Transcoding the postcolonial into film: Midnight's Children & The Buddha of Suburbia

Literature comprises unique and specific codes to reflect meaning and ideology. Postcolonialism makes use of concepts such as history, identity, hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence, as codes to foster the understanding of the movement. Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi are two prominent authors who portray postcolonial India and England in their novels. Rushdie in his novel Midnight's Children recreates history juxtaposing it with the personal history of the protagonist Saleem and employs various narration techniques and postcolonial imagery to picture India in colonial and postcolonial periods. Hanif Kureishi in his autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia displays the racial and cultural situation of 1970s England via the postcolonial imagery he uses. A film adaptation is the transfer of a text into a film. Film adaptation studies are mostly based on the evaluation of fidelity however "transcoding" is the ideal term to understand the process of adaptation. Mise en scène, camera work, use of light and editing are the codes of film language that allow the viewers to decode the meaning. Both novels of Rushdie and Kureishi are adapted into films and this study aims to decipher the codes of postcolonialism to understand novels and visual codes of film to comprehend their film adaptations. This study endeavours to find out the extent of the adaptations in terms of reflecting postcolonial imagery. The aim of the present dissertation is to offer new insights into film adaptation analysis by deciphering the transcoded postcolonial meanings.