Adaptation and Epistemic Redress: The Indian Uprising in Junoon

Our contemporary interest in the Victorian age has resulted in a continued investment in ventriloquizing Victorians themselves, as in the case of the various ‘faithful’ adaptations of Victorian novels and afterlives of Victorian literature in contemporary settings, as well as via neo-Victorian renditions. This chapter will discuss Shyam Benegal’s Junoon (1979), produced by Shashi Kapoor, as a screen adaptation of A Flight of Pigeons (1978), a neo-Victorian novella by Anglo-Indian author Ruskin Bond, set during the first war of Indian independence (1857-8). In particular, the focus will rest on how screen adaptation involves a double process of translation, one which is simultaneously trans-temporal, even anachronistic, and intermedia. Concurrently, this chapter will advance an argument about creative practices of trans-temporal ventriloquism as a way of dealing with conflicted pasts.The use in this chapter of the concept of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’ aims to assess the extent to which, as a concrete socio-cultural object, Benegal’s screen adaptation of Bond’s neo-Victorian novella can be seen as an instance of postcolonial re-mediation involving issues of archive, memory, and trauma.