Listen to Dr. Varsha Panjwani and I talk about the genesis of the Indian Shakespeares on Screen project.
Much Ado About Shakespeare
Monday, 25 April 2016
Indian Shakespeares on Screen 27-30th April, 2016
‘Indian Shakespeares on Screen’ examines the full influence of Shakespeare in Indian cinema and the way in which Indian cinema has mobilized Shakespeare to raise urgent local and national concerns. The project will be launched with an international conference and exhibition at Asia House in central London (27-29 April 2016), followed by a weekend film festival at the prestigious BFI Southbank in London (29-30 April 2016) where the screening of the Indian Shakespeare trilogy - Maqbool (Macbeth), Omkara (Othello), andHaider (Hamlet) - will be accompanied by public interviews with Vishal Bhardwaj, the trilogy’s director, and the scriptwriters of the films.
The multi grant-winning project is a unique partnership between INOX Leisure (India), The British Film Institute (BFI, London), Asia House (London) and six premier academic institutions in U.K. It is the brainchild of Ms Thea Buckley (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham), Ms Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway, University of London), Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston University (London) and University of York) and Dr Preti Taneja (University of Warwick and Queen Mary, University of London) - young diaspora women scholars from diverse Indian states who are keen to introduce Indian cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare to an international audience. For conference registration or for more information about ticket bookings for the screenings and public interviews, please contact the organisers at: shakespeareandbollywood@gmail.com.
Conference and
Screening Programme 27-30th April
27 April: Day 1 at
Asia House
9:00 – 9:30: Registration and
coffee/tea
9:30 – 10:00: Opening remarks by Thea Buckley and Koel
Chatterjee
10:00 – 10:45: Plenary
[Studio]
Setting the Scene
Roundtable: Poonam Trivedi, Diana Henderson and Deana Rankin
10:45 – 11:00: Break
11:00 – 12:30: Panel 1a [Studio]
Looking for Hamlet in India
Chaired by: David Schalkwyk
From Hamlet to Haider, twenty-first century antic
dispositions (Christie Carson)
Against ‘indigenisation’: Hamlet in a modern idiom or, the politics of missing persons
(Sandra Young)
Between Chutzpah and AFSPA: To be a Kashmiri Hamlet (Madhavi Biswas)
11:00 – 12:30: Panel 1b [Library]
Bollywood Dreams
Chaired by: Diana Henderson
On Directing a Bollywoodized Midsummer Night's Dream (Kavita Mehta)
Materialist Shakespeares in Indian Indie Cinema: 10 ml Love (Varsha Panjwani)
Bollywood’s midsummer (night’s) dream: 10 ml Love and the Problem(atic) of Adaptation (Sreya Mallika
Datta, Anil Pradhan, Utsa Mukherjee)
12:30 - 13:30: Lunch break (Lunch not provided)
13:30 – 15:00: Panel 2a [Studio]
Post-colonial
renegotiations
Chaired by: Deana Rankin
Postcolonialism and Transnational Feminism in Isi Life Mein (Rosa Periago)
“The Queen, my lord,
is dead”: (post-)colonial appropriation of Macbeth
on film in India and the North of Ireland (Eilis Smyth)
Refracted modernities in Bollywood (Syed Haider)
13:30 – 15:00: Panel 2b [Library]
Bengali Shakespeares
Chaired by: Koel Chatterjee
Shakespeare and Nineteenth-Century Bengali Literature:
Patterns and Methodological Questions (Suddhaseel Sen)
Taming of
the Bard: Domesticating farce in Srimati
Bhayankari (Paromita Chakravarti)
Shakespeare and Contemporary Bengali Cinema: Intertextuality
and Mise-en-scene in Hrid Majharey,
2014 (Priyanjali Sen)
15:00 – 15:15: Coffee/ Tea [Library Annexe]
15:15 – 17:00: Panel 3 [Studio]
Keynote Panel: The
Bhardwaj Shakespeare Trilogy
Chaired by: Varsha Panjwani
Vishal Bhardwaj, Director of Maqbool, Omkara and Haider discusses
his Indian Shakespeare trilogy with his scriptwriters Abbas Tyrewala (Maqbool), Robin Bhatt (Omkara) and Basharat Peer (Haider)
28 April: Day 2 at
Asia House
9:30 – 10:00: Registration and Coffee/tea
10:00 – 10:50: Plenary
[Studio]
Chaired by: Koel Chatterjee
Jonathan Gil Harris – Shakespearean Masala
10:50 – 11:00: Break
11:00 – 12:30: Panel 4a [Studio]
Itinerant Shakespeare
Chaired by: Paromita Chakravarti
Immortal or
immoral longings? Cleopatra the poison-maid: temptation vs temporality in Kannaki (Thea Buckley)
‘Would you create me
new?’: Representations of Shakespeare’s The
Comedy of Errors in Bhrantibilas
(1963) and Angoor (1982) (Paramita
Dutta)
Shakespeare and Assamese Parallel Cinema: Politics of
Identity and Political Realism (Parthajit Baruah)
11:00 – 12:30: Panel 4b [Library]
Myth and Metaphor
Chaired by: Varsha Panjwani
Enemy Desire, Pants on Fire: Myth and Fatalism in Sanjay
Leela Bhansali’s Goliyon ki
Rasleela-Ramleela (Patricia Gruben)
Image as Text in Arshinagar:
A Bengali Experiment with Shakespeare
(Koel Chatterjee)
Lost in Lear: A Critical Reading of Rituparno Ghosh's The Last Lear (Shreyosi Mukherjee)
12:30 – 13:30: Lunch break (Lunch not provided)
13:30 – 15:00: Panel 5a [Studio]
Script Reading and
Discussion: Have the Shakespeares on Screen Forsaken Shakespeare’s love of
Science?
Chaired by: Thea Buckley
Carole Jahme, RSC fellow and winner of the 2012 Science and
Technology Facilities Council Award for public engagement enacts scenes from The Merry Wives of Munnar and leads a
panel on Science, Shakespeare and India
13:30 – 15:00: Panel 5b [Library]
Talk: The Hungry, a contemporary re-telling of
Titus Andronicus, presented by Film London
Chaired by Preti Taneja, with a Q&A chaired by Film
London Head of Talent Development and Production, Deborah Sathe.
15:00 – 15:15: Coffee/Tea [Library Annexe]
15:15 – 17:45: Panel 6 [Studio] (Exclusive: for conference
delegates only)
Introduced by Koel Chatterjee
Screening of Arshinagar
(2015), an adaptation of Romeo and
Juliet (Bengali, with subtitles)
Dir. Aparna Sen, starring Dev, Rittika Sen, Jisshu Sengupta,
Kaushik Sen, Waheeda Rehman, Kamaleshwar Mukherjee, Roopa Ganguly, Jaya Seal
Ghosh
17:45: Drinks Reception
29 April: Day 3 at
Asia House
9:00 – 9:30: Coffee/tea
9:30 – 10:30: Plenary
[Studio]
Chaired by: Preti Taneja
Mark Thornton Burnett - Gendered Play and Regional Dialogue
in Nanjundi Kalyana
10:30 – 10:40: Break
10:40 – 12:40: Panel 7a [Studio]
Gendered Shakespeare
Chaired by: Poonam Trivedi
Dil Bole Hadippa and
Gender Politics (Bob White)
Untold Spices: The Secrets of Dedh Ishquiya (Madhavi Menon)
Queer Bollywood Shakespeare (Amritesh Singh)
Make ‘em Laugh : When Shakespeare Meets Bollywood;
Shakespeare Adaptations in Bollywood and Gender Dynamics (Aysha Iqbal)
10:40 – 12:40: Panel 7b [Library]
Selling Shakespeare
in the West and the East
Chaired by: Deana Rankin
From Melodrama to Tragedy and Back – Closing the
Melodramatic Gap between East and West in Shakespeare Film Adaptations (Kinga
Földváry)
Romeo and Juliet
between Hollywood and Bollywood: Bhansali’s 2013 Ram-Leela (Florence Cabaret and Sylvaine Bataille)
‘Naina thag lenge’ — Gulzar’s ocular poetics in Omkara (Shani Bans)
Interpreting the Idiom of Loss: From the mythical heath to
borders and signs.
Revisiting King Lear in the contemporary framework of Life Goes On.
(Sangeeta Datta)
12:40 – 13:30: Lunch break (Lunch not provided)
13:30 – 16:00: Panel 8 [Studio]
Introduced by Thea Buckley
Screening of Kaliyattam
(1997), an adaptation of Othello
Dir. Jayaraj, starring Suresh Gopi, Lal, Manju Warrier, and
Biju Menon.
16:00 – 16:30: Closing remarks by Preti Taneja and Varsha
Panjwani
SPECIAL SCREENINGS: BFI
Southbank
18:50 – 21:08 Maqbool
(133 mins) Introduced by Koel Chatterjee
21:08 – 21:53 Post
Screening Q+A: Director Vishal Bhardwaj and Scriptwriter Abbas Tyrewala in
conversation with Thea Buckley.
Sat 30 April: Day 4
SPECIAL SCREENINGS:
BFI SOUTHBANK
14:00 – 16:35: Omkara (150
mins) Introduced by Koel Chatterjee
16:35 – 17:25: Post
Screening Q+A: Director Vishal Bhardwaj and Scriptwriter Robin Bhatt in
conversation with Dr. Varsha Panjwani.
18:40 – 19:25: Introduction to Haider
by Koel Chatterjee followed by Pre
Screening Q+A: Director Vishal Bhardwaj and Scriptwriter Basharat Peer in
conversation with Dr. Preti Taneja.
19:25 - 22:04: Haider
(159 mins)
Monday, 21 December 2015
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
Thursday, 3 December 2015
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.
[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
Thursday, 19 November 2015
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.
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
Monday, 2 March 2015
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:
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