Lihaaf (The Quilt).
Leila (2019).
To tackle the question of why the choice of language creates a make or break situation in these adaptations, we are forced to return to the heavily explored but still relevant debate about the assumed audience of English language novels from South Asian countries, all of which are literally teeming with regional language literature. African literature scholar Eileen Julien wrote of the pressures on African writers to produce the “extroverted novel” that has “been asked to satisfy contradictory demands: to be “universal” but to display its “difference”.
Elsewhere, Eleni Coundouriotis countered with an exploration of the “introverted novel” that divests from transnational and global concerns and focuses instead on producing a people’s history from below, thus offering critical perspectives on that particular nation or region.