Hamara Shakespeare lives on in India’s heartland

Shakespeare has made inroads into India’s vast tribal belt. His works are being translated into tribal dialects. In Jharkhand and Orissa, a Santhali translation of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is doing well. One-fifth of the 1,000 copies published in 2008 sold in just two months. Likewise, ‘Maya ke Rang’, a Chhattisgarhi translation of the play. Tribals in the state’s Korba district are enthusiastic, believing this, the first Chhattisgarhi translation of a Shakespeare play, is their gateway to English literature. Or so says Mahavir Prasad Chandra, who translated the play even as he did his day job as an operator in the R&D department of Bharat Aluminium Company Ltd.
Poonam Trivedi, who has co-edited ‘India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance’ with Dennis Bartholomeusz, agrees that the Bard is now “very much a part of Indian heritage. We have made him our own.”
Trivedi’s book highlights the Bard’s unique connection with India today. ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, says Trivedi, was the first Shakespearean play to be translated into Gujarati. It was performed in Surat as early as 1852.
Shakespeare scholars agree that reinterpreted and localized versions of his plays have made the Bard acceptable right across India. Bollywood has famously done it time and again, notably Gulzar’s ‘Angoor’, which was based on ‘A Comedy of Errors’ and more recently Vishal Bharadwaj’s ‘Omkara’, which was based on ‘Othello’.
Regional theatre has also helped to Indianize the Bard of Avon. A notable example is thespian Habib Tanvir’s Hindi adaptation of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. It was titled ‘Kamdeo ka Apna, Vasant Ritu ka Sapna’ (1993) and was an improvisation that incorporated Indian theatrical forms such as nautanki. The cast was Chhattisgarhi. Some of these Indian avatars of Shakespeare do exceedingly well. In Kolhapur in the early 90s, ‘Raja Lear’, a Marathi adaptation by poet Vrinda Nabar, played to packed houses.
Marathi theatre director Vijay Kenkre, who has adapted many of the Bard’s plays, says they are often successful because the common man does not find it hard to identify with the stories. The universality of the stories keeps them relevant and contemporary, nearly five centuries after his death. Mumbai-based playwright Ramu Ramanathan, who recently staged ‘Shakespeare and She’, compares the work of the English Bard to the ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’. “Shakespeare is a bit like that. His stories are told and retold and nobody ever gets tired of them. The characters are eternal and that’s why it’s easy to locate them in any situation,” he says.
That must explain the extraordinary success in Mizoram of a production of ‘Hamlet’ by an amateur theatre group. It was a roaring hit. Audio cassettes of the play sold in large numbers. It was a phenomenon that Pankaj Butalia would go on to capture in his 1989 documentary ‘When Hamlet Came to Mizoram’.
Alyque Padamsee, who has directed eight Shakespearean plays, says the Bard’s imagery “grabs the imagination of a director whether in Colaba or Chhattisgarh.”
Small wonder that phrases like a ‘pound of flesh’, ‘what’s in a name’, ‘to be or not to be’ and play titles such as ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘As You Like It’, have become part of our daily vocabulary. It is not just Indian English but other vernacular languages too that borrow heavily from Shakespeare, sometimes without even knowing the source. K V Narayana, senior fellow at Mysore’s Central Institute of Indian Languages, says, “In Kannada poetry, sonnets were introduced after reading Shakespeare. Similarly, the idea of a black Moor marrying a white woman came from him.”
Several Shakespearean sub-plots have passed into Bollywood without reference to the Bard. The heroine in male disguise, a la ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and young lovers caught between warring families (‘Romeo and Juliet’) regularly feature in Indian cinema. Trivedi, who teaches English at Indraprastha College in Delhi, says, “These motifs have become so much a part of our lives, that not everybody can catch them or even realize where they are coming from.”
The extent of India’s acceptance of ‘Hamara Shakespeare’ can be gauged from the fact that a major thoroughfare in the heart of Kolkata is called Shakespeare Sarani. Padamsee concludes, “He is 500 years old but still alive and kicking.”
THE BARD IN BHARAT
Jungle Me Mangal | A Marathi theatrical adaptation of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in tamasha form
Kaliyattam | A Malayalam film based on ‘Othello’. It uses the theatrical tradition of Kaliyattam
Maranayaka Drishtanta | A Kannada adaptation of ‘Macbeth’, performed by the inmates of Mysore jail
Gunasundari Katha | Noted Telugu film director K V Reddi adapted ‘King Lear’ using the folklore format
Nanjudi Kalyana | Kannada film director M S Rajashekar set ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ in modern Karnataka
Bhranti Bilas | Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar starred in this 1963 hit film based on ‘The Comedy of Errors’