9781137386120 01 pre - Macmillan International Higher … 8 n a ndCii Imneend ar aa CpeShsmeos eks arof oerEr di The Poetics of Mistaken Identity 165 n e chad Rl i r Al re wyapend

Copyrighted material – 9781137386120

Contents

List of Figures vii

List of Contributors ix

Introduction: Shakespeare and Bollywood: The Difference a World Makes 1 Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia

Part I Bollywood’s Debt to the Theater: Aesthetic and Cultural Multivalence

Chapter 1 Parsi Shakespeare: The Precursor to “Bollywood Shakespeare” 21 Vikram Singh Thakur

Chapter 2 Bollywood Battles the Bard: The Evolving Relationship between Film and Theater in Shakespeare Wallah 45 Parmita Kapadia

Part II Shakespeare’s Local Face: Using Shakespeare to Rearticulate Indian Identities

Chapter 3 The Ambiguities of Bollywood Conventions and the Reading of Transnationalism in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool 63 Rosa M. Garc í a-Periago

Chapter 4 No Country for Young Women: Empowering Emilia in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara 87 Mike Heidenberg

Chapter 5 The Global as Local / Othello as Omkara 107 Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani



vi ● Contents

Part III Bollywood’s Cultural Capital: Bollywood Sells Shakespeare

Chapter 6 Interrogating “Bollywood Shakespeare”: Reading Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear 127 Paromita Chakravarti

Chapter 7 The Sounds of India in Supple’s Twelfth Night 147 Kendra Preston Leonard

Chapter 8 Comedies of Errors: Shakespeare, Indian Cinema, and The Poetics of Mistaken Identity 165 Richard Allen

Afterword: Shakespeare and Bollywood 193 Poonam Trivedi

Index 199



BOLLYWOOD SHAKESPEARES

Copyright © Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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ISBN: 978–1–137–38612–0

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First edition: March 2014

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INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare and Bollywood: The Difference a World Makes

Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia

An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin Than these two creatures.

— Twelfth Night, 5.1.223–4 .

If art’s products unceasingly cross over into the domain of com-modities, conversely commodities and usable objects do not cease to cross the border in the opposite direction, to leave the sphere of usefulness and value behind . . .

— Jacques Ranci è re, “Problems and Transformations of Critical Art . ” 1

—Crosshatched Shakespeare

Play this game. Describe the formal elements of Bollywood cinema, but try not to use the references to nation or other historical markers that describe its roots in specific cultural types of theaters or genres.

For instance, instead of saying “it is indebted to Parsi theater,” you would have to say “it borrows from the an age-old theatre based in feudal romance and its tropes—realism and fantasy, snide humor, catchy folk songs, feats of daring or heroism from local legends, use of dazzling stage effects.” Describe its use of dance in the same way: instead of saying “northern Indian folk dance,” describe the way it plays off of “festival dancing” noting the separa-tion from the plot, often interspersed free from flow of the narrative. You



2 ● Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia

note that practice of separating the men from the women in this way: “The men dance together in a simple circular pattern while clapping.” Likewise, to describe the uncanny feel of the music due to its being sung offstage in a sound stage and “looped” into the performance, you might say “the music seems altogether metatextual, different performers whose popular songs are stitched—or ‘synched’—into the story in a way that provides a frame for the narrative, a chance to relax but also reflect on the flow of the story.” Now imagine describing Bollywood’s gestures like this to someone who teaches and studies Shakespeare in the university setting, asking them to guess the theater you are defining.

To help them visualize the performance, use a vocabulary recognizable to them: its use of art and theater from different histories, you call “poly-chronic” and its use of different genres—romance and realism (epic and history)—you call dialogical or synthetic, or “based in both older popu-lar traditions and new types of theatrical spectacle and contemporary set-tings.” To help relate this to their own professional idiom, you can call this syncretic playfulness a “mingle mangle” of cultural forms. It is probably a game that could only exist in the abstract, since at a certain point the description of these historical elements of Bollywood break down and you might find yourself quickly at the tautological cusp of language, unable to describe Krishna folk dance without using the term “ Raut Nacha ,” or vice versa. Nonetheless, the example quickly takes us to a special point about the focus of this collection of essays.

The person playing this game is probably visualizing Bollywood film in a particular way. Not mistaking it, or misrepresenting it, but seeing it in a fully realized place that mis recognizes it in a telling manner that says more about his or her training and community than anything else. The teacher or student of Shakespeare playing this game—perhaps like the one hold-ing this book right now—is invited to visualize a very specific stage, in a very specific location: a raised wooden platform that, as legend has it, was dismantled and dragged across town from Shoreditch in the winter of 1599 to the south bank of the Thames and renamed the Globe. It is interesting to imagine, if we can indulge a bit more in this, how the game might trip unwittingly into a realm of perfect dramatic irony if the person playing were to ask, in an innocent moment of discovery, “Is this performance you are describing taking place at the Globe?”

But before giving up on this example, before questioning how it begs the question by anticipating its own forced analogy, pause for a moment. Think of this moment of discovery/misrecognition, the innocent question, “Are we talking about the Globe?”—that is, Shakespeare’s theater, but also the global stage of world cinema —as fraught with the perils of seeing, appropriating,



Introduction ● 3

misrepresenting anything called “Bollywood Shakespeares” might entail. When Bollywood “uses” Shakespeare to reproduce itself, it seems uncannily aware of this conundrum. But you might say, if you take out the “nation or other historical markers” while considering Indian cinema, in what sense are you even talking about, well, Indian cinema at all? Aren’t you ignor-ing real historical conditions of difference? Aren’t you reifying culture? By forcing someone to think about what makes their cultural tastes the basis of recognition for all other foreign perspectives, aren’t you effectively licens-ing a kind of cultural universalism that not only erases cultural difference, but endorses the worst sort of cultural centrism? At the very least, isn’t this precisely the impolite faux pas committed by the crass tourist who describes the flavor of gulab jamun as “like pancakes”? But the game we describe is not so easily dismissed. Because it’s not the Shakespearean who is being the crass tourist in this instance. Bollywood productions of Shakespeare are keenly perceptive of the parallels between early modern theater and popular Hindi cinema: it’s the directors and producers of Bollywood film who slip into the position of relating English holiday cakes and ales to gulab jamun , of using Shakespeare’s early modern theater to speak about modern Indian life.

Imagine, then, the moment in the game where you mistake your friend’s answer “Globe” for the world itself, and you might begin to think that this person understands Bollywood cinema after all. Bollywood is a global phe-nomenon, so she must be discussing the plays! And for a brief moment of unintentional double entendres, a conversation ensues where both partici-pants speak about the particularities of different cultural art forms and their contexts without ever noticing they are speaking of different worlds: one person speaks of patronage, licensing, and freedom from civic authorities, while the other thinks of early underground financing of Mumbai film and extortionist loans. One person speaks of the haphazard appropriations of religious forms at a time of intense suspicion of orthodox rituals and another begins to think of modern India’s struggles with secularism and political communalism. This conversation, absurd as it might seem on the surface—working at times in a “crosshatched” intellectual discourse where two worlds are necessarily separated but oddly aligned in their aims and focus—provides a key to understanding the multivalent textual and political perspectives working in Bollywood appropriations of Shakespeare.

“Crosshatching” is a term we will come back to, so it will pay to elabo-rate more here. We are indebted to China Mieville who deploys the term in his speculative fiction novel, The City and the City (2010). In the novel, two societies coexist in the same metropolitan space, inhabiting literally the same physical coordinates (neighborhoods, buildings, rooms). Both com-munities live with strong legal prohibitions against “seeing” or recognizing




the other community that lives ghostlike alongside (within? next to? parallel with?) their own. The recognition of these other spaces—all the shops, streets, schools that differ in name only—is strictly forbidden. Everyone must learn to “unsee” people and places from outside their own community. Only in those sections of the city that are “crosshatched” may one see the other community, but only in a way that negotiates the unspoken legal and political strictures surrounding these subtle social codes: seeing the other still requires a form of “unseeing” the strictures that work everywhere else to compartmentalize real-ity into recognizable forms. Crosshatching is a deft analogy of ethnocentrism in Western culture, if not the strictest of realisms exploring the racial divides that shape the great cities of the world. For our purposes, crosshatching can be used metaphorically to expose how global capitalism insists on investing any local individual experience with a haunting quasi-mystical half-truth wherein, as Fredric Jameson suggests in his famous essay “Cognitive Mapping,” the experiential truth of one’s daily life is necessarily removed from the immedi-ate scene of the everyday, such that anything that could be intuited as expe-rientially “factual” about one’s world is now seen in need of further rigorous analytical reframing to speak to the larger economic circuits that animate its double existence. 2 Reading for crosshatched spaces demonstrates the para-doxical strategy of “unseeing” the alien elements that now seem to lurk next to, beside, the local.

The scenario of simultaneously describing “Bollywood” and seeing Shakespeare’s stage answers the needs of a variety of readers for this col-lection. At one level, it responds to the interpretive challenge of parsing Shakespeare’s many regional disguises and vestments, his “global presence.” This repackaged Shakespeare provides what Tom Cartelli and Katherine Rowe (following William Worthen), term a rich and ever-mutable “citational environment” for stage directors, actors, and film producers to populate with local ideologies and cultural orientations. But on another level, crosshatched Shakespeare responds to the deeper philosophical questions being asked in the academy about the role aesthetics must play in a global political context. Let us define “unseeing” in relation to the idea of using Shakespeare as a site for such citations. Unseeing does not close down self-conscious awareness of the ideological limits of perception. It shouldn’t mean “ignoring” the seen, or trusting the conventional shroud of mediation that attends any commodi-fied image. As Elizabeth Abele writes in “Whither Shakespop? Taking Stock of Shakespeare in Popular Culture”: “From being a marker of highbrow, elitist fare, Shakespeare has become a commodity and brand that producers and marketers can exploit.” 3 The exploitation, adaptation, and appropria-tion of Shakespeare is transnational in scope, a testament to Shakespeare’s role as a vehicle for global culture. Unseeing is not the binary opposite of



Introduction ● 5

seeing the contours of this commodification. Rather, it is what A. J. Greimas might identify as its “complementary contrary,” another means of rendering representation intelligible that troubles both modern categories of “every-day perception” vs. “critical reflection,” and affective reading vs. critique. Shakespeare is, at one and the same time, part of an elite Western tradition and/also a window into a new, post-national identity founded by a truly global consumer culture. “Unseeing” puts into play the dislocated nature of Shakespeare’s immediate presence and makes visible the deeper valences of this transnational, trans-textual scene.

Consider how commonplace Shakespeare’s global presence is. Walk into Stratford-Upon-Avon’s New Royal Theatre for example, as one of us did this June 2012 in the midst of its Global Shakespeare Festival, and see an all-African production of Julius Caesar performed as a commentary on dictator-ships in postcolonial settings within developing African countries. 4 The fact of the racial or political dimension of the casting—the entire cast is com-prised of black English actors and musicians—hardly registers a nod in the program, which begins with the premise that Shakespeare is part of African heritage and pedagogy. The scene is naturalized, and at least for scholars familiar with the canon wars of the 90s, the odd Epcot-logic of color-casting and performing “ethnicity” within the production is oddly downplayed if not recognized at all (the musicians play “traditional African music” in the bar after the performance, as the English playgoers sip their pints and have snapshots taken with the musicians and dancers). In a moment of cynicism, one might wonder if anyone else notices that these “African” performers are among the finest British actors of Shakespeare today, who happen to be of African descent and have been asked to affect an African identity in order to promote Shakespeare’s own affinity with Africa. (A backstage tour provides the opportunity to learn how deeply the illusion is maintained, as the actors use “play” African currency to tip their hairdressers before curtain call: like Disney actors, the illusion must be maintained even when “out of character”). The performers are acting African to aid in the performance of a particular appropriation of Shakespeare. This is precisely what must be unseen for the performance to work at all. Shakespeare is the medium for this coming together of tourism, genuine cultural appreciation, and global history.

Or, closer to home, for our purposes, consider Steven Beresford’s Bollywood 12th Night , a 2004 production at the Albery Theatre in London. Beresford used a tropical monsoon to initiate the shipwreck and set the production in contemporary, urban India. In his review Laurence Wright asks, “A Bollywood Shakespeare? Why not?” before concluding, “Here was the after-math of the British Empire confidently enjoying a version of Shakespeare




that had in spirit made the journey through the mixed fortunes of the Raj and returned to recreate itself on a West End stage. The peculiar thing was that no one thought it peculiar.” 5 Also consider the recent Royal Shakespeare Company production of Much Ado About Nothing (2012) set in modern-day Delhi. Directed by Iqbal Khan, with music by Hinal Pattani, and chore-ography by Struan Leslie, the production relies on an all-British-Asian cast and Bollywood style musical numbers and dance sequences to suggest the relevance the play carries with contemporary Asian communities. The oddly crosshatched nature of global culture makes it hard to determine the politics of the gesture: are we seeing Shakespeare used as a vehicle to assert a post-colonial identity? Or are these performances of Shakespeare being used by dramatists and directors to advance a colonialist fantasy of cultural imperi-alism? Is this critique or conservative literacy? It depends on where you are standing, and which particular crosshatched elements of the productions you wish to “unsee.” 6

In this respect, un seeing the discordant, counter-valent strains created by the pairing of Shakespeare with local cultures in the form of new adaptations answers what Jacques Ranci è re has described in his Emancipated Spectator as the problem of defining critique in the post-critical age. For Ranci è re, critique is forestalled by the fact that “right-wing frenzy of post-critical thought and left-wing melancholy” collude. “Left wing melancholy invites us to recognize that there is no alternative to the power of the beast [global capitalism, elsewhere described as the ‘democratic thirst for egalitarian consumption’] and to admit we are satisfied with it. Right wing frenzy warns us that the more we try to break the power of the beast, the more we contribute to its triumph.” 7 Put sim-ply, in the context of our own focus, is Bollywood Shakespeare a testament to late capitalism’s ability to absorb local identity into itself and make all cultures commodities for consumption (as the melancholic witness to Epcot casting in the above example)? Or are these productions a celebration of the imperialist claims that England’s canonical poet does indeed speak a universal nature? (In our context, “talking back” to colonialism in its own tongue advances neoliberalism through a traditional prescriptive Western culture.) “Two sides to the same coin,” Ranci è re explains. “Both operate the same inversion of the critical model that claimed to reveal the law of the commodity as the ultimate truth of beautiful appearances. . . . The revelation continues,” he avers, “but it is no longer thought to supply any weapon against the empire it denounces.” 8 Crosshatched Shakespeare, we argue, aligns with Ranci è re’s attempt to start over 9 by imagining the act of recitation as “dissensus,” which he defines as “an organization of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind the appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness on all.” It means that every situation:



Introduction ● 7

can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification. To reconfigure the landscape of what can be seen and what can be thought is to alter the field of the possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities. Dissensus brings back into play both the obviousness of what can be perceived, thought, and done, and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering coordinates of the shared world. This is what the process of politi-cal subjectivation consists in: in the action of uncounted capacities that crack open the unity of the given and the obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of the possible. 10

Unseeing is a way to perform dissensus , to crack open the “regime of percep-tion” that naturalizes the global context of the local, to render intelligible the “peculiar thing” that no one thinks is peculiar.

Thinking it Peculiar: Bollywood’s Multinational Culture

There is one more state in this country, and that is Hindi cinema. And Hindi cinema also has its own culture . . . quite different from Indian culture but it is not alien to us, we understand it.

—Javed Akhtar, Indian screenwriter and lyricist . 11

Bollywood’s Shakespeare circulates within the intercultural context of twenty-first-century global Shakespeare. But how do we approach this inter-cultural phenomenon—how do we discuss it—without closing ourselves off from the “peculiar thing” that is Shakespeare and the “peculiar thing” that is Bollywood? We believe that Bollywood Shakespeares provides an opportu-nity to think through defining questions about the politics of global culture. Specifically, in this era of globalization, how does Bollywood exploit the canonical imprimatur provided by Shakespeare? The essays in this collec-tion pose answers to such questions by focusing on the way Shakespeare’s dramatic work is appropriated by different generations of Bollywood artists to reflect on the complicated, crosshatched place Shakespeare has in this postcolonial/global English canon. These essays engage with the most pro-vocative adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in contemporary Anglo-Indian, Hindi, and diasporic cinema—including but in no way limited to Merchant Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Gulzar’s Angoor (1982), Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (2003) and Omkara (2006), and Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) and Water (2006)—deploying critical perspectives rooted in postcolonial, globalization, and post-nationalist theory.




Bollywood articulates a national and increasingly international cinematic idiom. Raghunath Raina has described the rich historical layers of Indian film as a storehouse of eclectic traditions as much as a medium of modern artistic expression:

Indian cinema, like any cultural expression, is a montage of diverse influ-ences and a many-layered set of aesthetic values. Some of its basic features go back two thousand years to Sanskrit drama; others are drawn from the kaleidoscopic folk theatre that has kept dramatic traditions alive over the centuries. All this has an overlay of the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata , which pervade all Indian artistic expressions. Finally, the interaction with Western ideas and technology account for Indian cin-ema’s differing traits and components and above all, its eclecticisms. 12

Assessing contemporary Indian films, K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake state that the “forces that shaped Indian cinema and gave it its distinctiveness” include “the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, the classi-cal Indian theater, the regional folk theaters, the nineteenth-century Parsi theater, Hollywood, and music television.” 13 Indian cinema grows out of distinct traditions of folk theaters: the jatra of Bengal, the Ram lila and Krishna lila of Uttar Pradesh, the tamasha of Maharashtra, the nautanki of Rajasthan, the bhavai of Gujarat, the terukkultv of Tamilnadu, the vithina-takam of Andhra, and the yakshagana of Karnataka. This cultural blending was even further enhanced through contact with the Parsi theater that itself was influenced by Western dramatic forms. This amalgam of performance traditions shaped the “national Indian cinema” that has been influenced in turn by Hollywood and music television. The divisions between “Indian” and “foreign,” “indigenous” and “global” are deeply rooted in these perfor-mance traditions.

As such, “Bollywood” is a problematic category when used to describe the Mumbai film industry in that it does not do justice to these traditions of Indian theatrical representation and cinema that make up its global content as a film form. Like the term Hollywood, the word Bollywood has a useful pliancy as it defines the globalization of Indian filmmaking and its political and aesthetic vibrancy. When defining the “certain tendency” of Hollywood cinema, the film historian Robert Ray found that what appeared to be the markers of classic American cinema from the 1930–1980—the recycled use of the Western plots, reluctant hero protagonists, the reliance on invisible editing, and so on—were finally symptoms of American ideology itself. 14 What is one seeing while watching a Hollywood film? For Ray, what looked like a set of tropes turned out to be national identity.



Introduction ● 9

Bollywood promises its own set of “certain tendencies” and deeper ideological associations. 15 The term is often used as short hand to describe stylistic gestures—the mix of dance, music, and melodramatic romance plots—that characterize popular Hindi cinema. But the move to define Bollywood cinema as a composite of styles tends to complicate its com-parison to Hollywood. In “Surviving Bollywood,” M. Madhava Prasad argues

The term seems to serve different purposes for different people. Thus, academic conferences on Bollywood tend to use the term loosely to refer to Indian cinema in general, whereas European television shows which feature Indian films might restrict the meaning to the popular genre, and then only to the blockbusters. Bollywood also, like Hollywood, refers to everything to do with the Bombay film industry. 16

Rather than ignore the comparison to Hollywood, Ajay S. Sinha and Raminder Kaur also ask us to follow through with the implications:

If Hollywood represents the homogenizing effect of American capital-ism in global cultures, a study of Bollywood allows a unique opportu-nity to map the contrasting move of globalization in popular culture. Bollywood’s integration with film studies has brought it closer to the con-ceptual frameworks developed for Hollywood narratives (audience voy-eurism, narrative techniques and so on), and consequently Hollywood’s cultural capitalism is mapped [by critics] consciously or unconsciously, onto that of India’s commercial cinema. One fundamental difference between Hollywood and Bollywood is that the former pushes world cultures towards homogenization, whereas the latter introduces in those cultures a fragmentary process. 17

Bollywood is not only a style that mirrors the production and com-mercial techniques of Western filmmaking, then, but also a convergent and competing global phase of Indian cinema. When the term is used to describe films that pre-date the 90s, it must necessarily reify the very idea of Indian cinema from the perspective of this post-national moment, over-looking other regional markets and languages. And this is precisely why the question “What is Bollywood?” is such a vexed one: to project the term back onto the varied Indian films that antedate the production of Mumbai commercial films marked by the “extended commodity” phase of capitalist growth of the country is to assert the dominance of this form while ignoring the history that got us here. 18




Above, Raina justly points out the multivalent traits evident in Indian cinema, but the statement presumes that there exists an “Indian” cinema when in actual fact it is probably more accurate to say there exists a catholic-ity of cinemas in contemporary India, cinemas that cater to culturally, geo-graphically, and linguistically divergent audiences within India. Bombay’s Hindi language popular cinema has, nonetheless, become synonymous with Indian cinema. Sometimes derided as “ masala movies,” Bollywood films function metonymically, constructing a cultural and national iden-tity for Indian viewers worldwide. In Our Films Their Films , Satyajit Ray, regarded as one of India’s great filmmakers, asserts, “What our cinema needs above everything else is a style, an idiom, a sort of iconography of cinema, which would be uniquely and recognizably Indian.” 19 Bollywood cinema has brought Ray’s words to fruition, creating a style, idiom, and ico-nography that is “uniquely and recognizably Indian.” Indeed, Lothar Lutze claims that Bollywood films allow Indians “to feel Indian collectively, to experience something like national identity and solidarity by a public dem-onstration of their ‘Indianness,’ regardless of their regional background.” 20 It is indisputable that Bollywood films have evolved into a genuine, national cinema, which is quite popular domestically within India and bridges the linguistic, economic, and cultural differences that mark Indian nationhood. But Bollywood is also a global cinema with large audiences in South Asian diasporic communities throughout the world, particularly in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, in the Middle East, in Russia, and in many parts of Africa. In Newsweek International Carla Power and Sudip Mazumdar note, “For hundreds of millions of fans around the world, it is Bollywood, India’s film industry, not Hollywood that spins their screen fantasies.” 21 They continue, “Romany Gypsies in Eastern Europe tune in to India’s Sony Entertainment Television, as do Hindi film fans in Fiji and the Philippines. In Israel [Bollywood films] play to packed houses in Tel Aviv [ . . . ]. In Arab countries, fans opt for Hindi movies over Hollywood ones.” (n. p.). Bollywood’s “nationalist effect,” then, binds a global audience to an imaginary image of a polyvalent yet unified nation, a nation that may only exist in the abstract to ameliorate the real, lived political differences that define these different communities. The cultural differences of this global audience are, nonetheless, captured in Bollywood’s famously auda-cious style. Mira Reym Binford describes the typical Bollywood film as having a

distinctive aesthetic of its own. Its narrative structure does not depend on psychologically consistent characters, plausible plots, coherence, or unity of composition. Realism, in the sense of visual or psychological



Introduction ● 11

authenticity, has not been valued. The mandatory song-and-dance sequences, like operatic arias, tend to serve as both narrative and emo-tional points of culmination and punctuation. Baroque and sometimes highly dramatic camera movement is complemented by flamboyant use of color and sounds effects and flashy editing [ . . . ]. Sound and visuals of song-and-dance sequences are often edited in blithe defiance of con-ventional laws of space and time, whisking a pair of young lovers from a Himalayan mountaintop to a Parisian boulevard to some impossibly elegant hideaway without missing a beat. 22

The essays in this volume will analyze the historical and cultural assump-tions behind Bollywood’s appropriation of the bard, asking whether or not Shakespeare’s plays serve merely as one of these exotic spaces through which Bollywood film directors “whisk” their audience, or if there are not deeper valences between early modern perspectives and poetics and twenty-first-century global cinema. Our collection begins by asking, is there truly such a genre/category/thing as “Bollywood Shakespeare” to begin with? As pliant and supple a multimedia art form as Bollywood film is, seri-ous questions remain: How have the genre categorizations of “Bollywood Shakespeare” emerged and been defined? How have two forces of cinema development—Shakespearean adaptation on the one hand and the global emergence of Hindi cinema—intersected and what form does that intersec-tion take? What do we gain from the different critical stances we might take toward this intersection, whether we view it as what Sunaina Maira calls the “new Orientalism,” a conveniently flamboyant example of “Indo-chic”? 23 Or as an illuminating boundary effect where the idea of “national cinema” loses coherence? When Shakespeare is used to question the very boundaries of national and cultural frameworks, what interests are served?

Perhaps the crucial difference between Bollywood Shakespeare and other forms of Shakespeare appropriation lies in the transnationalism of both per-formance traditions. Indigenous, native, cross-cultural, postcolonial modi-fiers have long been coupled with Shakespeare. These descriptors serve to categorize the distinct “brands” of Shakespeare but communally these terms reveal the transnationalism that underpins contemporary Shakespeare schol-arship. Similarly, Bollywood is a global commodity encompassing not only the subcontinent but also the Middle East, Africa, Russia, and increasingly Western Europe and North America. Suketu Mehta writes, “Bollywood has become a globally recognized brand; like Darjeeling tea or the Taj Mahal, it has become an emblem of India. Its films are popular in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Latin America—and now the U.S. and Europe, where immigrants from Bollywood-loving countries make up most of the audiences




and provide more than 60 percent of the overseas revenues.” 24 Bollywood Shakespeare occupies a significant space through which to examine what Arjun Appadurai identifies as the “tension between cultural homogeniza-tion and cultural heterogenization.” 25 The crosshatched transnational bard embodies this tension and illustrates Appadurai’s contention that “as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies, they tend to become indigenized in one way or another.” 26 Bollywood appropriations of Shakespeare offer precisely this unique coupling of two transnational, global phenomena.

Bollywood Shakespeares: Brief Overview

The first section of this collection, “Bollywood’s Debt to the Theater: Aesthetic and Cultural Multivalence,” reflects on the roots of Bollywood’s hybridity in different performance traditions. Focusing first on Parsi the-ater and then on the popular 1965 Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah, this section examines how Bollywood inherits from theater conflicting ways to represent identity and political history. Tracing these pressure points, our contributors suggest, can help us rethink critical terms crucial to postcolonial criticism. In chapter 1 , “Parsi Shakespeare: The Precursor to ‘Bollywood Shakespeare,’” Vikram Thakur describes the compelling his-tory of Bollywood’s roots in the multivalent theater of Parsi, arguing that the popular uses of Shakespeare in this traditional theatre challenge our current understanding of postcolonial theory, particularly the fixed notions of agency and hybridity. In chapter 2 , “Bollywood Battles the Bard: The Evolving Relationship between Film and Theater in Shakespeare Wallah ,” Parmita Kapadia explores how this Merchant Ivory film uses Shakespeare theater and Hindi cinema as tropes to interrogate cultural change. Set at the moment immediately after independence, Shakespeare Wallah follows a the-ater troupe of Shakespearean actors across India as they confront a changing political and aesthetic landscape. Focusing on how the popular Hindi film industry challenges the vestiges of the British Raj, Kapadia interprets the emerging ascendency of Bollywood.

In our second section, “Shakespeare’s Local Face: Using Shakespeare to Rearticulate Indian Identities,” contributors explore contemporary appropri-ations of Shakespeare by the Bollywood film industry. Focusing on Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara and Maqbool , these essays explore how Shakespeare functions as an adoptive, crosshatched medium that allows for the expression of local critique and multinational allegory. In chapter 3 , “The Ambiguities of Bollywood Conventions and the Reading of Transnationalism in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool ,” Rosa M. Garc í a-Periago draws our attention to how



Introduction ● 13

Maqbool evokes an era of continuous migrations, displacement, and deterri-torializations, claiming that Bhardwaj’s opera prima departs from a so-called national cinema, paving the way for a cinema that registers new forms of dislocated identities. Garc í a-Periago observes that instead of being main-stream Hindu, the characters of Maqbool are all Muslim (with few excep-tions). Given the negative stereotypes of Muslims after the attacks of 9/11 and those of 2002 in Gujarat and their scarce appearance in mainstream Indian cinema, the film generates a construction of Muslims as exiles, as a marginal community locally and globally speaking. The “Bollywood label” does not neatly apply to this recent Shakespearean adaptation, she argues, and has to be broadened. In chapter 4 , “No Country For Young Women: Empowering Emilia in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara ,” Mike Heidenberg looks at the intriguing cultural politics represented in Bhardwaj’s revision of the Emilia character in his version of Othello, Omkara . Bhardwaj radically rei-magines the Emilia character to be a much more empowered and integral player in the film’s action. This deviation from Shakespeare, Heidenberg avers, profoundly strengthens the relationships between the two sets of hus-bands and wives and tightly focuses the film on the idea of the family, with Indu herself as perhaps its central, if largely unacknowledged, member. In Indu, the proto-feminist ideas of Shakespeare’s Emilia merge with postfemi-nist actions, creating a character operating within and rebelling against tra-ditional female roles exemplified both in Othello itself and in modern north Indian society. In chapter 5 , “The Global as Local / Othello as Omkara,” Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani call for a more thorough critical accounting of our understanding of cultural hybridity. Bhardwaj’s Omkara , they argue, dismisses the nation as a potent space of postcolonial resistance and pride. Importantly, by refusing to live in the shadow of a global space that will result in loss of self, the film carves out yet another “third space of enunciation.” The only space the film can be read as affirming, they argue, is itself—Hindi cinema as performative space that bears the burden and meaning of modern “Indianness,” the means through which a vibrant, confident cultural identity can come into being.

In section 3, “Bollywood’s Cultural Capital: Bollywood Sells Shakespeare,” contributors focus on how the Mumbai film industry makes Shakespeare part of a diasporic literacy to redraw cultural, genera-tional, and national boundaries. In chapter 6 , “Interrogating ‘Bollywood Shakespeare’: Reading Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear ,” Paromita Chakravarti asserts that Ghosh’s tale of thwarted paternities functions as a comment on cinema and its neglected theatrical inheritance as well as on film appropriations of Shakespeare represented by phenomena such as the multiple “Bollywoodizations” of the bard. Chapter 7, “The Sounds of




India in Supple’s Twelfth Night ,” by Kendra Preston Leonard, explores how music functions to enhance the multicultural dimension of the Bollywood Shakespeare, noting how the layering of different styles brings into relief the different social worlds inhabited by the characters. Leonard takes as her main example Tim Supple’s 2003 film adaptation of Twelfth Night , starring Parminder Nagra of Bend It Like Beckham fame as Viola. Supple captures the multiple forms of identity through four distinct musical cultures within the film. In chapter 8 , “Comedies of Errors: Shakespeare, Indian Cinema, and The Poetics of Mistaken Identity,” Richard Allen describes how Gulzar’s Angoor explicitly frames its debt to Shakespeare’s play by announcing itself as a film about not one but two sets of mistaken identities. Freely confessing its debt to Shakespeare, the film also suggests the centrality of the comedy of misrecognition to Hindi cinema as a whole. Allen focuses on explicating the Comedy of Errors as both a template for and version of Bollywood misrecogni-tion comedies more broadly, while acknowledging its indigenous sources for these comedies in the plays of Kalidasa. “The affinity between The Comedy of Errors and popular Indian cinema,” Allen suggests, “teaches us not simply about the ‘adaptability’ of Shakespearian idiom . . . but about the nature and character of Indian cinema as a distinctive narrative and artistic form.”

Finally, in her Afterword, Poonam Trivedi returns to a central question: does the interest in Bollywood film really help us understand the lives of the people that it ostensibly purports to represent? European and US schol-ars who perform close readings of the films themselves may inadvertently ignore the very world they mean to expose. Just looking at the films in their packaged form, reading only the subtitles, we risk “missing out on and even misrepresenting their full import. This erasure of linguistic knowledge from critical discourse,” she explains, “threatens to reproduce conditions of Plato’s cave, where the confined viewers are so entranced with moving shadows and so seduced with illusions that they never feel the need to venture out into the blinding reality of linguistic truths.” Trivedi is hopeful that the interna-tional marketing associated with Bollywood films—the “Bollywoodization” of Indian cinema—signals a new phase of development of a long and rich history of Hindi filmmaking. “The new respectability and consequent crit-ical accord gained by ‘Bollywoodization’ may instigate more Indian film-makers to re-turn to Shakespeare in the future. Who knows if ‘Bollywood Shakespeare’ may not be poised to create memorable film versions like the Russian and the Japanese?” Trivedi suggests that Bollywood Shakespeare’s historical importance might reside in a renewed aesthetic assessment of Shakespeare’s crosshatched forms, though elsewhere she reminds us that making “memorable” appropriation of Shakespeare’s dramatic works



Introduction ● 15

begins with genuine interest in the dynamic mix of languages and cultures that define such odd fruit as “Bollywood Shakespeares.”

Notes

1 . Ranci è re, “Problems and Transformations of Critical Art,” Aesthetics and Its Discontent , 50.

2 . Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” 347–58. 3 . Abele, “Whither Shakespop?” 6. 4 . Directed by Gregory Doran. 5 . Wright, “Bollywood Twelfth Night ,” 74–75. 6 . Compare this double-spaced valence to Burnett’s reading of the local and global

in Filming Shakespeare (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See how this doubling can work according to different registers in Richard Burt’s overview of what he calls the “Shakespeare-play-within-the-Indian-film genre,” in “All That Remains of Shakespeare in Indian Film,” Shakespeare in Asia , 73–108.

7 . Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 40. 8 . Ibid., 40. 9 . Ranci è re’s vision of critique requires a certain faith in the ability to break free

from the system one means to dislocate: “To escape the circle is to start from different presuppositions, assumptions that are certainly unreasonable from the perspective of our oligarchic societies and the so-called critical logic that is its double. Thus, it would be assumed that the incapable are capable; that there is no hidden secret of the machine that keeps them trapped in their place. It would be assumed that there is no fatal mechanism transforming reality into image; no monstrous beast absorbing all desires and energies into its belly; no lost community to be restored.” Ibid., 48.

10 . Ibid., 48–49. 11 . Kabir, Talking Films , 154. 12 . Raina, “The Context: A Socio-Cultural Anatomy,” 3. 13 . Gokulsing and Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema , 19. 14 . See Ray’s elaboration of “formal and thematic paradigms” in A Certain

Tendency , 25–88. 15 . An overview of the critical history and problematic nature of the very category

of “Bollywood” as a generic marker of some Hindi cinema is provided by Jigna Desai and Rajinder Durah’s “The Essential Bollywood,” in their collection Bollywood Reader (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008). In the same collection, Prasad’s “The Economic of Ideology” maps out in succinct terms the economic history that motivated the different stages of Indian film production to the present. In 2003, M. Madhava Prasad uncovered the earliest known use of the term. Also see Prasad’s “The Name of a Desire,” 525. http://www.india-seminar-com/2003/525 .

16 . Prasad, “Surviving Bollywood,” 43.




17 . Sinha and Kaur, Bollyworld , 15. 18 . Ravi Vasudevan urges us to reflect on this economic context in his “Meanings

of Bollywood.” 19 . Ray, Our Films Their Films , 2. 20 . Lutze, “From Bharata to Bombay,” 3. 21 . Power and Mazumdar, “America Isn’t the Only Country,” 52 22 . Binford, “Innovation and Imitation,” 81. 23 . Maira, “Temporary Tattoos,” 134–160. 24 . Mehta, “Lights, Camera, India,” 52–69. 25 . Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” 295–310. 26 . Ibid., 296.

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Binford, Mira Reym “Innovation and Imitation in the Indian Cinema.” In Cinema and Cultural Identity. Reflections on Films From Japan, India and China. Edited by W. Dissanayake. New York: University Press of America, 1988. 81.

Brown, John Russell. New Sites For Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia . New York: Routledge, 1999.

Burnett , Mark Thornton. Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Introduction ● 17

Huang, Alexander C. Y. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

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Mehta, Suketu. “Lights, Camera, India [Welcome to India].” National Geographic 207. 2 (2005). 52–69.

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Worthen, William. “Drama, Performativity and Performance.” PMLA 13.5 (1998). 1093–107.



Aajker Shahjahan, 136, 137–40as Shakespearean appropriation,

137, 138Aankhen (1993), 185Abedin, Reza Zainul, 141–2n1Abel, Roysten, 63, 80

see also In OthelloAbele, Elizabeth, 4Afsana (1951), 183Ahuja, Govinda, 185, 186, 187, 188–9Akeli Mat Jaiyo (1963), 184Akhtar, Farhan, 80Albee, Edward, 111Ali, Munshi Murad, 29–31Ali, Muzaffar, 73Allen, Richard, 73, 148Alter, Stephen, 93, 102n22Amphitryon, 175, 187Appadurai, Arjun, 12, 64, 67appropriation, 47Arambam, Lokendra, 76Aristotle, 165Asif, K., 73

Bachchan, Amitabh, 69–70, 132, 133, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188–9

Bad Boys (1995), 167, 187Banaji, Shakuntala, 69Bandit Queen (1994), 79

Bandyopadhyay, Samik, 143n21Barjatya, Sooraj, 70Bartholomeusz, Dennis, 150Basu, Bipasha, 110, 119Bay, Michael, 167, 187Beckett, Samuel, 111Beginner’s Luck (2001), 134, 139Benjamin, Walter, 110Beresford, Steven, 5–6Besson, Luc, 72Betaab (1983), 79“Betab,” Narain Prasad, 26Betab, Narayan, 182, 183Bhabha, Homi, 23, 32–3, 34–5

“the third space of enunciation,” 34, 120

Bhardwaj, Vishal, 22, 63, 66, 72, 108, 129, 130, 132, 134, 153

see also Maqbool, OmkaraBharucha, Rustom, 35, 74Bhaskar, Ira, 73, 190Bhat, Meghna, 103n36Bhatia, Nandi, 46Bhattacharya, Spandan, 190Bhaumik, Kaushik, 46Bimal Roy Studios, 167Binford, Mira Reym, 10Black Friday (2004), 74Bloom, Gina, 153Bobby (1977), 79

Index

Definitions are indicated by boldface.



200 ● Index

Bollywood, 128dance, 1–2, 6, 11, 46, 58n2, 64,

67–8, 89, 102n13, 112, 131, 147, 194

definition of, 8–11and emotions, 69–70as escapism, 54, 69and female avengers, 92, 103n38,

104n39global reach, 10, 11–12, 22, 128history of, 101n8history of appropriating

Shakespeare, 63and the mafia, 71, 76masala (formula movie), 58n25,

90–1, 196music, 14, 64, 67–8, 89–91, 102n13,

111, 112, 131, 147, 194and Shakespeare adaptation,

129, 130transnationalism of, 80, 194and Western influence, 194

Bollywood/Hollywood, 71Bombay (1995), 74, 79Bombay Dreams, 128Bombay Theatre, 39n11Booth, Gregory D., 92, 101n7, 104n39Boucicoult, Dion, 191n29Bradshaw, Peter, 130Branagh, Kenneth, 134Bride and Prejudice, 71Bruckheimer, Jerry, 187Brunette, Peter, 81n15Buksh, Hussain, 30Burnett, Mark Thornton, 15n6,

114, 134Burt, Richard, 15n6

Calcutta Theatre, 169Callis, James, 134Cartelli, Thomas, 4, 47, 38, 49, 65, 111,

134, 148Chaalbaaz (1989), 185Chadha, Gurinder, 71

Chakravarti, Paromita, 109Changeling, The, 102n27Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 117Chatterjee, Koel, 190, 190n20Chatterjee, Moushumi, 180Chatterjee, Partha, 117Chatterjee, Sudipto, 23Chaudhry, Lubna, 46Chaudhuri, Nagendra Nath, 33–4Chaudhvin ka Chand, 178Chinatown (1962), 183Chopra, Vidhu Vinod, 74, 79Chopra, Yash, 70Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, 71Chowdhry, Prem, 52Cirque du Soleil, 149Classic Theatre, 33Clément, Catherine, 152Cohen, Nick, 134Cohen, Robin, 75Columpar, Corinn, 73Company (2002), 72Coppola, Francis Ford, 72Corsican Brothers, The (1844), 191n29citational environment, 4, 37–8, 65, 148crosshatching, 3–4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 57Crowl, Samuel, 130

dargah, 68Das, Jibananada, 140Dasgupta, Shamita Das, 91David, Joseph, 30Dehlvi, Najar, 28, 29Derné, Steve, 93, 98Desai, Jigna, 15n15, 58n25, 71Desai, Manmohan, 184Dhawan, David, 185–6, 187Dil Chahta Hai (2001), 80Dil Se (1998), 74Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, 68Dionne, Craig, 110Dissanayake, Wimal, 8Do Phool (1973), 185Don (1978), 183, 185



Index ● 201

Doran, Gregory, 15n4Dumas, Alexandre, 191n29Durah, Rajinder, 15n15Durga, 92, 104nn39–40Dutt, Guru, 170, 177, 178Dutt, Sangeeta, 139Dutt, Utpal, 48, 76, 136–40, 143n21Dutta, Amrendranath, 33

Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 141–2n1Education Act of 1835, 169Eijofor, Chiwetel, 148Ezra, Elizabeth, 64, 72

Fanon, Franz, 32, 34folk theater, 8, 29, 169, 181

bhavai, Gujarat, 8jatra, Bengal, 8, 76, 136Krishna lila, Uttar Pradesh, 8nautanki, Rajasthan, 8Ram lila, Uttar Pradesh, 8tamasha, Maharashtra, 8terukkultv, Tamilnadu, 8vithinatakam, Andhra, 8yakshagana, Karnataka, 8

Frye, Northrop, 165

Gandhi, Indira, 76Ganti, Tejaswini, 108Garber, Marjorie, 152Get Over It (2001), 134, 139Ghatak, Ritwick, 140Ghosh, Girish, 34Ghosh, Partho, 74Ghosh, Rituparno, 13, 63, 127, 133

see also Last Lear, TheGhulam-e-Musthafa (1997), 74Globe, The, 2Globe to Globe World Shakespeare

festival, 195Göbel, Walter, 150Godfather, The (1972), 72, 82n34Gokulsing, K. Moti, 8Goldby, Roger, 134

Gopal, Sangita, 67, 147, 149, 161Gopalan, Lalitha, 103n38Goshal, Shreya, 90Grant Road Theatre, 24–5, 33,

39n11, 181Royal Theatre, 39n11Shankarseth’s Old Playhouse, 39n11

Greenway, Peter, 112Greimas, A. J., 5Grigely, Joseph, 38Gujarat, 8, 13, 64, 73–4, 80gulab jamun, 3Gulzar, 72, 129, 167, 168, 170, 177–8

see also Merchant Ivory: AngoorGuneratne, Anthony R., 69, 74, 82n48Gunning, Tom, 191n31Gupt, Somnath, 23–4, 31, 39n7

Hamdy, Noha, 150Hansen, Kathryn, 24–5, 26, 182, 190Hasan, Ahsan Mehdi, 182, 183Hasan, Mehar, 30Hasan, Munshi Mehdi, 28, 29Haseena Maan Jayegi (1968), 184Hathkadi (1995), 185Helen, 119Hoffman, Michael, 141–2n1Hum Aapke Hain Koun, 70Hum Dono (1961), 184Hutcheon, Linda, 31

In Othello (2002), 63, 80In the Bleak Winter (1995), 134, 139Indian cinema, 10, 71, 80

and call for realism, 170complexity of appropriating

Shakespeare for, 72history of adaptation, 107and languages, 194, 195–6and mistaken identity/doubles plot,

166, 171–2, 181, 183–7recurring motifs of, 65and technology, 8and Western influence, 6, 8, 9, 23



202 ● Index

Indian Dream (2003), 134, 139Indian theater, 21Ionesco, Eugène, 111Irving, Henry, 30Ishwarlal, 22Islam, Maidul, 74Ivory, James, 48, 81n26

see also Shakespeare Wallah

Jackson, Russell, 47Jahanara, 136Jahanbakhsh ane Gulrukhsar, 31Jaise Ko Taisa (1973), 184Jameson, Fredric, 4, 112–13, 132, 136

“Cognitive Mapping,” 4Jan, Amir, 28Jan, Gohar, 28Jan, Moti, 28Jeejeebhoy, Jamshedji, 39n11Jeetendra, 184Jejeebhoy, Shireen J., 103n32Jess-Cooke, Carolyn, 72Jhabvala, Ruth Prewar, 48Jhabwala, Ruth Prawer, 131Jhutti, Ronny, 148Johar, Karan, 70, 71Joshi, Framji, 31Junger, Gil, 142n11

Kabir, Nasreen Munni, 161Kadri, Haysam, 141–2n1Kaleidoscope Entertainment, 79Kalidasa, 14, 117, 167, 190n7Kapadia, Parmita, 110Kapoor, Anil, 184Kapoor, Babita, 184Kapoor, Kareena, 90, 95, 189Kapoor, Raj, 79, 170Kapoor, Rishi, 184Kapoor, Shammi, 183Kapoor, Shashi, 48, 58n13Kapoor, Shekhar, 79Kapur, Anuradha, 30Karim, Abdul, 192

Kashmiri, Agha Hashr, 22, 26, 27, 29–30

Shakespeare-e-Hind (Shakespeare of India), 27

Kashyap, Anurag, 74Kaur, Raminder, 9Kendal, Felicity, 48, 133Kendal, Jennifer, 48, 58n13Kendal, Geoffrey, 48, 58n12, 133Kendal, Laura, 48, 58n12Kendal troupe, 48, 131, 133, 136Kennedy, Dennis, 31, 37Kesavan, Mukul, 22–3Khan, Aamir, 82n46Khan, Firoz Shah, 182Khan, Iqbal, 6Khan, Mansoor, 79–80, 129Khan, Mehboob, 170Khan, Saif Ali, 82n46, 131Khan, Salman, 82n46Khan, Shahrukh, 82n46, 183, 189Khanna, Rajesh, 184Khatau, Kavasji, 30Khattak, Saba, 46Khori, Edalji, 26, 183Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 31Kishen Kanhaiya (1990), 184Kracauer, Siegfried, 186Kumar, Ashok, 183Kumar, Dilip, 187Kumar, Rajendra, 184Kumar, Uttam, 174Kumari, Meena, 184kundal, 64–5Kurosawa, Akira, 66, 72, 82n32

see also Throne of Blood

Last Lear, The (2007), 13, 63, 127–43as archive for theater and literature, 141as cinema versus theater, 134–5,

137, 139as re-canonization of Shakespeare,

133, 139as a stage history, 137, 138–9



Index ● 203

Lawrence, Martin, 187Led Zeppelin, 158León (1994), 72Leong, Lawrence, 141–2n1Leslie, Struan, 6Lesson, The, 111Little Theatre Group, 76, 136Loomba, Ania, 28, 32, 34, 36,

37, 109, 110Long, Robert Emmet, 45Lowe, Melanie, 152Luhrman, Baz, 112, 142n11Lutze, Lothar, 10

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 33, 140, 169

mimic men, 33Madden, John, 142n11Madhok, N., 22Magic Flute, The, 151–2, 156–7Mahabharata, 8, 92, 108Majumdar, Neepa, 166Malagi, R. A., 190n7Malick, Javed, 27–8, 183Malini, Hema, 185Maloney, Michael, 148Mandelbaum, David G., 93Manjula, 46, 47Maqbool (2003), 7, 12–13, 22, 63–80,

87, 110, 127–8, 129, 132, 161and displaced community, 80, 81n7and Macbeth, 65, 66, 72, 73, 76, 87,

110, 129, 147and music, 67–9, 74–5and Muslim community, 64, 73–8, 80and suicide in Indian culture, 66and Western success, 64, 130see also Bhardwaj, Vishal

Mason, David, 76–7, 83n57Massai, Sonia, 120Matusitz, Jonathan, 89Mazumdar, Ranjani, 113–14, 191n31Mazumdar, Sudip, 10McClary, Susan, 152

McShakespeare, 63–4Mehdi, Ahsan, 26Mehta, Deepa, 71

Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), 7Water (2006), 7

Mehta, Suketu, 11Menaechmi, 187Merchant Ivory, 45, 70, 107, 127, 131, 139

Angoor (1982), 7, 14, 72, 108, 129, 167, 168, 170, 177, 179, 180–1

double plot, 187and the master-slave relationship,

171and the Parsi theater, 185as self-parodic commentary on the

history of double, 185remake of, 189

see also Shakespeare WallahMere Mehboob, 178Merzban, Behramji Firdunji, 26Middleton, Thomas, 102n27Mieville, China: The City and the City

(2010), 3Mishra, Ashok, 98Mishra, J. P., 29Mishra, Sudhir, 129Mishra, Vijay, 46, 108Mission Kashmir (2000), 74Modi, Sohrab, 22, 73Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 36Moorti, Sujata, 67, 147, 149, 161Motley, 111Mother India

see Omkara: and Mother IndiaMozart, Wolfgang, 151–2, 154, 156–7Mrcchakatika (The Little Clay Cart),

167–8Mughal-e-Azam (1960), 73, 82n49Munnibai, 28Murad, Karimuddin, 29

Naficy, Hamid, 80, 83n67Nagra, Parminder, 14, 148Nair, Mira, 149



204 ● Index

“namaz” (Islamic prayer), 75–6Namesake, The, 149Nami, Abdul Alim, 39n7Nargis, 22Naval, Deepti, 178Nayak, V. K., 29Nayakan (1987), 72New Globe, The, 37, 196New Royal Theatre, 5

Global Shakespeare Festival, 59/11, 13, 64, 73–4, 77, 801942: A Love Story (1994), 79

O’Haver, Tommy, 134Omkara (2006), 7, 12, 13, 22, 63, 70,

83n63, 87–104, 107–20, 127–8, 129, 132, 161

box office success, 129and caste, 115–16, 119, 120and dance, 91, 101n9, 119and dialect, 114–15, 116and female avengers, 81n6, 92,

98–101, 103n38, 104nn39–40and female empowerment, 88–9,

90, 92–3, 95–7, 101, 102n17, 103n36, 104nn39–40, 117–8, 119

Hindu criminals in, 76and its nontraditional setting,

113–14and Mother India, 88–9, 91, 100,

101, 101n8, 102n17, 103n38, 104nn39–40

and music, 89–92, 94, 99, 101n9as Othello, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 97,

103n36, 115, 121n24, 129, 147and political mafia, 91, 92–3, 94as postcolonial Shakespeare

appropriation, 112–13, 115and race, 115–16reviews of, 109and traditional clothing, 103n31and Western culture, 97–8, 108,

116–17, 118, 119–20see also Bhardwaj, Vishal

Orfall, Blair, 66Osborne, Laurie E., 37

Pacino, Al, 142n11Pandey, Chunkey, 185Parsi theater, 1, 8, 12, 22, 64, 70, 129,

161, 167, 169, 185, 191n29and appropriating Shakespeare, 31–8companies, 24–7

Albert Theatrical Company, 25The Alfred Theatrical Company,

31Amateurs Dramatic Club, 25Baronet Theatrical Company, 25Elphinstone Amateurs, 25Elphinstone Dramatic Club, 25, 33Elphinstone Theatrical Company,

25The Empress Victoria Company,

29Gentlemen Amateurs Club, 25, 30Hindi Theatrical Company, 25The New Alfred Theatrical

Company, 31New Parsi Victoria Company, 30Oriental Theatrical Company, 25Original Victoria Club, 25Parsi Alfred Company, 28, 29Parsi Company, 29–30Parsi Elphinstone Dramatic

Club, 25The Parsi Stage Players, 25, 30Parsi Theatrical Company, 25, 29Parsi Victoria Opera Troupe, 25Persian Theatrical Company, 25Persian Zoroastrian Theatrical

Company, 25Shakespeare Theatrical Company,

25, 29Victoria Theatrical Company, 25,

26, 29The Volunteers Club, 25Zoroastrian Dramatic Society, 25Zoroastrian Theatrical Company,

25



Index ● 205

costumes, 29, 30–1, 32and dance, 27, 31, 34, 38

folk dance, 40n18formula for adapting Shakespeare,

27–8and Hindi film, 107, 108history of, 23–7, 181and hybridized Shakespeare, 183language, 25, 26–7, 30, 33and mimicry, 32–3, 35–6music, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 38, 182

classical music, 40n18as “opera,” 40n22

and postcolonial hybridity, 31–8props, 30rejection of, 23and sets, 29, 30–1and “stage spectacle,” 30, 31and translating Shakespeare, 32and Western influence, 28, 35

Patel, Dadi, 26Patel, Dhanjibhai, 25Pattani, Hinal, 6Pauwels, Heidi, 104n40Payano, Pam, 89Plautus, 175, 185, 187poly-chronic, 2Power, Carla, 10Prakash, H. S. Shiva, 81n13Prasad, M. Madhava, 15n15, 114

and defining Bollywood, 9Price, Claire, 148Pukar (1939), 73

qawwals, 68

Raina, Raghunath, 8, 10Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 22, 101n8Ram, Anjali, 102n17Ram aur Shyam (1967), 184, 185,

187–8, 191n30Ramakrishna, 169Ramayana, 8, 92, 108, 118Ramudu Bheemudu (1964), 191n30Ramesh, Randeep, 63

Rancière, Jacques, 6–7, 15n9dissensus, 6–7, 7Emancipated Spectator, 6

Rangaragan, Mahesh, 190Ranina, N. R., 192Rao, Shakuntala, 89Rast Goftar, 24, 26, 30Ratnachandra, 192Ratnam, Mani, 71, 72, 74, 79Rawail, Rahul, 79Ray, Robert, 8Ray, Satyajit, 10, 140, 170Ray, Upendra Kishore, 140Rehman, Waheeda, 184Riehle, Wolfgang, 173Roach, Joseph, 66Roja (1992), 74Rothwell, Kenneth, 46Rowe, Katherine, 4, 38, 65, 111,

134, 148Rowden, Terry, 72Rowley, William, 102n27Roy, Bimal, 170Royal Shakespeare Company, 6Rustamji, Nahanabhai, 26

Sachaa Jhutua (1970), 184Säckel, Sarah, 150Sajid-Farhad, 189Salter, Dennis, 113Sangeet Natak Akademi, 39n3Sangera, 58n25Sathar, Zeba A., 103n32Satte Pe Satta (1982), 183Satya (1998), 72Sawhney, Nitin, 149, 150–1, 155, 156,

161, 162see also Twelfth Night, or

What You WillSchneider, Alexander, 69Scolnicov, Hannah, 31Screen International, 79Seeta aur Geeta (1971), 184–5Sen, Amrita, 79Sen, Aparna, 103n36, 132



206 ● Index

Sen, Debu, 167, 178Sen, Konkona, 103n36Sen, Manu, 167, 169Sen, Prianjali, 190, 190n12Sen, Suddhaseel, 76Shah, C. R., 191n24Shah, Naseeruddin, 111Shahjahan, 136Shakespeare, William

and Africa, 5All’s Well that Ends Well, 37Antony and Cleopatra, 50–2

Kali Nagin (1906, adapt.), 30As You Like It

Gentlemen Amateurs Club 1866 adapt., 30

Mob Hit Production 2010 adapt., 141–2n1

and colonial India, 166, 196–7The Comedy of Errors, 14, 165–91

Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (1998, adapt.), 167, 181, 185, 186–9

Bhramajalaka (1879, adapt.), 182Bhranti Bilash (1963, adapt.),

167, 169, 170, 172–5, 175–6, 178–80, 185, 190

Bhrantibilas (1869, adapt.), 169, 190

Bhul-Bhulaiyan (1896, adapt.), 182

Bhul-Bhulaiyan (1915, adapt.), 182Do Dooni Char (1968, adapt.),

167, 170, 171–4, 177–81, 1851867 adapt., 24and free adaptation, 183Gorakhadhandha (1912, adapt.),

182Gorakhdhanda (1917, adapt.), 182Jedia Bhai—Adhle Beheru Kutavu

(adapt.), 26Jodiya Bhaiyo (1865, adapt.), 182and the love story, 172–81and the master-slave relationship,

170–1, 188–9as melodrama, 166

Rama Ratana (1903, adapt.), 182see also Merchant Ivory: Angoor

global presence, 2–3, 4–6, 7, 57, 193globalization of, 47, 63–4, 114, 120Hamlet, 37, 49, 54, 142n18

Dhruv (adapt.), 129Franco Zeffirelli 1990 adapt.,

142n11Hariraja (1897, adapt.), 33Khoon ka Khoon (1935; adapt.), 22Khun-e-nahaq (1898, adapt.), 28, 30

Henry IV, 40n43and history with India, 21–38, 107,

150, 168–9and Indian languages, 32

Julius Caesar, 5, 40n43, 111King John, 29

Said-e-Havas (1936; adapt.), 22King Lear, 132, 135, 140

Hara-Jita (1905, adapt.), 29, 30–1Life Goes On (2009, adapt.),

139–41Safed-Khun (1906, adapt.), 29

Macbeth, 77, 150, 182Girish Ghosh adapt., 34Maranayakana Drishtanta (1991,

adapt.), 66, 81n13Throne of Blood (adapt.), 66, 71,

72, 82n32Uptal Dutt adapt. (1975), 76see also Maqbool

The Merchant of Venice, 26, 40n43, 49, 196

Dil Farosh (1900, adapt.), 22, 29Dil Farsoh (1927, adapt.), 22, 107,

196Dil Farosh (1937, adapt.), 22

A Midsummer Night’s DreamMichael Hoffman 1999 adapt.,

142n11Tim Supple 2003 adapt.,

141–2n1, 148Much Ado About Nothing, 6

Kenneth Branagh 1993 adapt., 142n11



Index ● 207

Othello, 13, 40n43, 54, 55, 56, 58n27, 70, 108–9, 111, 131, 137

Bollywood version, 112Ek Bevapha Mitr (1865, adapt.), 30Kasrivaj na Karstan (adapt.), 26Saptapadi (1960s, loosely based),

109Shaheede Vafa (1898, adapt.), 29Sher-Dil (1918, adapt.), 28, 29, 30see also Omkara

PericlesKhudadad (adapt.), 29

and postcolonial appropriations, 130–1

in postcolonial India, 166–7as “proof of British superiority,” 31Richard II, 50, 52Richard III

Looking for Richard (1996, adapt.), 142n11

Saide-havas (adapt.), 29Romeo and Juliet, 131

Bazam-e Fani (adapt.), 182Bazme Fani (1897, adapt.), 30Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988,

adapt.), 79–80, 129Popo Gigi (2009, adapt.), 130,

141–2n1Ranjha and Juliet (adapt.), 112William Shakespeare’s Romeo +

Juliet (1996 adapt.), 142n112 Henry IV, 50, 52The Taming of the Shrew, 26, 29

Hathili Dulhan (1932, adapt.), 107Nathari Firangiz Thekani Avi

(1852, adapt.), 40n45Taming of the Shrew: A Bollywood

Cabaret (2010, adapt.), 141–2n1Ten Things I Hate about You

(1999), 142n11The Tempest, 134

Miranda (2010, adapt.), 141–2n1Timon of Athens, 26Titus Adronicus

Junune Vafa (1910, adapt.), 29

and translation into other cultures, 196

and transnational adaptations, 148as transnational icon, 80transnationalism of, 67, 72Twelfth Night

Bhul-Bhulaiyan (adapt.), 31Tim Supple 2003 adapt., 14,

141–2n1see also Twelfth Night, or What

You WillTwo Gentlemen of Verona, 26universality of, 131

Shakespeare in Love (1999), 130, 142n11Shakespeare Wallah (1965), 7, 12, 70,

107, 127–8, 131–2, 136and Anglo/Indian culture, 46,

48, 57and the British Raj, 45, 47, 48–50,

52–3, 81n26, 127, 131and the dual appropriation of

Shakespeare and Bollywood, 46–7

as nostalgia/heritage film, 132, 133, 139

and postcolonial India, 48–53, 56–7, 81n26, 131–2

and race, 59n27see also Merchant Ivory

Shakespeareana, 48, 58n12, 70Shakuntala, 167Shankarseth, 39n11Shetty, Rohit, 189Shirdodkar, Shilpa, 185Shiv Sena, 73Shudraka, 167Simpson, Don, 187Singh, Anant, 79Singh, Jyotsna G., 169Sinha, Ajay, S., 9Sinha, B., 192Sisson, C. J., 32, 37Sisson, Charles Taylor, 182, 191n24Sitram, Lala, 182Smith, Will, 187



208 ● Index

Son ke Mul ki Khurshed, 26Sona na Mol ni Khurshid, 183Sridevi, 185Srinivasa, Sidharth, 70Stage of Blood, The (1997), 76Stam, Robert, 134Sterling, Sam, 130, 141–2n1Stoppard, Tom, 130Supple, Tim, 141–2n1, 148, 156, 161,

162see also Twelfth Night

Sunana Mulni Khurshed, 26Sundar, Pavitra, 90surrogation, 66Swades, 68

Tagore, Rabindranath, 169Tagore, Sharmila, 140, 141Tandon, Raveena, 187Taylor, Gary, 120Thacker, N. V., 18236 Chowringhee Lane, 132

see also Sen, AparnaTrade Guide, 79transnational cinema, 64, 78–9

and displacement, 72–3transnationalism of Indian culture,

46, 47Trivedi, Poonam, 23, 40n45, 83n35,

107, 169, 190Troughton, David, 148Twelfth Night, or What you Will (2003),

14, 141–2n1, 147–63and Bollywood film and musical

conventions, 148as citational environment, 148, 149genres of music within, 149music for individual characters,

151–8as post-Bollywood, 162

and race, 161as “a series of texts,” 148and translation and adaptation of

English works in India, 153and Western influence, 162and Western music, 152, 157–8, 161

Udvadia, M., 22Umar, Syed, 22Umrao Jaan (1981), 73, 82n49UTV Motion Pictures, 189

Vaidya, N. K., 192Varla, Zubin, 148Varma, Ram Gopal, 71, 72Verma, Rajiva, 36, 38, 129–30, 131,

166, 168–9, 173Vasudevan, Ravi, 16n18, 191n31Videovision Entertainment, 79Vidyasagar, Ishwar Chandra, 169,

173, 190

Waiting for Godot, 111Wayne, Valerie, 46Weld, John S., 166Williams, Gary Jay, 128Willmer, David, 26, 36, 39n7Wonder, Stevie, 90, 118Worthen, William, 4, 37–8

see also citational environmentWright, Laurence, 5–6Wureshi, Aamir, 112

Yajnik, R. K., 25–6, 27, 29, 31, 39n7, 183, 190n23

Yakeen (1969), 183Yamamoto, Hiroshi, 82n32

Zeffirelli, Franco, 142n11Zoo Story, The, 111


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