‘Remembering Shakespeare in India: Colonial and Postcolonial Memory’, in Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo, ed. Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 101-20 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Historicising Shakespeare's Histories in Colonial India: A Speculative Discourse
Representation and Resistance: Essays on Postcolonial Theatre and Drama, 2015
Historicising Shakespeare’s Histories in Colonial India: A Speculative Discourse Santanu Niyogi Assistant Professor of English Raniganj Girls’ College Searsole Rajbari PINCODE: 713358 West Bengal email: santanuniyogi@yahoo.com Abstract The artistic excellence of the Shakespearean Histories has been generally agreed upon. But whether this corpus should be taken as authentic history is a matter of debate. In the post-Armada context these histories undoubtedly contributed to nation writing especially for the illiterate populace. Even for a section of the cultured elite of Britain, Shakespearean Histories were the sources of knowledge of the country’s medieval past. In the colonial context, the English educated elite of the colonies may also be presumed to have acquired their knowledge of the British medieval history from Shakespeare’s historical works. But, as Vinay Lal argues, in the Indian situation, “history” as a category of knowledge was imposed by the colonisers on the colonised intelligentsia. The Indian consciousness till the pre-colonial days was predominantly ahistorical. The English educated elite, the vanguards of nascent Indian nationalism in the nineteenth century reacted to this new imperial, Eurocentric knowledge category in two diametrically opposite ways. A section of the Indian intelligentsia being inspired by the concept of “history” endeavoured to construct the glorious past of the Indian nation and in the process attempted to forge a nationalist movement. The other section, however was antipathetic to the concept of “history” and considered it to be detrimental to the indigenous mode of resisting and subverting the empire. This paper is a speculative discourse on the role of the Shakespeare’s Histories in this problematic situation. Shakespeare’s historical plays were vehicles of British cultural supremacy and reinforced the new colonial epistemic category of “history”. At the same time they were models and fountainheads of inspiration for the colonised creative writers to work in the historical genre as they desperately wanted to recreate a glorious Indian past at least fictionally in the absence of concrete historical records. Keywords: Shakespeare’s Histories, nationalism, ahistoricism, epistemic category
The re-birth of Shakespeare in India: Celebrating and Indianizing the Bard in 1964
While the Tercentenary of Shakespeare's death (1916) was hardly celebrated in India and marked the beginning of a period in which Shakespeare was hidden, the Quartercentenary of his birth (1964) spawned a large number of collections, theatre performances and even exhibitions to pay homage to the Bard. Although a special issue of the journal Indian Literature published in 1964 contributed to the re-emergence of Shakespeare, the most revolutionary projects in the making of a vernacular Shakespeare occurred on the Indian stage via Utpal Dutt's Shakespearean productions in Bengali. Following Arjun Appadurai, this paper argues that Utpal Dutt's Bengali theatre productions in 1964 participate in a "decolonization" of Shakespeare, consisting in liberating Shakespeare "the text" and Shakespeare "the author" from the bonds of the empire, from restrictive colonial associations. Two out of his three theatre performances produced in 1964 -Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar -are symptomatic of the effects of "glocalizing" the Shakespearean texts since the original place names and names of the characters are combined with the Bengali language and some unavoidable localization. Thus, Shakespeare's Quartercentenary in India not only saw the re-emergence of the Bard, but also took its first steps in his indigenization.
While the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death (1916) was hardly celebrated in India and marked the beginning of a period in which Shakespeare was hidden, the Quartercentenary of his birth (1964) spawned a large number of collections, theatre performances and even exhibitions to pay homage to the Bard. Although a special issue of the journal Indian Literature published in 1964 contributed to the re-emergence of Shakespeare, the most revolutionary projects in the making of a vernacular Shakespeare occurred on the Indian stage via Utpal Dutt’s Shakespearean productions in Bengali. Following Arjun Appadurai, this paper argues that Utpal Dutt’s Bengali theatre productions in 1964 participate in a “decolonization” of Shakespeare, consisting in liberating Shakespeare “the text” and Shakespeare “the author” from the bonds of the empire, from restrictive colonial associations. Two out of his three theatre performances produced in 1964 – Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar – are symptomatic of the effects of “glocalizing” the Shakespearean texts since the original place names and names of the characters are combined with the Bengali language and some unavoidable localization. Thus, Shakespeare’s Quartercentenary in India not only saw the re-emergence of the Bard, but also took its first steps in his indigenization.
From ‘Imitation’ to ‘Indigenization’: A Study of Shakespeare Performances in Colonial Calcutta
Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2012
The plays of William Shakespeare have been performed all over the globe. This is particularly true of the erstwhile colonies of Britain and India is no exception. Along with other English playwrights, Shakespeare’s plays began to be performed in India during the eighteenth century by British officials for their entertainment. Educated Indians took these performances as a model to develop ‘modern’ Indian theatre. The present essay engages with Shakespeare production in colonial Calcutta, starting with Shakespeare performances in English before moving on to consider the later process of ‘indigenizing’ Shakespeare. The essay also proposes that Shakespeare production in Calcutta after the 1850s when Shakespeare’s plays moved out of the confines of schools and colleges has been governed by its own aesthetics.
Reinterpreting the ‘Bard’: Shakespearean Performances in India and (East) Germany
This essay attempts to undertake a comparative study of the Shakespearean appropriations in late 19th century India under colonial rule on one hand, and in mid-20th century (East) Germany on the other. While 19th century Indian responses to Shakespeare carried a covert nationalist agenda against the British rulers who had made him complicit in the colonial project, the mid-20th century German adaptations found in him, a potent site for voicing their opposition against the governments, which had imposed censorship regulations upon newspapers, books and television. Within this framework and making use of the textual, performative and audience sensibility components, the paper would endeavor to: a) explore the nuances in the performance strategies of selected playwrights from both the countries, and understand the extent of divergences and departures from the English text; and b) scrutinise the location of these performances respectively within the overlapping currents of colonial modernity, nationality and regional identity in the 19th and 20th century India, and the post-war communist regimes operating in (East) Germany.
IDEAS Volume 5, 2020
The exuberant world of Shakespeare seems to have always fascinated Bollywood filmmakers, inspiring them to interpret or adapt his texts in the context of their own socio-cultural milieu. In Postcolonial India, the Bard’s magnificent and “universal” tales of love, revenge, intrigue and violence have played a remarkable role in shaping and influencing Indian imagination and ethos. The dramatist began to appear in Bollywood cinema several decades ago, and over the years he turned into the Bard of Bollywood. From Gulzar’s Angoor (1982), an adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014), a remake of Hamlet, the playwright has appeared in diverse and myriad avatars on the big screen. Bollywood has domesticated Shakespearean texts, popularising them with its own masala formula – the inclusion of dance, music, item songs and so on – to entertain and cater to the taste of the desi audience. Thus, bollywoodised adaptations/interpretations of Shakespearean dramas have become part of popular or mass culture in this part of the world. Film-makers have translated the Bard’s works in their own tongues and tones, and as Shakespearean-plots interweave almost all the subtle and intricate components of human-psyche/life, thus endowing the texts with a crowd-pulling ability, they help fulfil the film-makers’ commercial interests. In this paper, we aim to examine how Bollywood has remained, over decades, a fertile field for Shakespearean texts to be re-explored, reinterpreted or reinvented. The essay also aims to decode the politics of appropriating and commoditising literary and cultural artefacts as a means to catering to popular and mass consumption. Furthermore, the paper aspires to bring into fore how Shakespearean texts’ intrinsic/embedded modernity has enabled their writer to transcend the boundary of individual subjectivity and to ultimately become a metaphor for heterogeneous or “global” humanity. Keywords: Shakespeare, Bollywood, Filmmaker, adaptation, commoditising, popular culture
Where the Context becomes Co-text: Shakespeare in Bollywood
Historical context 'undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text.' (Sinfield and Dollimore 6) Shakespeare's plays have proved themselves 'timeless' (Barry 176) in the way they are read and enjoyed in our own times and through our own manners. However, it is interesting the way the classic period pieces of sole European soil have made their immense influence in the veteran film industry of India, Bollywood. Bollywood has been an inseparable part of the cultural thread of India and has witnessed severe political upheavals. Shakespeare play also significantly enough couldn't ensure that culture cannot 'transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it.' (Sinfield and Dollimore 8) This paper seeks to address the particular enmeshment of history and culture in the reflection of Shakespeare over Bollywood movies.