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Dr. Abu Farah Hoque
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Maharani Kasiswari College
20, Ramkanto Bose Street, Kolkata -700003(affiliated to the University of Calcutta, India)
E-mail id: abu.fh@mkc.ac.in
ORCID ID: 0009-0008-6127-9654
Abstract— Bhakti literature constitutes one of the most influential vernacular traditions in South India, yet its transition from poetic, performative, and temple-based expression into cinema has received comparatively fragmented scholarly attention. This study conceptualizes cinematic adaptation not merely as narrative transfer but as a multimodal transformation involving language, music, devotional affect, visual symbolism, characterization, and regional cultural identity.
A distinctive research gap lies in the absence of a systematic cross-linguistic framework capable of comparing how Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam films reinterpret Bhakti texts and saint traditions through different cinematic conventions. The proposed research addresses this gap by combining computational textual analysis, multimodal feature extraction, adaptation mapping, and interpretive film analysis within a unified analytical framework. Particular attention is directed toward alterations in poetic voice, devotional subjectivity, linguistic localization, musicalization, sacred-space representation, gendered agency, and the cinematic construction of divine presence. Recent developments in multilingual language models, speech processing, visual analysis, and multimodal artificial intelligence make it possible to examine literary and audiovisual transformations at a scale that conventional close reading alone cannot achieve.
Keywords— Bhakti literature, South Indian cinema, cinematic adaptation, multimodal analysis, computational humanities, vernacular cultural translation
References
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- Pillai, S. S. (2024). Krishna’s Mahabharatas: Devotional retellings of an epic narrative. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197753552.001.0001
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- Additional useful references for the Bhakti-literature section
- Dehejia, V. (Ed.). (1988). Slaves of the Lord: The path of the Tamil saints. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers.
- Hardy, F. (1983). Viraha-bhakti: The early history of Kṛṣṇa devotion in South India. Oxford University Press.
- Narayanan, V. (1994). The way and the goal: Expressions of devotion in the early Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition. Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
- Peterson, I. V. (1989). Poems to Śiva: The hymns of the Tamil saints. Princeton University Press.
- Ramakrishnan, E. V. (Ed.). (1999). The book of bhakti. Sahitya Akademi.