Naseeruddin Shah, the actor, once claimed that “The roots may look lost but every big story in the Hindi film industry is from Shakespeare.”[i] It might not be as simple as that but what Shah was pointing out was to the fact that there are many references to Shakespeare’s plays in Hindi films. The influence of the Bard of Avon is not just seen in Hindi cinema but in Indian cinema as a whole. Regional language films in India have also seen many adaptations and appropriations of the plays of Shakespeare. There are also themes and devices commonly found in Shakespeare’s plays used so often in Indian films, such as twins separated at birth, cross dressing characters, star-crossed lovers, characters falling in love with messengers, the wise fool, the tamed shrew and the mousetrap device.

Unlike Hindi cinema that appeals to a large section of Indians, films in regional languages mostly cater to their specific regions and to people who understand and speak the languages. However, the presence of OTT platforms work to bring these films with subtitles and allow for a larger viewership these days.  Each of the regional languages in India have their own cultural and linguistic registers that add more nuances and different ways of looking at Shakespeare. Films made in English in India by Indian filmmakers too bring in ways of relocating the Bard.

One very important recent book of scholarship in this area is Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: Local Habitations edited by Poonam Trivedi and Paromita Chakravarti. The volume has an annotated filmography on “Shakespeare Films in Indian Cinema” which is an exhaustive list of film adaptations and appropriations of the Bard in films in Indian languages. As Trivedi and Chakravarti write in the “Introduction” – “ . . . it is in cinema, . . . that Shakespeare in India has been truly ‘homed’, not just translated and adapted but adopted and assimilated as one of our own.”(10)

Shakespeare has been part of the colonial legacy, his plays have been read, translated, performed since the nineteenth century in India. He is so much a part of our lives and thoughts that we can very well claim him to be one of us. Taught in schools, read, recited and enacted in various forms and genres, Shakespeare is now part of popular culture. One needs to recollect memes doing rounds when Covid 19 began – memes that had to do with washing one’s hands, an important precaution in these times and there was Macbeth everywhere - taken out of the context, away from the world of Macbeth’s Scotland and yet so much a part of the times that we are in.

Shakespeare’s plays have been translated and adapted into many Indian languages. They have been performed in English in India, in Indian languages and in indigenous performative forms like the jatra, nautanki and classical dance forms like Kathakali, as well. The plays have been adapted, appropriated and reworked in Indian cinema, films like  Bhul Bhulaiyan (Silent film, director Vithaldas, 1929), Shylock (Tamil, director, S. Sarma, 1940), Hamlet (Hindi, director, Kishore Sahu, 1954), Mane Thumbida Hennu (Kannada, director B. Vittalacharya, 1958),  Branti Bilaash (Bengali, director Manu Sen, 1963), Angoor  (Hindi, director Gulzar 1982),  Double Di Trouble (Punjabi, director, Smeep Kang, 2014), Sairat (Marathi, director, Nagraj Manjule 2016),  Veeram (Malayalam, director Jayaraj, 2016),  Local Kongfu 2 (Assamese, director, Kenny Deori Basumatary, 2017), Paddayi (Tulu, director, Abhaya Simha, 2018)  to name just a few. There are many films which use a scene, a dialogue, a situation, a reference to his plays, maybe a reference to a character and work them wonderfully into the context of the film.

In her presentation at the recently concluded World Shakespeare Congress 2021 Poonam Trivedi noted that Shakespeare is like a banyan tree whose roots and branches spread so far and wide that at times the main root and branches are completely covered up. Adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays work at creating networks. While there might be talk of authenticity, of refashioning, of transforming, of taking complete liberties with the play to present a different world, yet one that resonates, that works in so many different cultural and linguistic registers particularly when speaking of non-Anglophone Shakespeares, of Shakespeare being re worked in Indian cinema.

As Alexa A. Joubin said, in a discussion at the World Shakespeare Conference 2021, that it is important to “work with Shakespeare”. In her paper at the Conference Joubin noted that Shakespeare’s plays feature translational properties which can be amplified in the process of translation. It is this process of translation that enriches our understanding of words and the plays as well.

“Adaptations and appropriations,” Julie Sanders notes “also provide their own intertexts, so that adaptations perform in dialogue with other adaptations as well as their informing source”. (24) Many of the essays in this special issue of Muse India that examine the adaptations, appropriations, reworkings, transformations, transcreations of Shakespeare’s plays in Indian cinema bring this out clearly. They present new ways of looking at the plays. As many critics have pointed out there are issue of non-translatability of the plays in parts, of situations, characters and the like, however, it is interesting to watch non-Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare in film to see how they enhance and enrich the canon, of how far Shakespeare travels to create new levels of meanings and newer ways of presenting his plays. As Julie Sanders notes – “The inherent intertextuality of literature encourages the ongoing, evolving production of meaning, and an ever-expanding network of textual relations.”(3) Shakespeare’s plays are a series of intertexts as he uses various source material for the plots of his plays, for characters, for situations and events. He constantly reworks his source material, transforming and transmuting them to fashion his plays. The rhizomatic nature of Shakespeare’s plays has often been commented upon. Douglas Lanier notes, “To think rhizomatically about the Shakespearean text is to foreground its fundamentally adaptational nature – as a version of prior narratives, as a script necessarily imbricated in performance processes, as a text ever in transit between manuscript, theatrical and print cultures, as a work dependent upon its latter –day producers for its contained life.” (p.29) He further notes – “And by its nature, the Shakespearean rhizome is never a stable object but an aggregated field in a perpetual state of becoming, ever being reconfigured as new adaptations intersect with and grow from it.” (p.30)

In their concept note for a seminar at the World Shakespeare Conference 2021, Amrita Sen and Jim Casey note – “A rhizomatic model, which approaches Shakespeare as a node on the rhizome rather than the central trunk of the literary tree, liberates the adaptations scholar from questions of textual fidelity and focuses the critical impulse on those ever-changing cultural processes that make up ‘Shakespeare’.”[ii] The tree metaphor with its widespread roots and branches reaching out, figures here once again, in the context of adaptations of the plays of Shakespeare. As M.J. Kidnie notes – “…the dramatic work, whether encountered as text or performance, is a dynamic process…” (p. 32).

Adaptations, appropriations and reworkings of Shakespeare’s plays in Indian cinema bring in a plethora of contexts and texts that reveal the way the Bard’s plays could be re-presented in different contexts. The bringing in of the local, of folk, religious and other such elements add layers of meaning  - from the use of the Othello scene with the English dialogues in the Bengali film Saptapadi (that was adapted from a Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay) and performed as part of a college stage performance with Utpal Dutt and Jennifer Kendall (actors who have a long history of performing Shakespeare on stage) speaking the dialogues that are mouthed on screen by Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen playing Krishnendu and Rina Brown, to the use of yakshagana in a Tulu adaptation of Macbeth -  Paddayi, that locates the story in a coastal Karnataka setting, to the use of the folk form of the janapadam in Gunasundari Katha, a Telugu film that uses part of the Lear story, to the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in Bitargaon in Maharashtra that brings in caste as a major element of the narrative in Sairat, to locating the Hamlet story in the contemporary Bengali film industry in Hemanta, to the double set of twins in Double Di Trouble in Punjab, the various reworkings of the story of the “star crossed lovers”, to the adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew in Kannada in Nanjudi Kalyana with two shrews in it, among many others. The essays in this special issue of Muse India examine many of these films and many more revealing the myriad ways in which the plays have been transformed, appropriated and adapted in Indian cinema. Apart from the essays the issue also includes a select bibliography on critical works on the films of Vishal Bharadwaj that would be of help to those who want to pursue the field further.

WORKS CITED

Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. Routledge, London and New York, 2009.

Lanier, Douglas. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptations, Ethics, Value” in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014, pp. 21- 40.

Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledhe, Oxford and New York, 2006

Sharma, Mandvi. “Bard in Bollywood” https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/delhi-times/bard-in-bollywood/articleshow/1869205.cms

Trivedi, Poonam and Paromita Chakravarti eds.  Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: Local Habitations. Routledge, New York and Oxford, 2019

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[i] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/delhi-times/bard-in-bollywood/articleshow/1869205.cms

[ii] http://139.196.28.181:9090/wsc2021/Seminars.html