Ek Duuje Ke Liye: The first modern Romeo and Juliet translocation in Bollywood

The first reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on screen in Bollywood was undertaken in the form of Ek Duuje Ke Liye, which was the Hindi remake of the Telegu Maro Charitra (1978). Both films had south Indian superstar Kamal Hasan playing the lead role. The film was a box office success, earning a total of Rs. 100 million in receipts, and winning a National Film Award and three Filmfare awards. This was the first Hindi film post-independence in a modern setting to quote and reference Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Ek Duuje Ke Liye also avoids the usual dichotomies that are available within the Indian context such as religion or financial and/or social status and locates Romeo and Juliet within an issue of contention that is rarely addressed on film - the differences between North Indian and South Indian language and culture.

The opening sequence of the film depicts waves crashing against rocks and the empty spaces in a dilapidated temple on top of a mountain. The camera focuses on the graffitied walls, reminiscent of West Side Story, where Sapna and Vasu’s names have been inscribed repeatedly, while we hear the lovers talk off-screen about how their unfulfilled love will become legend for future generations. The sense of tragic inevitability, that is so crucial to an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet but unfamiliar to Indian audiences, is subtly woven into the fabric of a seemingly familiar love story. The setting of the lovers’ meeting place in Dona Paola beach, for instance, hints at the tragic fate of the lovers. The place is named after Dona Paula de Menezes, the daughter of a viceroy, who committed suicide when her father refused to marry her to a local fisherman, Gaspar Dias, whom she loved, and the location is a well-known suicide point for lovers. There is also a reference to a well-known Bollywood celluloid tragic lover - Jai from Sholay (1975) - when Vasu is depicted playing the mouth organ and riding a bike in the scenes where he is wooing Sapna. The lurking presence of a sexual aggressor who has his sights set on Sapna, evoking Samson’s threat of violence towards Montague women (‘women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall’ 1.1.15) and Maria’s assault by the Jets in West Side Story, adds a further sense of disquiet to what would otherwise be a traditional Bollywood love story. This threat of violence against women is incorporated later in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak as well when Rashmi is stalked by a group of would-be aggressors. Towards the end of Ek Duuje Ke Liye, when it seems that the lovers may achieve their happy ending despite all odds, Chakravarty/Paris reminds Sapna that God is always unfair to true lovers and the audience is once again cautioned against believing in a traditional happy ending for the lovers who have suffered so much in trying to be with each other. Thus, the sense of tragic inevitability of the play is infused in the film in a more understated manner than merely positioning the lovers within the context of insurmountable cultural differences.

The film is particularly remembered for the lovers’ suicide at the end, There were several reports of lovers committing suicides after the release of Ek Duuje Ke Liye; the director was called in several times by authorities to appeal to young couples not to take their own lives. The growing incidence of suicides forced the director to modify the ending but the change was instantly rejected by the viewers, who stuck to their demand for the original climax. The ending of Ek Duuje Ke Liye has particularly influenced more recent adaptations and appropriations of Romeo and Juliet in Bollywood; Ishaqzaadein (2012) and Ram Leela (2013) for instance, both end with the lovers dying at their own hands.

The play itself is quoted several times in the film. Romeo and Juliet is directly referenced in the first instance when Sapna asks for Professor Munshiram’s notes on Romeo and Juliet at a book store she frequently visits. Then, just after the sequence where we see Sapna and Vasu falling in love intercut with scenes of their parents fighting, Sapna reads out: ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other word would smell as sweet’(2.2.43). This is a theme central to this film which deals with barriers of language and culture and about personal identity. The repetitive scenes where we see the names of the lovers inscribed on walls, in the sand, and in letters, highlights the preoccupation that this film has with the concept of names as being part of a person’s identity. The sequence that any audience familiar with the play would find most faithfully reflected in the film, however, is the one after Vasu is banished. His anguished cry: ‘Why should I banished from this place?...Is sheher mein tumhe janne wale, nahin janne wale, janwar, panchhi, peddh, paude, yahan tak ki choti si choti chinti bhi dekh sakegi. Sirf main nahin dekh sakta?’ (Everyone in this town, people who know you, people who don’t know you, animals, birds, trees, plants, even the tiniest of ants will be able to see you. Why should I be the only one not able to see you?) is a literal translation of Romeo’s protest in the third act of the play: ‘Heaven is here/Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog/ And little mouse, every unworthy thing,/ Live here in heaven and may look on her,/ But Romeo may not.’ (3.3.29). This is also, conversely, the point in the film where the screenplay deviates from the play text and other locally relevant issues begin to inform the film, such as cultural prejudices that prevail in India. Nevertheless, there are several moments in the film even after this point, when other themes of the play are briefly cited, for instance, the eternal fight between age and youth: ‘Budhape aur jawani ki sangram’ or the equation of love with madness: ‘Love is…a madness most discreet’. (1.1.190)

Ek Duuje Ke Liye begins as a tragi-comedy but devolves into a melodramatic social drama because of the several digressions from the play text and the inclusion of prevalent Bollywood formulaic episodes. Sapna and Vasu’s love is frequently shown to be self-destructive, for instance, when Sapna tells Vasu to jump into the sea to prove his love despite not knowing how to swim or when Sapna cuts herself by gripping a conch shell too hard in an effort not to go to Vasu and break the terms of the contract they have signed to stay away from each other for a year to prove that their love is not merely lust. These scenes seem to lend credence to the doubts that the parents have about their being mature enough to understand what love and marriage entails: ‘Is umar mein pyaar kya hain? Vaasna’ [At this age, what is love? Lust]. Sapna at one point reverts to typical Bollywood heroines by rejecting Vasu for stealing a kiss. Consequently though, like Juliet, and unlike female protagonists in Bollywood at the time, she initiates physical contact with Vasu several times, which renders the formulaic ‘modesty of a woman’ scene pointless. There is also a sequence in the film when Vasu’s love falters and he prepares to marry Sandhya when he is misinformed that Sapna’s wedding to Chakravarti has been finalised. This digression essentially dilutes the intensity of their love and they lose their way as protagonists of a legendary story of love. The plot twist in the end that results in their death also seems somewhat contrived and complicates a reading of this film as being an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. When Vasu and Sapna fulfil the terms of their contract and finally prepare to meet each other, Sapna is raped by her stalker and Vasu is attacked by assassins on the behest of Sandhya’s brother at the abandoned temple which used to be their meeting place; they ultimately find their happy ending by jumping into the sea together. Their suicide somewhat obfuscates the sense of tragedy that is associated with the deaths of Romeo and Juliet as they essentially become agents of their own destiny. Moreover, neither do their deaths bring about a reconciliation between the families, nor any change in society at large.  At the end we are not left with a sense of the futility of hate so much as the impetuosity of love.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that in Ek Duuje Ke Liye we find the first attempt at adapting and translocating Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in mainstream film in Bollywood and it's influence on adaptations after the 80s is unmistakeable. Here's a link to the film on Youtube: https://youtu.be/xFAhIrZY5Sc 

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Nimmi: Lady Macbeth’s Bollywood cousin or Asaji’s alter ego?

'Kya sab kuch galat tha Miyan? Sab kuch? Hamara ishq to paak tha na Miyan? Paak tha na hamara ishq?'

[Was it all a mistake Miyan? Everything? Our love was pure though, wasn't it Miyan? Was it pure, our love?]

-          Maqbool (2004)

Macbeth, as a story of ambition,  treachery and violence seemed tailor-made for the Mumbai Noir genre in Bollywood already made popular with movies like Agneepath (1990), Satya (1998), Vaastav (1999) and Company (2002) which were also big box office successes[1]. As a cultural transposition, Maqbool is largely faithful to Shakespeare’s plotline and characters. Mumbai functions as a kingdom in miniature, with Bollywood itself as one its holdings. The central players- Jehangir/Duncan and his henchman Maqbool/Macbeth - are the local manifestations of royalty. Jehangir is described as the ‘Messiah of the minorities’, a title which establishes the Mumbai mobster as a type of quasi-divine leader. Instead of Donaldbain and Malcolm, however, Jehangir here has a daughter, Sameera who is in love with Guddu/Fleance. Guddu is no hard hearted killer like Maqbool, as is made apparent by his saving Boti/Macduff’s life early in the movie. Guddu/Fleance is developed in detail as a character- much like the 1955 Ken Hughes directed Joe Macbeth’s Lennie/Fleance- because we are given an indication at the beginning of the movie that he will be the antidote to Maqbool. Boti/Macduff, on the other hand, is not as strong a character in the movie but, faithful to Shakespeare’s script, later in the film he flees to Guddu leaving his wife and child behind and in the final sequence of the film he is the one who kills Maqbool.

The most critical change that has been made to the play script for the purposes of relocating it to the Mumbai underworld is the portrayal of Nimmi/Lady Macbeth as Jehangir’s mistress and the object of Maqbool’s desires and ambitions. 'Macbeth killed for the crown,' says Abbas Tyrewala, co-writer of Maqbool. 'A position in the underworld is not as big as the crown. So we make Lady Macbeth the crown.'[2] Nimmi, therefore, is a reworking of Lady Macbeth’s character, role and motivation in Macbeth. As Amrita Sen points out, Nimmi is a powerful blend of the Shakespearean and Bollywood influences on Maqbool.[3]Unlike Lady Macbeth, ambition alone does not drive Nimmi. Jehangir's mistress is similar to the fallen women who emerge as love interests of rising gang lords in films such as Dayavan (1988) or Vaastav (1999). Nimmi, unlike the female leads of these popular gangster films, is not a common prostitute, but she certainly shares their desperation and marginalization. For Nimmi, murdering Jehangir amounts to more than mere ambition. Getting Jehangir out of the way translates into survival, a shot at a life with the man she loves - Maqbool. Unlike the usual gangster moll forced into prostitution in movies like Chandni Bar (2001) or Vaastav, as is the Bollywood convention for primary female protagonists, Nimmi, however, seems to have chosen to become Jehangir’s mistress out of free will as a means of becoming a heroine in Bollywood; this is hinted at in the scene when she wants to visit the dargah (mosque) towards the beginning of the movie, and later when she forces Maqbool to choose between her and Jehangir.

The greatest influence on the portrayal of Nimmi, though, is Asaji from Throne of Blood (1957) directed by Akira Kurosawa and set in feudal Japan. The woman who coldly and calculatingly manoeuvres her husband by planting insecurities in his head and forcing him to ‘take the nearest way’ in order to fulfil his destiny finds a recognisable echo in Nimmi. Asaji seems absolutely impervious to the consequences of doing away with people who are in her husband’s way. She makes him believe that Miki will tell Lord Tsuzuki about the witch’s predictions and use it to his own advantage by making him think that Washizu is a traitor and when Washizu decides to name Miki’s son his heir in order to keep Miki loyal, she taunts him with the idea that he has sinned for the benefit of Miki’s future generations. Lady Macbeth states what she has to in order to give courage to her husband, but she never plants insecurities in his head, nor does she taunt him except when he displays fear. She firmly believes that her husband must take matters into his own hands in order to achieve his rightful destiny, though why she thinks he needs to take ‘the nearest way’ is never quite explained.

Nimmi similarly uses Guddu/Fleance to make Maqbool insecure and she uses every chance she gets to manipulate situations so that Maqbool must face his feelings for her. Most of her manipulations, such as when she steps on a sharp object so that Maqbool is forced to hold her hand in order to support her, or when she holds a gun to him and tells him to call her ‘Meri Jaan’ [my love] seem reminiscent of Lady Kaede’s manipulations from Ran (1985) and some scenes such as when she holds the jug of water out of Maqbool’s reach when he comes to fetch it for Jehangir who is choking on his food, or her rubbing her relationship with Jehangir in Maqbool’s face at the end of the dargah sequence seem intentionally cruel. She ruthlessly uses Maqbool to get what she wants – a life with the man she loves.

The child mentioned by Lady Macbeth, and carried and subsequently lost by Asaji also appears in Maqbool. Nimmi’s descent into madness is triggered by her pregnancy, however; Asaji’s madness is triggered by miscarrying. This is in keeping once again with the Bollywood tradition of sons avenging the deaths of their father, the central theme in Agneepath for example. The likeness between Asaji and Nimmi is made most obvious, however, when they deliver the exact same question to their husband/lover on the eve of the murder: “So, have you decided?”

Lady Macbeth is not a black villain like Goneril or Regan. As Hazlitt puts it, 'Her fault seems to have been an excess of that strong principle of self-interest and family aggrandisement not amenable to the common feelings of compassion and justice, which is so marked a feature in barbarous nations and times'.[4] She also consciously tries to reject her feminine sensibility and adopt a male mentality because she knows that her society equates feminine qualities with weakness. Yet she cannot commit the murder herself because Duncan reminds her of her father, and she needs spirits to fortify herself when she sends her husband in to kill the king. At the end, it is this dichotomy in role and nature, along with her husband’s growing indifference and lack of need of her, which leads to her mental disintegration.

Asaji, on the other hand, is almost portrayed as a counterpart of the witch in Throne of Blood. The whispery quality of her voice, her eerie stillness, the way she continues to plant seeds of doubt in Washizu’s head, all seem an extension of the mind games that the witch played on Washizu and Miki at the beginning of the movie. The scene where she goes to fetch sake for the guards makes this comparison most apparent. She literally ‘disappears’ into the darkness, and then magically seems to reappear with a jug of wine.

Asaji suggests murder in a tone of practicality. Theirs is a society where one must kill or be killed. There is no suggestion that she feels any compassion for the victims nor that she has to suppress her feminity in any way in order to suggest murder. For her it is a simple matter of survival. However, the witch had prophesized that Washizu would be king, but that Miki’s son would succeed. While she took the first part of the prophesy as truth because it suited her ambitions, she ignored the second part. Her disintegration happens when she realises that she has tried and failed to change her destiny.

Nimmi too lives in a society where bloodshed is inevitable. According to Tony Howard, 'Gang wars provided a modern context for the play’s tribal codes of violence'[5]. The ‘kill or be killed’ ethos of her world is brought to focus right from the start of the movie. She is as Machiavellian as Asaji; it is only her ambition that is different. She too plays on Maqbool’s fear of being supplanted, but the ace up her sleeve is that Maqbool desires her much more than he desires the ‘kingpin’ position. She is the prize, and she knows it. She blatantly uses her feminity, without regret or remorse, to achieve her goals. Once pregnant however, she begins to doubt her justification. The fact that she has murdered the father of her child begins to haunt her. It is not made obvious whether the child is Jehangir’s or Maqbool’s and this makes her descent into madness more poignant. Maqbool always puts her first, however, before everyone, before business (much to the disgust of his associates), before his own safety. He risks his life trying to come back and fetch her before he attempts to flee the country. Nimmi dies seeking assurance that their love was true, that their love was worth this kind of end.

Traditionally, Lady Macbeth is played as the virago or the determined, manipulative wife behind the ambitious yet weak man. 'Like Macbeth’s evil genius, she hurries him on in the mad career of ambition and cruelty from which nature would have shrunk.'[6] Asaji and Nimmi, though inspired by Lady Macbeth, are characters in their own right and can be viewed as such without any prior knowledge of the original play text. The former behaves almost like a mature advisor to her husband, while the latter is the heroine of a typical love story where obstacles must be crossed in the pursuit of love. Taken out of context, and looking at Maqbool within the background of Bollywood movies, Nimmi and Maqbool may even belong to a world of star-crossed lovers in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, Shirin and Farhad or Laila and Majnu.

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[1] Joshi, Sonali, Gangs of Bollywood: Slew of New Films Attempt to Take the Gnagster Flick to its Next Nevel,http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2139817/Gangs-Bollywood-Slew-new-films-attempt-gangster-flick-level.html edn, 5 May, 2012 vols () [accessed 24 Dec, 2012]

[2] Bhattacharya, Chandrima S., Bollywood Discovers Macbeth- Shakespeare's Tragic Hero Lands in Mumbai's Underworld,http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040111/asp/frontpage/story_2774803.asp edn, (Sunday, January 11, 2004)

[3] Sen, Amrita, 'Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions.', Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009), Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue (Spring/Summer 2009), in http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/

[4] Hazlitt, William, 'Characters of Shakespeare's Plays', in Macbeth: Critical Essays, ed. by S. Schoenbaum, 1135 vols (New York: Garland Pub, 1991), pp. 5

[5] Howard, Tony, 'Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots', in (Cambridge University Press, 2007) pg 302

[6] O'Connor, John, 'Shakespearean Afterlives', in Ten Characters with a Life of their Own(Cambridge: Icon Books/Totem Books, 2005), pp. 177-218

Indian Comedies of Errors

There has been very little written on the Bollywood Shakespeare film and what little has been written tends to focus mainly on Bhardwaj’s post-postcolonial adaptations, though some articles have also been written on the appropriative category of films such as Shakespeare Wallah (1965) and on films made in the colonial period such as Modi’s Hamlet (1935) and Sahu’s Hamlet (1954). Academics who have written specifically on the subject of Bollywood Shakespeares briefly describe Angoor (1982) as a combination and culmination of the two main strands of Indian Shakespeare films in postcolonial India – the Bengali literary film and the Hindi film that descended from the Parsi Theatre tradition. As the first commercially successful Hindi Shakespeare film, Angoor not only paved the way for Bhardwaj’s adaptations at the turn of the twenty-first century but also truly brought Shakespeare into the fold of popular cinema in a very deliberate and visible manner. This was achieved primarily by embedding the film within the popular twin film and the middle class social comedy genres and by pairing Angoor with Golmaal (1979), another very successful twin film in the social comedy genre.  

 Angoor was not the first adaptation of The Comedy of Errors in Indian cinema, nor the first version in Hindi. Politically, the 1960s was a very important point of time for Shakespeare in India, and it is the Bengali film adaptation of Vidyasagar’s Bhrantibilas in 1963, directed by Manu Sen starring Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar, which has the distinction of being the first Indian adaptation of The Comedy of Errors on film. This film was also the first Indian film to transpose a Shakespearean play onto a modern Indian setting, thus paving the way for a phase of recontextualising Shakespeare in post-colonial India. Bhrantibilash was remade as Do Dooni Char (1968) in Hindi with Gulzar playing a prominent part in its making. The Comedy of Errors has a strong presence in cinema in India, which is surprising in light of the fact that this is not a play that is common to the syllabus in schools or colleges in India.  Given the lack of academic significance given to this play in India it is particularly interesting that to date there have been six adaptations of The Comedy of Errors in Indian cinema and three more are being planned for release by 2016. This is quite a large number compared to the mere handful of other international adaptations of the play that exist – three from Hong Kong, two from the United States and one each from Russia and Mexico.  It is the most adapted Shakespearean play in Indian cinema in recent years certainly, though Hamlet comes a close second. It may be argued that because The Comedy of Errors is more a part of popular culture in India rather than academia, it was the obvious choice of play to begin the process of the post-postcolonial renegotiation with Shakespeare that has culminated in the work of Vishal Bhardwaj in the present generation of Shakespeare films in India.

                                            Meeting of the twins in Bhranti Bilas

There are two particular plot points in the The Comedy of Errors that make it particularly easy to adapt for an Indian audience. While not so common in India any more, before Indians began migrating for employment purposes it was not uncommon to have servants who became assimilated into the master’s family; the servants’ family often served the masters’ family through several generations. Modern audiences find the master-servant relationship in the play particularly controversial and difficult to relate to. This relationship is, conversely, still a common one in Indian households and is thus very easily adapted into an Indian setting. The other important plot point of the play that translates extremely well on to an Indian setting is the culturally specific joking-flirting Jija-saali relationship – the relationship between a man and his wife’s sister. The wooing of Luciana by Antipholus of Syracuse in this context takes on an explicit significance and is a source of both laughter and unease. In all three adaptations – Bhrantibilas, Do Dooni Char, and Angoor – someone in the crowd comments on this relationship when Luciana insists on dragging the wrong Antipholus home. Since the first two films heighten the love story between Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse, the comic aspects of this misrecognition is intensified. In Angoor, however, the comment made by the person in the crowd is deliberately suggestive, bordering on vulgar, and causes some unease despite the comedy of the situation. Subject matter that involves a strange man staying at the marital house, the possibility of marital infidelity with a sister-in-law, and the representation of a relationship between a husband and a courtesan, is quite sensitive material for mainstream Hindi cinema of the post-war period, framed as it was by the overarching discourse of civic uplift and moral responsibility that placed a premium on virtuous womanhood even as it inevitably sought, as a popular medium, to represent female desire. It seems no accident, then, that the first of these film adaptations emerged in the 1960s, when the discourse of morality was slowly loosening under the pressure of social change in the post Nehruvian era.

Bhrantibilas (1963) was based on Vidyasagar’s prose narrative adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.With the exception of the framing story of Aegeon and Emilia, the film is, nonetheless, an exact rendering of The Comedy of Errors with various key points such as the argument over a necklace, the lock out scene, the Pinch episode and the recognition scene faithfully recreated. Even the plot material that Shakespeare had borrowed from Plautus’ Amphitryon where Alcmena is seduced by Jupiter, the king of Gods in Roman mythology, who takes the form of her husband Amphitryon has been paralleled in the legend of Ahalya, wife of the sage Gautama Maharishi, who is seduced by Indra, the king of gods in Hindu mythology. This legend is retold in the film at a fair through a puppet show just before Bilas/Luciana finds the wrong Chiro/Antipholus at the fair and takes him home to her sister who also mistakes him for her husband.

                                       

Do Dooni Char (1968) was meant to be a copy of Bhrantibilas; both screenplays were written by Bidhayak Bhattacharya. The film was supposed to be directed by Bimal Roy who was noted for his realistic and socialistic films. However, Bimal Roy passed away before the film was completed and the film was ultimately directed by Debu Sen. Gulzar, Roy’s protégé, who went on to direct Angoor in 1982, was chief assistant director for Do Dooni Char and wrote the dialogues and lyrics for the film. Do Dooni Char ended up downplaying the literary associations keeping the Bombay audience in mind, though it did acknowledge Shakespeare in the credits. It set itself up as a remake of a Shakespeare film that was itself based on a translation. The vaudevillian tradition of playing The Comedy of Errors was adopted for this film and it delights in the physical comedy, visual comedy and double takes that issue from the pair motif that came to be so popular in Bombay. It played to the strengths of Kishore Kumar, the singer/actor playing Antipholus, and not only intensified the love story of Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse but also the farce that lies at the core of the play. The first scene after the credits sets the tone with Sandeep/Antipholus hurrying home after a shopping trip loaded down with boxes so he cannot see where he is going. He slips on a banana peel on his way home, bumps into a person who gets turned around and continues walking the way he came, and fumbles with his keys and ends up pressing the doorbell with his nose. The pre-credit prologue is also constructed as a visual witticism in which the two sets of twins are paired with contrasting servants who bear traits that are opposite to them. The panels are then shuffled like a deck of cards that enacts the comic confusion of identity that the voice-over narration announces as the subject matter of the story. These type contrasts are exaggerated in comparison with Shakespeare’s play not only to heighten comedy but also to enhance recognition in the context of a medium in which intercutting between scenes is rapid and which relies as much on visual cues as on verbal ones.

The plot of The Comedy of Errors is particularly suited to the middle class social comedy genre within which Angoor is situated. Not only is it a comedy based on confusions, it also has a character who needs to be taught a lesson. Sudha/Adriana in Angoor is a shrewish middle class wife who, without reason, suspects her husband of cheating on her and nearly ends up cheating on her husband herself by mistake. The only way in which this plot is different from other films in the genre is that the characters themselves do not set the confusions into motion. The protagonists from the play were seamlessly transposed on to the middle class world of 1980s India. Angoor stays faithful to Shakespeare’s play with certain exceptions. The story has been shifted to the 80s in urban India, the Pinch subplot has been removed and the Egeon/Aemilia framing has been replaced with a rather different framing. Unlike the precursors, Gulzar models the film on the play and the incipient romance between Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse is played down almost to nonexistence. The strength of this strategy is that Angoor is free to focus more squarely on the comedy for which the film is celebrated.

Angoor managed to adapt The Comedy of Errors on several different levels with great fidelity much more minutely and skilfully than either Bhrantibilash or Do Dooni Char, while recontextualising it within modern India and critiquing Indian society. By situating itself firmly within both the twin film genre and the social comedy genre and by consciously presenting itself as a twin of the commercially successful Golmaal, it managed to throw off any stigma that may have been associated with it being a Shakespeare film. It was the first film in Bollywood after postcolonialism to advertise itself as a Shakespeare film, albeit cautiously. However, it successfully appropriated a literary subject and ‘Bollywoodized’ it, effectively popularizing and commercialising Shakespeare for the first time in Indian cinema by removing any elitist overtones that Shakespeare had in the past. It also managed to detach itself from the need to imitate or compete with English interpretations of Shakespeare and thus for the first time, clearly state India’s claim to Shakespeare as part of its cultural history, where Bhrantibilash and Do Dooni Char had merely suggested such a claim. Gulzar’s reputation as a film maker adept at adapting works of literature for a commercial audience was of further advantage as was the involvement of actors reputed for their Shakespearean backgrounds and their work in the middle class comedies of the time. Therefore, a fortunate confluence of people, genres and generation towards the end of the twentieth century resulted in the first successful Bollywood Shakespeare film and facilitated the emergence of the third generation Bollywood Shakespeare film that began with the work of Vishal Bhardwaj in the early twenty-first century. 

* This blog is based on the first chapter of my thesis where I have analysed Angoor as the first of the post-post colonial Shakespearean adaptations in Hindi cinema 

The First Mainstream Hindi appropriation of Othello

Izzat (1968): The introduction of Othello in mainstream Hindi film

Izzat was the first Bollywood film, by which I mean a film catering to the masses and using formulaic popular culture codes and tropes, to reference Othello. It does not aspire to the high culture associations of Shakespeare that, in many ways its 1961 Bengali predecessor Saptapadi does, nor does it reference the performance traditions of Othello on stage or film. Like other films of its time, this film chooses to focus on the marginalization and exploitation of the adivasis [tribal people] by the rich zamindars [landlords] and uses Othello to comment on the othering prevalent in postcolonial India based on colour, caste and class. The male protagonist of the film, the tribal and, therefore, dark skinned Shekhar finds out that his mother had been raped and abandoned by his zamindar father and decides to seek revenge. He travels to his father’s house intending to confront him only to discover that he has a brother who looks exactly like him except for the colour of his skin. Wrongs are righted when history repeats itself and Dilip, the fair brother, falls in love with a tribal girl. Moreover, the fair Deepa, who was betrothed to Dilip, falls in love with Shekhar. The film thus ends with two inter-racial marriages and with the zamindar finally choosing his abandoned son over his izzat, thereby conforming to the dictates of the Hindi film industry.

While most postcolonial stage and film interpretations of Othello choose to gloss over the racial issues that lie at the heart of Othello, Izzat uses these issues to highlight the subject that dominated several films in the 1960s and 70s – the exploitation of the backward classes by the rich landed gentry. These issues in the play are appropriated quite deftly for the purposes of this film: for instance, when Shekhar is mistaken for Dilip and is asked to sing at his sister’s birthday party, he sings of people who hide behind masks, ‘Kya miliye aise logon se jinke fitrat chupi rahe, nakli chehra saamne aaye, asli chehra chhupi rahe’ [How does one interact with people whose real natures are hidden, their real faces lie hidden behind pretty masks]. The lyrics of this song seem to echo two sentiments from the play. The first sentiment is the deceit that may lie behind a fair face that Brabantio refers to when he warns Othello: ‘Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: She has deceived her father, and may thee’ (1.3.293). The second, and related, reference is to the natural association of fairness with virtue that is prevalent in many cultures, including India, as when the Duke says: ‘If virtue no delighted beauty lack/Your son-in-law is far more fair than black’ (1.3.290). These references, in turn, highlight the complexity behind the othering based on colour prejudice that occurs in India, both among Indians and with foreigners of darker skin colour than Indians.[1]

‘Her name, that was as fresh/ As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black/ As mine own face’ says Othello in 3.3; Indians use the term ‘muh kala karna’ [to blacken one’s face] as a reference to lost virtue in women. The association of fairness with virtue can easily be traced today in India by a quick perusal through the matrimonial advertisements in any paper which stress on fairness as a requirement for prospective brides. The consumer market is another indication with the overabundance of ‘fairness creams’ for men and women by different national and international companies. Social and family customs are further proof: pregnant mothers are traditionally bathed in milk, turmeric and saffron to ensure the birth of fair children, to cite but one example. Milk, turmeric and saffron are applied externally in order to lighten the skin; they are also applied during weddings and religious ceremonies as part of purification rituals thereby further conflating notions of fairness with virtue in the minds of Indians. Colour prejudice in Northern India is moreover complicated by the association of darker skin tones with people of lower caste and class. Traditionally backward classes such as the adivasis, dalits and other scheduled castes and tribes (SCs and STs) are dark skinned and there is, therefore, an automatic assumption of social and financial backwardness with Indians of darker skin colour.

The Zamindari system was formally introduced by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal in 1793 but the system existed even before the Mughal era. Zamindars were aristocrats or royalty who owned land and collected taxes from the peasants; the system was similar to the feudal system in the middle ages in England. It was abolished in India after independence, but peasants were still economically dependent on noblemen and aristocrats due to the disparity of wealth between the noblemen and the peasants in postcolonial India. In Izzat for example, the Thakur is depicted as being in trade; he owns the sawmill which employs most of the Adivasi villagers in the area. His status, however, also allows him to take advantage of the villagers as is shown in his rape of Savli, Shekhar’s Adivasi mother, and this is shown as symbolic of an exploitation of the Adivasis that has been happening for generations. This indirectly references the oppression of the ‘natives’ by the colonisers, by the foreign Mughals before that, and the Aryans before them. It is equally significant that in all these instances of history, the oppressors were fair of skin as compared to the natives. By locating the Othello text within this particular context, the obvious marginalization of the backward classes in India has been highlighted as a social problem within the film. The Thakur’s servants are also adivasis, and only the wealthy are fair in this film. When Deepa’s father comments on the unusual darkness of Shekhar’s skin (who he thinks is Dilip), her mother chooses to deliberately ignore his skin colour and says: ‘Aamir aadmi ke beetein kabhi kaalen hotein hain kya?’ [Can the sons of rich people ever be dark?]. There is thus another layer of meaning that fairness gains in this context: lightness of skin not only indicates virtue and higher caste in India, but also higher class and economic superiority, and thus, in extension, all the ‘virtues’ accrued from wealth, such as English medium education, and ironically, a familiarity with Shakespeare.

Othello has consistently been among the most popular of Shakespeare plays in India for students and audiences since the nineteenth century. ‘More students probably read Othello in the University of Delhi every year than in all British Universities combined’, Ania Loomba had written at the end of the 1980s in an oft-quoted opening sentence to her chapter on “Imperialism, Patriarchy and Post-colonial English studies”.This is true of Delhi University to date, as well as of other universities in India, such as University of Mumbai, University of Gauhati and Karnataka State Open University, as a survey of current B.A. English syllabi across the various universities of India will prove. It is, therefore, safe to assume that a majority of graduates throughout India are familiar with the text of Othello in its original form. It is important to note, moreover, that Othello is the earliest recorded Shakespeare play performed in Calcutta, in the week of December 23–30, 1780, at the Calcutta Theatre.  The play has a long performance history in India, in English medium higher education institutions, as well as in professional theatre, and is therefore familiar to theatre audiences both in the original and in the form of vernacular translations and adaptations. However, Izzat is the first attempt to appropriate the play into mainstream Bollywood, almost 40 decades before the critically successful Vishal Bhardwaj adaptation Omkara (2006) and one of the rare postcolonial appropriations that emphasize the theme of colour prejudice in the play in a meaningful postcolonial context. 

                            

                           The full film is now available to watch on Youtube:

Romeo and Juliet in Bollywood

                  

One of the problems that critics face when evaluating a Bollywood film as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the fact that most Bollywood films are romantic musicals about doomed lovers and a Romeo and Juliet story is often based on the legend of Romeo and Juliet, or similar legends of star-crossed lovers such as Laila and Majnu, Shirin and Farhad or Heer and Ranjha, rather than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For example, in Josh (2000), Mansoor Khan’s adaptation of West Side Story (itself an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet), the lyrics of the song ‘Apun bola tu meri Laila’ [I said you are my Laila] are subtitled as ‘I said you are my Juliet’, thereby indicating that the Romeo and Juliet fable is interchangeable with the Laila Majnu fable of star-crossed lovers to many Indians and films based on the legends are not to be confused with actual adaptations and translations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in Bollywood. The star-crossed lovers trope is used in one way or another in most Indian films and there are several variations of it in Bollywood, and indeed, in all the other film industries in India. For instance, one popular situation is when a rich girl falls in love with a poor boy such as in Raja Hindustani (1996) or Kaho Na Pyaar Hain (2000) [Tell me You Love Me] or when a rich boy falls in love with a poor girl as in Mughal-e-Azam (1960) or Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (2001) [Sometimes Laughter, Sometimes Tears] and the matter of class and social status becomes the obstacle to true love. The other most common variation of the trope is the forbidden love between a Hindu and a Muslim against the backdrop of historical or present day communal tensions as in Bombay (1995), Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001) [Revolt: A Love Story] or Veer Zaara (2004). There is a third variant made famous with films such as Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) [I Have Loved] and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) [The Braveheart Will Win the Bride] which foregrounds the unfairness of a patriarchal society where the father’s word is law even though he opposes the marriage of the lovers for reasons that lack moral authority.

          

However, the tragic genre is largely absent in Indian drama and literature because of a popularly held belief that ‘a drama should not end in separation or bereavement’. This is on account of the Indian definition of drama which emphasizes entertainment as the primary function of drama and therefore suggests that ‘art should shun the grim, sordid or puzzling aspects of life’. The protagonist of a later popular film echoes this sentiment by summing up the ethos of most Bollywood films till the turn of the century: 

Aaj mujhe yakeen ho gaya doston, ki hamari zindagi bhi hamare hindi filmon ke jaisa hi hai.. jaha pe end mein sab kuch theek ho jaata hai.. ‘Happies Endings’.. Lekin agar end mein sab kuch theek na ho to woh the end nahi hain dosto.. Picture abhi baaki hai.  (Om Shanti Om)

[Today I am convinced that our lives are like our Hindi films, where everything ends on a positive note. Happy endings. And if everything does not turn out well in the end, then that is not the end, there is more to the movie.]

This Bollywood genre convention, however, makes it easier to identify an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, of which there are a few in Bollywood. I would agree with Courtney Lehmann and argue that ‘what distinguishes a truly Shakespearean version of Romeo and Juliet from the hundreds of ‘wannabes’ that seek access to the play’s effective capital…is a profound sense of the tragic inevitability that fuel’s Shakespeare’s play’. For any film to be accepted as a ‘true’ adaptation of Romeo and Juliet furthermore, the lovers, I would put forward, must die in the end, and the tragic fate of the lovers must be sealed from the start. Nothing in the dramatic climate should indicate that all will be well in the end. The sense of tragic inevitability that characterises Romeo and Juliet loses power if the lovers achieve a generic Bollywood happy ending. A love story with a happy ending is unremarkable; as the protagonists from Ek Duuje Ke Liye emphasise, ‘Prem adhura reh gaya to hi hamari kahani banegi’, [If love remains unfulfilled then only shall we become legend].The absence of this factor immediately disqualifies most Bollywood films about star-crossed lovers as ‘true’ adaptations of Romeo and Juliet.
The second factor that I would include as a consideration when scrutinizing adaptations of Romeo and Juliet is the backdrop of the family feud. The family feud and the feeling of sheer hate that seems to motivate the family feud in Romeo and Juliet is what, in my opinion, vitally sets apart Shakespeare’s lovers from other legendary lovers. It is Maria’s anguished cry in West Side Story that stays with us: ‘You all killed him! And my brother, and Riff. Not with bullets or guns but with hate!’ The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet comes from the lasting sense of futility that the audience is left with when young love is sacrificed on the altar of destructive hate: ‘Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love’, (1.1.166). This aspect of Romeo and Juliet is most effectively translocated in India by recontextualising the story against a historical time period as in 1942: A Love Story or by drawing upon historical reasons for conflict between two groups of people based on religion, caste or political affiliation that naturally leads to the othering of a minority group by a majority group of people within India. Therefore, any film based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, should, I would put forward, include an opposition at a familial and social level and not opposition from a single person, such as the father figure or a romantic rival, as is often the case in Bollywood films.
The final criteria that should be considered, in my opinion, is the translation of lines, mood, or images from Shakespeare’s text into the language of film, and an awareness of other well-known adaptations of the play. The former factor, I feel is, essential in the case of non-Anglophone adaptations of a Shakespearean play. Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood [1957] for instance, has been hailed by Harold Bloom as ‘the most successful film version of Macbeth’, despite not using a single word from the Shakespearen text. What I would like to highlight as the measure for a film to be considered as an adaptation, however, is its Shakespearean spirit, and not just a resemblance in plot. A film such as Saudagar (1991), which has certain similarities in plot and characters with Romeo and Juliet, but reflect very little else of Shakespeare’s text can, therefore, be excluded from a list of true adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Conversely, films such as Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981) and 1942: A Love Story (1994) which quote lines and images from the play text, but do not strictly follow Shakespeare’s plot can still be considered adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. With regard to the awareness of other adaptations of the play, Cartmell defines a ‘successful adaptation’ as one that comments on its own construction ‘through intertextual links to other screen adaptations of Shakespeare’. It is the fulfilment of this final criterion by which, I would argue, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak sets itself apart from other Bollywood adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. It does this by not only directly referencing Ek Duuje Ke Liye and West Side Story, along with extra and inter textual links to other films and legends, but also theatrical traditions of interpreting Shakespeare’s text such as the use of music in the play or the tradition of depicting the Montagues as bourgeois enemies of the noble Veronese house of the Capulets. I would suggest, therefore, that it is QSQT that is by far the best and most successful adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in Bollywood to date.

              

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(This article is a section from a paper on Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak that I am presently writing.)