We wondered why nobody is talking about the fact that Nishabd is not an original story. Ram Gopal Varma has denied that he has been inspired by the Hollywood versions of this infamous theme, but, nevertheless, we would like to bring the ‘originals’ to you. The story, of course, had to come from a European mind.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita first in English, 1955. It had to be published in Paris as no American publisher would touch it with a barge pole. Ironically enough, the Russian translation was first published in New York, 1967. Amitabh Bachchan’s original is Humbert Humbert, the book’s narrator and protagonist who becomes sexually obsessed with 12-year-old Dolores Haze. No, unlike popular misconception, Lolita was not her real name, but a pet name given to her exclusively by Humbert.
Humbert takes up residence as a paying guest in Charlotte Haze’s home only after seeing her daughter, Dolores, sunbathing. He starts keeping a diary about his growing obsession and even marries Charlotte in order to stay close to Dolores. Charlotte dies in an accident just after she discovers his diary and Humbert starts travelling with Lolita, claiming that she was his daughter.
He soon discovered that Lolita was not as innocent as she seemed; she knew about his obsession and was not averse to it. A shocked reader is made to sympathise with a confused and weak Humbert rather than Dolores. Eventually she leaves him for another man.
Five years later she, married and pregnant, contacts him for money. In a jealous rage he kills her husband, is arrested and convicted, and eventually executed. She dies in childbirth.
Even though the first 5,000 English copies sold out in France, it was not until Graham Greene called it one of the best novels of the 20th century that it reached England.
A furious debate followed between authors, scholars and governments, not to mention readers. The novel eventually hit American stores and went on to become a controversial cult classic.

Writers’ Perceptions of the Novel

In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies wrote that the theme of Lolita is “not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child”.
Most writers have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov’s powers as an ironist. Martin Amis proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism which destroyed the Russia of Nabokov’s childhood. “All of Nabokov’s books are about tyranny,” he says, “Perhaps Lolita most of all”.
In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about an illicit women’s reading group. In this book the psychological and political interpretations of Lolita are united, since as female intellectuals in Iran, Nafisi and her students were denied both public liberty and private sexual selfhood. Nafisi writes of her students’ strong emotional connection with the book: “what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer” and “like Lolita we tried to escape and create our own little pockets of freedom”.
One of the novel’s early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: “We find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents.”
In his afterword to the novel, Nabokov wrote that “the initial shiver of inspiration” for Lolita “was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”
The novel was filmed twice: Stanley Kubrick adapted the novel in 1962 and Adrian Lyne, in 1997. Though the film garnered several nominations at various film award ceremonies, only Sue Lyon was given the award for most promising newcomer.