The Oriental as Absence in Minghella’s
The English Patient
Dr. A. Clare Brandabur
Fatih University
Every film director has a choice as to how much of the printed
text to include, how much to cut, and how much to add when making a film from a novel. Such decisions result in films which
vary from the printed text in either major or minor ways. The Merchant-Ivory team, for example, often creates film versions
of stories that are astonishingly faithful to the text.
What Minghella has done in the film version of Michael Ondaatje’s
The English Patient changes the story so radically that the film actually tells
a different story. The film has a different protagonist, a different denouement, and a different resolution from the novel.
Whereas the novel written by Michael Ondaatje provides a delicately nuanced multicultural world view culminating in a caustic
appraisal of Western hegemony, the film retains a Eurocentric world view never given the devastating critique to which it
is subjected in the novel. The character of Kirpal Singh who moves in the novel
from apprentice to master of the art of defusing bombs, upon discovering that the hierarchy of nations of his respected teachers
have perfected a gigantic bomb beyond his own wildest imagination, and dropped it on civilian targets, confronts his mentors
with a fiery speech of repudiation, and returns to his own country. All the important characters still alive at this final
stage of the novel concur in the justice of his analysis. Kirpal Singh becomes
the dominant character in the denouement of the novel: his analysis is acquiesced in by Almasy, Caravaggio, and Hana. Which
makes it all the more surprising that this dominant character is essentially absent from the film.
When a novel is translated into the medium of film, it must
be adapted to the target audience. That The English Patient was successfully adapted
to the majority in a highly militarised Western capitalist cinematic audience – the white male – is confirmed
by the many Oscars it garnered in the first months of its release. But the original text contains at its heart a devastating
criticism of Western culture. And this criticism is delivered by an Oriental belonging to a religious minority. Apparently
the producers of the film realized early on that the film had to be shorn of its political content in order to be acceptable
to its target audience. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam demonstrate in their essay
on “The Cinema After Babel,” “discourse is always shaped by
an audience, by what Tzvetan Todorov calls the allocutaire-- those to whom the discourse is addressed --whose potential
reaction must always be taken into account.(Shohat 116).
It seems to me that a fairly obvious reading of the novel sees it
as a postcolonial kaleidoscopic many layered narrative in which Western culture is surveyed by an Oriental in the person of
Kirpal Singh and found wanting. Set in Italy in the final months of the Second World War, the novel focuses on the lives of
four characters who have been variously shattered by the war, huddled together in or around the ruin of a grand historic Villa,
a ruined survival of the Italian Renaissance. Each of these survivors has in
his own way “stepped away” from the war. Kirpal Singh is that last of the characters to step away from the war,
and when he does so, his denunciation is total and devastating.
The Oriental in the novel, Kirpal Singh, is a Sikh, the point
of view character, and his picture in the film version is mostly left on the cutting room floor or distorted out of all recognition.
In an important essay on the film version of The English Patient, “Twice
Repressed: The Case of Ondaatje’s Kip,” Nikki Singh responds from a Sikh perspective to the incongruity between
the representation of Kirpal Singh in the film as compared with that in the Ondaatje text. “Twice Repressed: The Case
of Ondaatje’s Kip” first published in 2004 was reprinted in December 2010 for the occasion of the selection of
The English Patient, a novel first published
in 1994, by sikhchic.com as “Book
of the Month” for December 2010. The study includes a detailed comparison between the novel and the film informed by
the author’s Sikh background and by the reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism
(first published in 1978, reissued in 1994).
Singh quotes
Ondaatje as saying in an interview with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC (Singh 2) that he had not really planned the character of Kirpal
Singh when he began to write The English Patient. He asserts that he himself was
surprised when this character suddenly appeared. Ondaatje tells Wachtel
I started to investigate Kirpal Singh, trying to find out
who this person was, what his job was. And that became, in a way, a new part of the book, a new character whose presence fills
one-quarter of the novel. (Michael Ondaatje qtd by Nikki Singh)
Noting that we seldom find Sikh characters in postcolonial
literature, Singh points out how a-typical Kip is from other Oreintals in contemporary fiction—defusing rather than
exploding bombs-- and argues that Kip’s character unfolds in the narrative to reveal a person increasingly rooted in
his own religious faith (Singh). Such a portrait of a deeply spiritual Oriental male is particularly needed in post 9/11 fiction,
Singh believes:
Such an introduction is desperately needed in our dangerously
divided and polarized world. Since September 11, several hundred Sikhs have been victims of hate crimes in America. In the
mind of the attackers, Punjabi Sikhs are the same as Afghani Muslims and Afghani Muslims are the same as al-Qaeda terrorists.
In Phoenix, Arizona, a Sikh gas station owner was murdered in that blinding rage. It is urgent that we in the West learn about
our Asian neighbors and begin to respect them (Singh 2):
And though a film version could have provided an opportunity
to realize and celebrate such a learning experience, in fact its director Anthony Minghela chose instead to confirm the stereotype
of the “raghead” instead of finding it possible to provide space for the dignified, deeply ethical Oriental depicted
by Ondaatje. In the novel Kip takes great care to wash his hair and launder his white turban, as Singh points out, “[I}n
the film, Kip’s turban, the emblem of Sikh pride, is carelessly tied” and “shabby” (Singh 2). “Ironically,”
Nikki Singh points out, the subject who frees himself of British colonialism in Ondaatje’s novel becomes in the film
an object of American racial and sexual obsessions” (Singh 2).
The binary opposition between “them” and “us”
which Edward Said made us so conscious about years ago, infects the 1996 Miramax production. Even though Ondaatje’s
Punjabi sapper comes to Europe during World War II, and warmly embraces Catholic frescoes in Italy, the Canadian Hana, the
Hungarian Almasy, and the Italian thief, Minghella and his crew reshape him and recast him in a very different meaning –
as Said would say, in one of its deepest and most recurring images of the “Other.” (Singh 3)
The process employed by Hollywood to effect this transformation
is typical of the cultural obduracy that forbids the depiction of an Oriental as manifesting the dignity and maturity actually
belonging to this character. Here Singh quotes from Said’s Orientalism:
. . .
the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the
Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence (Said 1994 208 qtd by Singh 4).
In order to keep Kip from rising in the film to his true stature
as protagonist and hero of the novel, the director had to alter many more or less subtle relationships and to omit significant
passages from the text altogether. As Singh points out, “by erasing the spaces where Kip grows up socially, culturally,
and religiously, Hollywood not only dislodges Ondaatje’s hero to the periphery but also makes him a momentary and insubstantial
figure” (Singh 4). At times in the novel Kip is forced by circumstances to assume enormous responsibility, to communicate
to his dwindling team all the accumulated technical expertise of a whole tradition of sappers as one after the other they
fall victim to bombs made more intricate and more lethal by the Germans in their retreat north through Italy.. Absent from
the film are reflections like “he knew he contained more than any other sapper, the knowledge of Lord Suffolk. He was
expected to be the replacing vision” (EP 208), and he has cultivated an austere
tolerance for solitude since he worked among men “who would not cross an uncrowded bar to speak with him when they were
off duty”; nevertheless “he knew he was for now a king, a puppet master, could order anything” (EP 209). The film omits the real technical mastery and courage through which Kip has won pre-eminence among his
British military peers. Instead, as Nikki Singh demonstrates, Hollywood keeps Kip infantile and undeveloped. The camera, she
says, “captures Kip’s body, his mystery, his sexuality; it exoticizes his “oriental” body and coloring
and features” (Singh 7). Such Oriental stereotypes are designed in the film to contrast with and “reinforce the
Whiteness, rationality, masculinity, and adulthood of the West” (Singh 7).
Also omitted from the film are passages in which Kip’s
inclusive cultural vision is expressed: “For him there were the various maps of fate, and at Amritsar’s temple
all faiths and classes were welcome and ate together” (EP 289). Having omitted
all of Kip’s reflections on his religious concerns, Singh observes, the director turns Kip into a feminized sexual fetish
through the parallel drawn cinematically between the scopophilia whereby the camera caresses Katherine’s body, making
it the object of the male gaze of Almasy, and the long hair of Kip. Cinematic metonymy elides Kim’s long hair and brown
skin by photographing him analogically with shots of Katherine against the undulating
desert sands, both perceived as passive objects of sexual desire.
Thus, Singh points out,
rather than marking his Sikh identity, Kip’s long dark
hair is fetishized in the movie. Such a representation facilitates the division between the viewing subject and the viewed
object, and converts a religious person into a knick-knack for sexual gratification. With his hair on display, the Asian is
no more than an interesting spectacle, and each time his hair is shown, the upper part of his body is also bare. (Singh 8)
This sexual fetishization is further enabled by the omission
of the many markers of Kip’s spiritual side. Nikki Singh stresses the deletion from the film of long verbal journeys
in the novel during which Kip takes Hana to visit the sacred places of his Sikh religion, the magnificent temple at Amritsar,
the Harmandar, the central Sikh shrine in Punjab, scenes in which “we see the structure of the shrine inlaid with gold
and marble lifted by the shimmering waters surrounding it” (Singh 4), even though it would have been so easy “to
flash an image of the Harmandar – even for a second” (Singh 4). As Singh points says:
But the film utterly omits this sublime vision and thereby
categorically conceals Ondaatje’s pluralistic perspective in which the Sikh shrine is linked with the Desert and with
the Villa Giralamo. These are three important spiritual locales [in the novel] which nurture and bring out the best of humanity.
Great religious figures like Moses, John the Baptist, Christ, the Desert Fathers, Prophet Mohammad were all attracted to the
Desert. It was in that open and limitless space and silence of the shimmering sand that they carried on their communication
with the Divine. Ondaatje’s early-twentieth century explorers in the desert also acknowledge the presence of the Divine
in their midst. (Singh 5)
By thus feminizing Kip, by neutralizing his masculinity through
the camera, Minghella reinforces the Orientalist stereotype of the feminization and passivity of the East. Thus Singh argues,
by fetishism and scopophilia, Hollywood succeeds in “shifting the threat of the Other to a control and power over the
Other” (Singh 8). There is a definite feminine side to Kip, as he is perceived by Hana as dissolving the male and female
dichotomies, his hair reminding her of a Hindu goddess and thereby connecting him to many other goddess images in the novel—his
resting beside the statue of Mary, his sighting his rifle on the light-bulbs in the halo of the Queen of the Sea, his empathy
with the sad Queen of Sheba in the painting in a church. Such associations would suggest the kind of balance between animus and anima of which Jung would approve. But Hollywood must reduce
this complex imagery to a banal stereotype to evade the threat represented by this mysterious “Other,” even though
this requires overlooking the fact that Kip is perceived as a “warrior
saint” by Hana who visualizes him like a medieval knight going off to his perilous work each morning: “It was
the moment he left them all behind, the moment the drawbridge closed behind the knight and he was alone with just the peacefulness
of his own strict talent” (EP 290).
This image of the warrior-saint finds its vindication in Sikh history. Most readers of the novel like viewers of the
film probably come to the work with little knowledge of the Sikh religion and its history, although the novel appeared only
eight years after the notorious storming of the Golden Temple at Amritsar called “Operation Blue Star” by Indira
Gandhi’s military with its tragic loss of life and the subsequent demands of Sikh separatists for an independent state
in Punjab. But Ondaatje would have crafted his story not only with this recent
crisis but with a more comprehensive overview of Sikh history, especially the conflicted relation of the Sikhs to British
colonialism—an important element in his still somewhat mysterious title “The English Patient” when the supposed
English patient turns out to be Hungarian.. According to V.S. Naipaul in India: A Million
Mutinies Now (1990), the Sikh religion first arose in about 1500 as the embodiment of an illumination of Guru Nanak which
was “the quietist one that there was a middle way: that there was no Hindu and no Muslim, that there could be a blending
of the faiths” (Naipaul 421-22). Recounting Sikh fierceness at the siege of Lucknow, a famous battle at the time of
the 1858 Mutiny, Naipaul says:
In the Sikh fierceness at the battle of Lucknow there would
have been a wish to get even with the ‘Pandies’ who had helped [the British] to defeat them [the Sikhs] less than
10 years before. There would have been a more general wish as well to get even with the Muslims. And it was historically fitting
that the Sikhs should have helped to bring about the extinction of Muslim power in Lucknow and Delhi, because it was out of
the anguish caused by Muslim persecutions of Hindus that the Sikh religion had arisen. (Naipaul 421)
What had happened 10 years before was the ultimate surrender
of the Sikhs to British forces after several years of viciously fought battles. The most implacable resistance fighters against
British hegemony over India, they became in defeat the staunchest of British-India’s defenders. In Naipaul’s analysis, it had been the fifth of the ten Sikh Gurus, Gorband Singh, who had built
the Golden Temple at Amritsar and, in reaction against persecution, had given the Sikhs their militant character (Naipaul
491-92).
The historical circumstances of Sikh tradition provide a context for Ondaatje’s deployment
of Kirpal Singh’s character in the novel without an awareness of which the reader misses an important level of meaning.
Unlike Kip’s mirror image Kim in Kipling’s novel (out of which Hana sees Kip as emerging into their life at the
Villa), Kip has no amulet proving him to be a Sahib and therefore superior to the Indians around him. Instead Kip has his
turban, his steel bracelet, and his knife as Naipaul says, “every day, with these intimate emblems, a man would be reminded
of what he was” (Naipaul 492). But this identity is effectively omitted
from the film. The main reason why Kip must stay within the Orientalist cliché in the film is to prevent audiences from glimpsing
the real threat of an Oriental who judges and rejects the West, a powerful denouement which is at the heart of Ondaatje’s
narrative. Such a motivation constitutes the “final cause” of the plot in Aristotle’s sense, in terms of
the rational intentionality of the protagonist. If (as the film implies) Kip’s real reason for leaving the Villa to
return to India is his depression at the death of his friend Hardy, the last remaining sapper besides Kip, this would tend
to confirm his femininity. In this view, Kip would be seen as lacking a mature motivation of his own and so unable to continue
this arduous work without his friend. Therefore the most serious distortion in
the film is the misrepresentation of Kip’s actual reason for leaving the
Villa to return to India. In the novel, the real crisis that forms the climax
of the novel and determines Kip to leave is the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities by the Americans. On the day Kip learns from his wireless radio that the bombs have fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this
is the scene: from Hana’s perspective:
She sees him in the field, his hands clasped over his head,
then realizes this is a gesture not of pain but of his need to hold the earphones tight against his brain. He is a hundred
yards away from her in the lower field when she hears a scream emerge from his body which had never raised its voice among
them. He sinks to his knees, as if unbuckled. Stays like that and then slowly gets up and moves in a diagonal towards his
tent, enters it, and closes the flaps behind him. . . . Kip emerges from the tent with the rifle. He comes into the Villa
San Giralamo and sweeps past her, moving like a steel ball in an arcade game, through the doorway and up the stairs three
steps at a time, his breath metronomed, the hit of his boots against the vertical sections of stairs. (EP 300).
Kip enters the
bedroom and stands at the foot of the English Patient’s bed. His confrontation
with Almasy and Caravaggio – totally left out of the film -- constitutes
the knight’s single combat with the enemy and the climax of the novel. He fires the gun at the fountain painted on the
trompe d’oeil wall of the bedroom and plaster flies onto the bed.:
I sat at the foot of this bed and listened to you, Uncle.
These last months. When I was a kid I did that, the same thing. I believed I could carry that knowledge, slowly altering it,
but in any case passing it beyond me to another. I grew up with tradition from
my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island
that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. . . . . You and then the Americans converted us. With your missionary rules. And Indian soldiers wasted
their lives as heroes so they could be pukkah. You had wars like cricket. How did
you fool us into this? . . . listen to what you people have done. (EP 301)
He throws down the gun and puts the radio earphones on Almasy, “One
bomb. Then another.
Hiroshima. Nagasaki”. (EP 302). When Caravaggio tells Kip that the English Patient is not
English, Hana says “He would say it doesn’t matter” (EP 304)
showing clearly that she agrees with Kip. When Kip targets Almasy with the gun, Almasy pulls off the earphones and says ”Do
it, Kip, I don’t want to hear any more (EP 303). Caravaggio thinks, “He knows the young sapper is right. They would never have dropped such a bomb
on a white nation” (EP 304). Thus
Kip has the agreement of the three other adults in the community, each of them deferring to his judgment against Western hypocrisy
which, as Nikki Singh points out, “bears a striking resemblance” to the influential postcolonial thinker of our
century, Aimé Césaire (Singh 10-11). .After delivering this devastating judgment, Kip divests himself of his uniform and military
insignia, gets on his motorcycle, and heads south “rewinding the spool of war” (EP 308), on his way back to India, where “all the hands around the table are brown” (EP 320).
All
this is omitted from the film. Nikki Singh says, “The Dream Factory cannot and will not deal with Kip’s disclosure
of the dirty deeds of the colonizing West. The camera effortlessly leaves out the empowered Kip and directs out attention
to the Englishman’s heroism. “Amidst haunting music and endless sand we see in the centre of the screen an exhausted
white man – a Saviour – carrying a burden in his arms, the corpse of the vivacious Katherine. The movie blatantly
reminds us of Said’s realization that “the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective
absence.” (Said 1994 208 qtd by Singh 12)
In his well-known essay on The Legacy
of Islam (1931), H.A.R. Gibb reflected on the vagaries of Oriental influence on Western literature, stressing the conditions
for such influence to be received. First he says, “there must be a condition of receptivity on one or both sides.—a
willingness to take what the other has to give, an implied recognition of its superiority in one or another field” (Gibb
181). Gibb then adds “There has scarcely been anything approaching a transference of any oriental literary art as a
whole into European literature, but single elements of technique and occasionally certain established literary motives have
been successfully transplanted. (Gibb 181). Why some such elements have been accepted and other rejected, Gibb says, is a
problem largely of national or popular psychology (Gibb 181). Perhaps it was too much to expect that an Oriental hero –
whose achievement would be made much more explicit in film than in his less obviously abrasive
incarnation in the highly discontinuous, allusive text full of subtle parody and pastiche. In particular at a time when popular resistance to such an Oriental hero was inflamed by the propaganda
being exploited to persuade the public of a sleight-of-hand being deployed after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in
1989. There had to be a demonization of Islam and the Orient, to substitute for
the icon of “godless communist” the icon of the “Islamo-fascist” as the national bęte noir; thus the heroism of the White man had to be foregrounded
in the film, while the real hero -- who recognizes the decadence of the over-militarized
killing machine that the Western Allies especially the UK and the US had become and who has the courage to speak “truth
to power” --was turned from a courageous “warrior knight” of an unfamiliar Eastern religion to a “raghead”
In the 1994 Afterword
to a new edition of Orientalism, Edward Said notes a trend which was to be dramatically intensified by the events of 9/11:
ever since the
demise of the Soviet Union there has been a rush by some scholars and journalists in the United States to find in an Orientalized
Islam a new empire of evil. Consequently, both the electronic and print media have been awash with demeaning stereotypes that
lump together Islam and terrorism, or Arabs and violence, or the Orient and tyranny” (Said 1994 346).
Ondaatje’s novel was published in 1992. It seems certain
that what H.A.R. Gibb called the “problem of national or popular psychology” required that the actual resolution
of the novel in which the extreme violence of the culture was confronted and called by its right name had to be jettisoned
in favour of a story of Western adventure and illicit passion. The novel constitutes
an intensely intelligent inquiry into human nature, the history of civilization, and the immorality of war but it had to be
castrated and made into a celebration of the liebestod-- love-death theme -- sadomasochistic sex with a White Man as suffering hero.
Since
Kip had to be infantilized, he is not permitted the mature loving relation with Hana that is clearly visible in the novel,
so Minghella cuts that out of the film and adds a completely incongruous scene, one not in the novel, in which Kip and Hana
swing like playing children in the Sistine Chapel. Kip has gone there (Hana never enters the Chapel in the novel) to hoist
himself up with a series of pulleys using his powerful flshlight to see the face of Isaiah painted by Michaelangelo of which
Almasy had told him. The swinging scene reduces Kip to a boy, and trivializes his interest in the sacred art of the Christian
Renaissance.
Having
excised the climactic scene of Kip’s righteous rage at the atomic bombing of Japanese largely civilian cities by the
Americans, Minghella substitutes another fake scene—i.e. a scene not found in the text -- in which Kip is reading Kipling’s
novel Kim, pronouncing each word deliberately like a child. After reading that “the cannon in Lahore was made
by melting down cups and bolts from every household,” Kip adds somewhat petulantly, “later they fired the cannon
at my people, coma, the natives, fullstop.” (qtd.by Singh 9). In this scene
we see Kip as capable of mild annoyance, but the real expression of anger is omitted entirely from the film. In huge contrast to this rather minor annoyance in the film version, in the novel Kip’s expression
of righteous -- almost murderous -- anger gives us a view of the Oriental as judge like a prophet in his rage. This cannot
be allowed in the work of cinematic art to be shown to the audience that matters to the producers of the film of The English Patient. In fact, as Nikki Singh points out,there is another scene (not in the text) in which the
film substitutes for Kip’s righteous anger an incongruously trivial complaint: in the film Kip is made to say, “what
I really object to Uncle is that you are finishing all my condensed milk” a line completely out of keeping with Kip’s
character that has the effect of trivializing Kip’s disgruntlement with
the British (Singh 9).
Recalling H.A.R. Gibb’s judgment that any kind of transference from one culture to another requires receptivity
on one side or both, we can conclude that The English Patient represents an intriguing
effort at inter-penetration of Western thought by an Oriental insight. Kip listened at the foot of Almasy’s bed for
long speeches about Old Testament prophets and about the many paintings of Isaiah at different ages, so that whole passages
of Scripture come back to him as he speeds south through Italy at the finale of the novel. Kip
had been perhaps overly receptive to the poetry of the Bible, but Almasy in turn never inquires about Kip’s religion
or beliefs. It is precisely because Kip found so many English people (like the “holy
trinity of Miss Morden Fred Harts, and Lord Suffolk who accept Kip as an equal and teach him the dangerous art of defusing
bombs) and so many elements of English culture appealing that his final rejection of that culture after Hiroshima and Nagasaki
is so devastating. Therefore while I generally appreciate the detailed list of
Christian myths and biblical allusions listed in David Roxborough’s essay “The Gospel of Almasy: Christian Mythology
in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” I must emphasize the rejection of that culture in Kip’s
final judgment at the end of the novel. As I have said in an earlier essay (being
published in a Proceedings from Murcia, Spain entitled Restless Travelers, “Kirpal Singh and the Repudiation
of Isaiah in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” it is impossible to read the text without realizing
that Kirpal Singh is the intellectual and moral hero of the book. As he leaves Italy, rewinding the spool of the war, Kip
reviews his complex encounter with Western culture and realizes it was mostly a one-way discourse:
He was riding deeper into thick rain. Because he had loved
the face on the ceiling he had loved the words. As he had believed in the burned man and the meadows of civilisation he tended.
Isaiah and Jeremiah and Solomon were in the burned man’s bedside book,
his holy book, whatever he had loved glued into his own. He had passed his book to the sapper, and the sapper had said we
have a Holy Book too. (EP 313)
Perhaps the time for a more dialogic encounter between East and
West is still ahead of us.
When it comes, such brilliant works as Ondaatje’s The English Patient will have prepared the
way.
Works Consulted
Brandabur, A.Clare.. Pastiche and Parody in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.
Brandabur, A. Clare. Kirpal Singh and the Repudiation of Isaiah in Michael Ondaatje’s
The English Patient.
Gibb, H.A.R. The Legacy
of Islam. Ed. Sir Thomas Arnold, Alfred Guilllaume.London:
Oxford University Press, 1968 (first published 1931)
Hsu, Hsuan. “Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus
in Minghella’s Adaptation of
Ondaatje’s
The English Patient. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/iss3/
Naipaul, V.S: India:
A Milllion Mutinies Now. London: Picador, 2010.
Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury,
1992.
Roxborough, David. “The Gospel of Almasy: Christian
Mythology in Michael Ondaatje’s
The English Patient.” Online Literary Reference Center, 2010.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage, 1978, 1994.
Shohat, Ella. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham and
London: Duke University
Press. 2006.
Singh, Nikki. “Twice Repressed: The Case of Ondaatje’s
Kip.” Journal of Religion and Film.
Vol 8 Noç 1 April 2004. http://www.unomaha.edu/irf/Vol8No1/EnglishPatient.htm
Singh, Nikki Guninder Kaur. “Another Look at ‘The English Patient’: The Book & the Film.”
http:/www.skhchic.com/books/another_look_at_the_english_patient Sikhchic.com: The Art
and Culture of the Diaspora. December 1, 2010. Courtesy: Journal of Religion and Film
(de) Zepetnek, Steven Tötösy. “Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: History and the
Other. <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol1/iss4/8>
