Famous Books Adapted into Films: Writers and Movies

A large share of the films a General Awareness paper names were books first. Examiners like the pairing because it tests two lists at once: the author and the film. A question gives you one and asks for the other, so the only safe way to prepare is to memorise the three-part chain, book, author, film, rather than any one part alone. Indian literature supplies most of the pairs, and the great directors, Satyajit Ray above all, worked almost entirely from novels and short stories.

Indian novels and the films made from them

Shakespeare in Indian cinema

Three films of Vishal Bhardwaj form a Shakespeare trilogy and are asked as a set: Maqbool from Macbeth, Omkara from Othello and Haider from Hamlet. Gulzar's comedy Angoor comes from The Comedy of Errors, and Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, while Aisha follows Austen's Emma. The pattern to remember is that the play or novel is English and the film Indian, so a question can ask for either side.

Recent Indian writing on screen

Chetan Bhagat is the writer most often asked, because four of his novels became well known films: Five Point Someone became 3 Idiots (2009), One Night @ the Call Center became Hello, The 3 Mistakes of My Life became Kai Po Che and 2 States kept its name. Vikas Swarup's novel Q & A became Slumdog Millionaire (2008), directed by Danny Boyle, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; A. R. Rahman won two Academy Awards for its music and song. Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning The White Tiger was filmed in 2021, and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake was filmed by Mira Nair in 2006.

Famous foreign books on film

Why the pairs are worth the effort

Three kinds of fact hang together here. First, an author's name may be asked through a film rather than a book: a candidate who knows only that R. K. Narayan wrote about Malgudi may still miss that The Guide became the film Guide. Second, the film's director is often part of the question, and Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy, Govind Nihalani, Shyam Benegal and Vishal Bhardwaj are the names that recur. Third, awards cross over: Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird began as prize-winning novels, The White Tiger won the Booker Prize before it was filmed, and Slumdog Millionaire turned an Indian novel into a Best Picture winner. Learn the chain in one direction and then test yourself in the other, because papers ask it both ways.