, and who restores to her a sense of being valued.
Jasbir Jain's formulation that “an act of transgression breaks the control of
others over the body and compels society to reformulate its boundaries” (136)
illuminates the significance of this relationship: Chand and Naga do not escape
the structures that confine her, but they carve out, however temporarily, an
alternative space of desire and recognition that those structures cannot
regulate.
The film's climactic ordeal – in which Chand must hold
the cobra to prove that she has not been unfaithful – directly reprises the
snake-ordeal of Naga-Mandala, but it also resonates with the broader Indian
epic tradition of the agni-pariksha, the trial by fire that Sita undergoes in
the Ramayana. Stuart Hall's observation that for the diasporic subject “the
past continues to speak to us”, that it is always “already 'after the break'”
and is “constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth” (qtd. in
Rutherford 226), aptly describes Chand's relationship to these inherited
stories: standing on Canadian soil, she nonetheless reaches for an explicitly
Indian mythic vocabulary to make sense of, and ultimately to escape, her
predicament. That Chand's final departure from the house feels, as several
commentators have noted, somewhat understated rather than triumphant is in
keeping with Mehta's broader refusal of easy resolution – the film offers not a
feminist manifesto delivered through placards, as in Water, but a quieter, more
interior form of release.
8. Feminist Vision: Domesticity, Isolation, and the
Marginalised Woman
Underlying the film's transnational and mythic registers
is a sustained feminist critique of the structures – dowry, arranged marriage,
the joint family – that the film presents as travelling with the migrant family
rather than being shed at the border. Manju Jaidka's observation that such
structures involve “a distinct undercurrent of meanness and negativity…
plaguing our gender” (qtd. in Hill, n. pag.) is borne out across the film's
female characters: Biji, who provokes her son's violence against his wife;
Aman, who is simultaneously a victim of her own husband's frustration and, at
moments, complicit in normalising Chand's suffering; and Chand's own mother,
who is shown to relinquish responsibility for her daughter's wellbeing once the
marriage has been arranged by the men of the family.
Carole Boyce Davies's claim that “migration creates the
desire for home, which in turn produces the rewriting of home”, and that “home
can only have meaning once one experiences a level of displacement from it”
(84), provides a useful frame for understanding why Chand, rather than the more
settled Aman and Baldev, becomes the vehicle for the film's feminist critique.
It is precisely because Chand has not yet “rewritten” home – because Punjab
remains, for her, the unattainable site of safety and parental love – that she
is positioned to perceive, and ultimately to reject, the unfreedom of her
present circumstances. The film's almost total absence of neighbours, visitors,
or any wider community – an absence the narrative repeatedly underlines – further
intensifies this critique, suggesting that the isolation experienced by women
within the immigrant household is compounded by the isolation of the household
itself within its new society.
Read alongside Mehta's earlier trilogy, in which Radha
(Fire), Shanta (Earth), and Kalyani (Water) are similarly positioned as victims
who are nevertheless granted alliances with younger, more resistant figures –
Sita, Lenny, and Chuyia respectively – Videsh continues Mehta's consistent
refusal to allow her female protagonists to remain merely passive. Although
Videsh lacks an equivalent younger ally for Chand, the film substitutes the
relationship with Rosa, the Jamaican-Canadian co-worker who recognises and
responds to Chand's bruises, suggesting that solidarity across diasporic
communities – rather than along strictly national or ethnic lines – offers one
of the film's few genuine sources of support.
9. Conclusion
Videsh – Heaven on Earth demonstrates that the value of
an adaptation lies not in its proximity to a single “original” but in the new
meanings generated by the journey itself. By carrying Karnad's serpent-lover
from the folk imagination of Karnataka, through the Punjabi stage adaptation
Naga-Chhaya, into the snow-bound suburbs of Brampton, Deepa Mehta produces a
film that is simultaneously a continuation of an ancient narrative tradition
and a sharply contemporary diagnosis of the conditions facing first-generation
Punjabi immigrants in Canada. Read through Naficy's framework of accented
cinema, Brah's theorisation of home as roots and routes, and the feminist film
criticism that has long attended to Mehta's work, Videsh emerges as a film
about the costs of migration that refuses both the nostalgic fantasy of the
homeland and the assimilationist fantasy of the host nation. Its title –
Videsh, or “foreign land,” ironically subtitled “Heaven on Earth” – ultimately
names the gap between promise and experience that the film's heroine, like so
many real migrants before and since, must learn to live within, and finally, to
leave behind.
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