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