During the worldwide celebrations of Shakespeare’s 400^th anniversary on April 23, 2016, I was glad to see the homages to the bard from a Tamil cinema historian, Theodore S. Baskaran, and an English professor, Ganesh Krishnamoorthy. While both of them acknowledge the influence of Shakespeare on Tamil cinema, Baskaran points to the penchant for melodrama and monologues in Shakespeare and the Tamil cinema of the last century till the 1970s. He alludes to the waning of Shakespeare in Tamil cinema when it moved away from the earlier form of classical feudal romances mainly shot within the studios to relatively realistic films shot increasingly in outdoor locales, which also meant moving away from the stagey melodramatic flourish within the studio premises. Whereas Krishnamoorthy also focuses on most of the well-known and popular Tamil films we identify as invested in Shakespeare, as explicated by Baskaran, there are also noticeable differences. For instance, as a historian, Baskaran is interested in the trajectory of Shakespeare in Tamil cinema, starting from the legendary playwright and director/actor Pammal Sambandha Mudaliyar (henceforth referred to as Pammal) and his iconic troupe Suguna Vilasa Sabha. In contrast, Krishnamoorthy sheds light on the way Shakespeare is cited in Rajapart Rangadurai by enacting the iconic scene involving the rumination of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” to mark the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial times thereafter, as an academician.

While these articles provide a valuable point of entry for my meditations on the presence of Shakespeare in Tamil cinema, particularly regarding the privileging of certain characters and the supernatural elements, which resonate with local culture. I would focus on detailing the differences in Pammal’s two markedly different adaptions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I would then briefly engage with the trajectory of Shakespeare in Tamil cinema after Pammal during the times of the actor Sivaji Ganesan to underscore the sociocultural context of the Bard’s appeal. Additionally, I would briefly focus on Shakespeare as propelling special effects in Tamil cinema. I realized the bard's witches and ghosts, who are key figures and play a central role in his significant plays, are not far removed from the ghosts from the machine called camera, what we call as special effects––visual effects achieved through the camera, mainly inside the studio on the celluloid, rather than during postproduction which is the norm now in this era of the digital cinema. In this regard, let us first look at the trajectory of Shakespeare in Tamil cinema in detail before my take on Shakespeare’s unusual but conspicuous ties with special effects in Tamil cinema, particularly during the 1950s in the context of films like Marmayogi (1951) and Manohara (1954).

As Baskaran points out in his article, Pammal, who was critical of the folklore-inspired theater of the masses, aspired for and created a niche audience for an elitist theatre which drew heavily from his fictive historical dramas, set in imaginary spaces/kingdoms, like Pushpavalli and Leelavathi-Sulochana, and many of his translations of Shakespeare’s works, including Hamlet and Macbeth, during his initial years as a playwright/director. He adapted As You Like it (Virumpiya Vitame, 1902), The Merchant of Venice (Vanipu?a Va?iga?, 1904), Hamlet (Amaladithyan, 1906), Macbeth (Magapathi, 1910), a segment from Henry IV (Koneri Arasakumaran, 1913), and Cymbeline (Simhalanathan, 1914). As far as Tamil theatre is concerned, the significant factor is that he acted in two of the versions of Hamlet, from his own adaptations of Shakespeare: Amaladithyan and Manoharan.  He called his adaptation “Tamil Amaippu” which could be translated as “setting up [Shakespeare’s plot] in Tamil” or simply “rendering [Shakespeare] in Tamil.” Pammal was known for closely following the Bard when it came to naming his characters and the places where the narrative was set. Hamlet is rendered as Amaladithyan, Claudius as Kaaladevan, Polonius as Balanesan, Horatio as Hariharan, Rosencratz as Rajakanthan and Guilderstern as Giritharan. Besides, Gertrude as Gowrimani and Ophelia as Abalai also sound similar and rhyme with the original, just like Macbeth as Magapathy. As far as Tamil cinema is concerned Pammal’s name is deeply entrenched with the film Manohara. The first version, Manoharan, made in 1936, had him directing and acting in the film with K.T. Rukmini. However, the print of that film is lost. The later, more popular version, Manohara (1954), had Sivaji Ganesan essaying the titular role and mouthing through his “Simmakkural/lion’s voice” the dialogues written by the Dravidian ideologue M. Karunanidhi who adapted the screenplay from Pammal’s play. While Baskaran points to the lack of acknowledgment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in this 1950s Manohara, when you watch the film the reason becomes clear. This version of Hamlet is far removed from the earlier translation. The characters in Pammal’s Amaladithyan, where they seemed to align with the Bard’s imaginings not only by echoing the names in the original by remaining close to the phonetics but also through similar imaginary lands to posit the action, are absent in Manohara(n). Consider for instance, Pammal’s seeking of affinity with Shakespeare, beginning with the name: Hamlet as Amaladithyan or Kurjara Nattu Arasilangkumaran (Amaladithyan or the Young Prince of Kurjara State) is portrayed as belonging to Kurjaram (Denmark). England becomes Sinhala Desam and France Kekeyam in the Tamil version. Similarly, Norway in Shakespeare becomes Pammal’s Panchalam; Elsinore is Seelanapuram, Paris morphs into Padaliputhram. Poland transforms into Palai Desam, and Normandy into Narimani. Just imagine the efforts that would have gone into Pammal’s meticulous work of transplanting Shakespeare to the Tamil soil, through his many translations of the Bard’s significant plays, to make the unfamiliar sound familiar in his attempts at appropriating the Bard’s spirit to the ethos of his local audience, while remaining true as far as possible to his icon regarding his narrative and plot progression. Manohara, though alluded by Pammal himself as a reworking of Hamlet from his critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful Amaladithyan to a more general audience not invested in the nuances of Shakespeare, seems a far cry from the original. Manohara, the titular character and his father King Purushottaman, his mother, the Queen Padmavathi, his father’s mistress/wife, Vasantha Senai, have nothing in common either in form/phonetics or content of Pammal’s earlier reimaging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as Amaladithyan for a discerning but elitist Tamil audience.

Nevertheless, K. Muruganandan in his dissertation, “Shakespeare Reception in the Shaping of Modern Tamil Drama: A Study of Sambanda Mudaliyar’s Select Plays,” points to the key for reading Manohara as a Shakespeare-inspired narrative on the part of scholars and much Tamil audiences. He analyzes V. Y. Kantak’s interrogation of Shakespeare as going beyond the general hagiography surrounding his persona in India, in the context of the vestiges of colonialism regarding English education and the Bard’s centrality, in exploring the sociocultural contexts for his appeal to Indian audiences. Kantak argues for Shakespeare’s universality as his narratives can be retooled in different contexts, including that of India, as his plays resonate culturally across borders and allow for improvisations. More importantly, for our purposes here, Kantak accounts for the Bard’s popularity in India to the “fabular elements” in his plays - the supernatural, including the ghosts, witches, fairies, and myths, which is what appeals to cultures across the spectrum in Shakespeare. According to Muruganandan, the ghosts in Hamlet are invoked along with those in Julius Caesar, as acknowledged by Pammal regarding his fascination of and the inspiration by the Bard’s penchant for the supernatural.

Vasantha Senai, the seductress and vamp who tricks Manoharan’s father, King Purushottaman to abandon his pious wife Padmavathi, has a dark past of having murdered her former husband Kesari Varman. It is his ghost which haunts Vasantha Senai throughout the film and us as the audience. Kesari Varman’s ghost bookends Pammal’s play Manoharan as well as its adaptation on screen as Manohara (dir. L.V. Prasad) later. Nonetheless, the ghost figure of Kesari Varman as lamenting his premature and vicious death at the hands of the scheming and ruthless Vasantha Senai is a trope common in many folkloric tales, except for the gender reversal. As in the case of the iconic and ubiquitous Neeli––the female ghost/goddess figure, it is the woman who is tricked by a heartless and misogynistic and casteist man, generally from the upper caste, leading to her violent end at his hands, as is the reality in most cases in a conservative heteropatriarchal society. In arguing for the parallels, Muruganandan convincingly argues for how the lamentation of Kesari Varman as the ghost recalls the similar predicament of Hamlet’s father. Furthermore, as Vasantha Senai is cursed by Kesari Varman’s ghost to die and rot in hell, it invokes Brutus as he is haunted by the Caesar figure after the murder. However, I would like to push the sociocultural context in the case of Manohara, the film, further. Manohara, written by Karunanidhi, was released in the same year as Andha Naal (That Day, dir. S. Balachandar,1954), written by Javar Seetharaman, whose narrative revolves around the life and times of its anti-hero protagonist, an anti-national Japanese spy during the Second World War in Chennai, who is instrumental in enabling the Japanese Bombing of Chennai on October 11, 1943. It also succeeds the film Thirumbippaar (Look Back, 1953), written by Karunanidhi, in which the anti-hero protagonist, who is a plagiarizer and a philandering womanizer, is portrayed as a subnationalist as well, retorting to and echoing Prime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru’s cryptic remark, “Non Sense”––a response to the claim regarding autonomy to Dravida Nadu/Dravdian Nation, on more than one occasion during key moments in the narrative. It is in this context that the ghost figure of Kesari Varman as seeking vendetta should be seen.

Vasantha Senai, which means endearing/charming as the spring in Sanskrit, symbolizes the apprehensions regarding the Hindi/North Indian hegemony that haunted the South, particularly the Tamils, immediately after Independence. Whereas the protagonists were portrayed as dark and rebellious in the iconic Parasakthi, Andha Naal, and Thirumbippaar, Manohara goes a step further in giving form to the fear regarding the erasure/subsumption of language/culture in the form of a seductive and alluring figure who nonetheless is coldblooded and murderous. Hamlet’s father’s parallels with Kesari Varman, as a man lamenting his untimely death and his state of helplessness is complex since the plotting of his brother to usurp his kingdom as well as his wife is avoided, as acknowledged by Pammal, keeping in mind the Tamil ethos. The blame for the usurpation of the kingdom along with the king is, thus, shifted unilaterally to this seductress, Vasantha Senai, who tricks him into marriage, and denies Manoharan his inheritance of the kingdom and renders his mother, the endlessly patient and the stereotypical Padmavathi, representing the ideal suffering wife of the patriarch, powerless and helpless by having the wayward king under her spell. While another spirit––that of Julius Caesar––from the arsenal of Shakespeare, comes in handy and enables the happy ending of the film, the bodiless and invisible Kesari Varman does have his final say when he puts an end to the devious and deadly Vasantha Senai by forcibly pulling and taking her away after she accidentally kills her own son Vasanthan and is pleading with him to leave her. She is portrayed as unconditionally evil in the film and it is significant that the film’s denouement spends time on detailing her gruesome death. Shakespeare’s influence, thus could be argued to be at the level of the spirits, through Pammal’s reimagining of Hamlet as Manoharan, rather than the fidelity to characterization or plot of the Bard’s original or its faithful translation by Pammal earlier.

More importantly, Jupiter Pictures which produced Manohara was also the production house that nurtured famous (studio era) cinematographers like P. Ramasamy, who did the camerawork of Manohara, often referred to as Jupiter Ramasamy, W.R. Subba Rao and Masthan––the trio who from their long apprenticeship at Central Studios, in Coimbatore, and Neptune Studios, in Madras, both leased by Jupiter Pictures, later became famous for their acumen in special effects when they became successful cinematographers. Jupiter Ramasamy’s special-effect sequences in Manohara, revolving around the appearance/disappearance of the invisible Kesari Varman, where his costumes like the headgear swiftly move without the presence of his body, are rendered with finesse with the help of the Mitchell Camera, inside the studios, and the accompanying motor that helps moving the film forward and back and re-exposing the unexposed areas while masking or exposing a part and rewinding to expose the other unexposed area. Earlier, Subba Rao and Masthan, who together photographed Marmayogi (dir. K. Ramnoth, 1951) enabled the realization on screen of the invisible king, the titular yogi with his secret powers of hiding himself, in a screenplay drawing eclectically from Hamlet and Robin Hood, among others. Thus, the finesse of Subba Rao and Masthan’s special effects in Marmayogi could be argued to prefigure the rendering of Kesari Varman as an invisible man in Manohara, three years later.

Prior to Manohara, Shakespeare was invoked in a play within a film––a trope common to Tamil cinema––in Anbu/Love (dir. M. Natesan, 1953), with Sivaji Ganesan and Padmini in the lead. Such a play within a film, where a key scene from a famous Shakespeare play is staged could be seen to continue in many of Sivaji Ganesan’s landmark films. For instance, like Anbu, Ratha Thilagam (dir. Dada Mirasi, 1963) also recycles a scene from the Bard’s Othello. However, in Anbu, there is a gender reversal as it is the woman who suspects the man of infidelity in the appropriation of the scene from Shakespeare, unlike Othello’s suspicion of Desdemona. In Anbu, Malathi suspects her lover Selvam of having an affair with his step mother––portrayed by T.R. Rajakumari who played Vasantha Senai in Manohara. In the aftermath of Independence, thus Shakepeare provided the frame for positing the misgivings and apprehensions surrounding the oppression of the North, often depicted as the seductive or young and attractive step mother trying to lure and destroy the son/heir to the throne in the South. Ratha Thilagam, a decade later, would retool the key scene from Othello, wherein he kills Desdemona, with the dialogue rendered from the original but in the voices of Utpal Dutt and Jennifer Kendal from the Shakespearana, the touring repertory theatre company, formed by Geoffrey Kendal along with his wife Laura. Ratha Thilagam adds another layer to the misgivings by positing Major Kumar/Othello (Sivaji Ganesan) as suspecting Kamala/Desdemona (Savitri) as a Chinese spy. The backdrop of the film––the Sino-Indian Border dispute of 1962––informs us of Shakespeare’s centrality to Tamil cinema in addressing larger and complex sociocultural issues through raw and heightened emotions of the main characters, predicated on love and betrayal. A decade after Ratha Thilagam, in Rajapart Rangadurai (1973), the thespian Sivaji Ganesan would continue his tryst with Shakespeare by rendering the iconic “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet in the play within the film. Here again, the reenactment of the iconic scene from the Bard comes at a crucial moment when the touring theatre company of Rangadurai, staging classical plays, often inspired from myths and folklore, is at its ebb. Thereafter, however, Rangadurai experiences a change of fortune when he sees the audiences flock to the theatre to watch his plays on the lives of nationalists and patriotic figures like Veerpandiya Kattabomman, Bhagath Singh, and Kappalottiya Thamizhan. Ganesh Krishnamoorthy astutely reads the soliloquy––the play within the film––as punctuating the transition from “anglophilia to a postcolonial stance.” One could also read the “To be or not to be” soliloquy as a monologue of a Tamil actor when he is pondering his involvement with and transition to active politics, particularly at a juncture when he is not younger and wants to capitalize on his charisma as an aging star and the following he has among fans. In this particular instance, it is the critical time when the Congress party he is aligned with is sidelining his favorite leader K. Kamaraj and its path forward is prefiguring the Emergency. Shakespeare, thus, has been effectively invoked to mark the layered interiority of actors with brevity and finesse. It is important to note here that Sivaji Ganesan, who was the protagonist in many of the iconic Dravidian ideology-driven films of the early 1950s, including Paraskathi, later changed his affiliations to the Congress party. His Shakespearean soliloquy of being at the crossroads comes at a critical time when the Nehruvian dream regarding socialism has waned, and the democratic ideals predicated on inclusivity of the party he crossed over to is at its ebb, as emblematized by the rejection of his folkloric and mythology-inspired plays, in 1973. Additionally, the thespian’s citation of Shakespeare includes a passage from Julius Caesar in Sorgam/Heaven (dir. T.R. Ramanna, 1970), wherein the play in the film is a mimesis of the betrayal of the friend in the narrative. Unlike the brief nod to the Bard as a short play within a film, Sivaji Ganesan’s colorful repertoire also includes the adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew as a feature film in Arivaali/Genius (dir. A.T. Krishnaswamy, 1963).

I would like to conclude this essay with my pondering on Shakespeare and special effects in Tamil cinema. Nishi Pulugurtha, as a Shakespearean, has studied the film Gunasundari Katha (1949) in detail to convincingly argue for the possibilities to creatively rework Shakespeare, King Lear in this case, within the framework of a mythological which draws heavily from folklore in a Telugu film of the studio era. Vijaya-Vauhuni Studios later remade their Gunasundari Katha as Gunasundari (1955) in Tamil. Unlike the Telugu version, Gunasundari failed at the box-office. I have argued elsewhere that one of the reasons for its failure could be the expectations of higher quality of special effects from Vijaya-Vauhuni, on the part of the Tamil audience, in a mythological juxtaposed with (cinematic) folklore, particularly after their seminal Pathala Bhairavi (1951).  Nonetheless, Gunasundari has achieved a cult status today. Thanks to the Bard and his ruminations on and the resonance of the predicament of an old father with three daughters.

Works cited:

Baskaran, Theodore S. “Of Monologues and Melodrama.” Thehindu.com. 23 April 2016, Accessed 30 July 2021. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/theodore-baskaran-on-shakespeareinspired-tamil-films/article8510087.ece

Eswaran, Swarnavel. “Adaptation as Cultural Appropriation: Transnational Frames and Local Flavor.” Ceasurae.org [Caesurae: Poetics of Cultural Translation (3:2 & 4: 1)]. Accessed 30 July 2021. https://www.caesurae.org/copy-of-film-studies-2019

Kantak, Y.Y. Re-Discovering Shakespeare: An Indian Scrutiny. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2006.

Krishnamoorthy, Ganesh. “All the World’s a Stage, Tamil Nadu Too.” Timesofindia.indiatimes.com. 9 May 2016. Accessed 30 July 2021. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/tracking-indian-communities/all-the-worlds-a-stage-tamil-nadu-too/?source=app&frmapp=yes

Muruganandan, K. “Shakespeare Reception in the Shaping of Modern Tamil

Drama: A Study of Sambandha Mudaliyar’s Select Plays.” Dissertation/Doctoral Thesis, Advisor T. Marx, Dept. of English, Pondicherry University, 2015.

Pulugurtha, Nishi. “Reworking Shakespeare in Telugu Cinema: King Lear to Gunasundari Katha.” Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: Local Habitations. Eds. Poonam Trivedi and Paromita Chakravarti. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Sambandha Mudaliyar, Pammal. Amaladithyan Allathu Kurjarathu Arasilagkumaran/Amaladithyan or the Young Prince of Kurjara. Kindle Edition. Amazon.com.

–––. Natakamedai Ninaivugal: Aaaru Baagangal/Memories of the Stage: Six Parts. Kindle Edition. Amazon.com.

Singh, Jyotsna G. Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2019