A Comparative Study of Na D'Souza's novel Dweepa and Girish Kasaravalli's Film Dweepa

This paper presents a comparative study of Na D’Souza’s novel Dweepa and Girish Kasaravalli’s acclaimed film adaptation Dweepa (2002).  The study looks at how land, water, loss, gender, and modernity are portrayed differently in literature and film within the socio-historical framework of river-valley projects and displacement in Karnataka. The paper makes the case that, although the literary text emphasises socioeconomic structures and collective displacement, the cinematic adaptation intensifies subjective, gendered, and phenomenological experiences, particularly through the character of Nagaveni, through close textual readings of the novella using translated passages and in-depth scene analyses of the film. This study uses ecocriticism and adaptation theory to show that Kasaravalli's film is a critical re-interpretation that turns the ecological politics of the original text into an affective ethics of witnessing rather than just a visual translation.