Adapting the Experience of Endurance: Waiting, Interiority, and Cinematic Form in the Two Uski Rotis

Abstract

This paper examines Mani Kaul’s 1969 film adaptation of Mohan Rakesh’s short story Uski Roti through the interconnected questions of waiting, interiority, and cinematic form. Moving beyond a fidelity-based understanding of adaptation, it considers how Kaul reworks the experience of endurance that structures the source-text’s narrative. In the source story, Balo’s waiting is shaped through memory, anticipation, psychological uncertainty, marital obligation, and repetition; in the film, this experience is relocated into cinematic duration, silence, bodily stillness, spatial distance, and an attenuated narrative rhythm. Through Balo, Zinda, Sucha Singh’s mistress, and the unnamed dead woman, the film creates a productive tension between visibility and knowledge: characters and events may become more physically present while remaining psychologically opaque. Drawing primarily on adaptation theory and on Deleuze’s account of cinematic temporality, the article argues that Kaul does not simply make visible what remains unsaid in Rakesh’s prose. Rather, he gives the unsaid a different formal existence, transforming literary uncertainty into an audiovisual experience of duration, silence, embodiment, and interpretive openness.