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