The Shakespearean International Yearbook

Volume 12: Special Section, Shakespeare in India

Sukanta Chaudhuri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781409451167
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351963589
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

Part I
Special Section

Shakespeare in India

1 Introduction: Shakespeare in India

Sukanta Chaudhuri

I would perversely ask the reader of the essays in this Special Section to begin by looking at the notes and the works cited in them. Few people will find all the titles intelligible, as they belong to a number of Indian languages besides English (which too is an official language in India). Few again, except Indians, may be able to locate all the places of publication. But all these places have contributed, sometimes extensively, to the world's output of Shakespeareana. Even more significantly, they have published a range of other materials on very different subjects but bearing on the study and performance of Shakespeare

Outside the Western world, India has the longest and most intense engagement with Shakespeare of any country anywhere. I should say a series of engagements, as Shakespearean traffic was routed through many languages and cultural contexts across the subcontinent, commencing at various dates from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It progressed in parallel on the stage and through the printed word. And needless to say, the cross-lingual exchange was underpinned by direct access to the original English works: a relatively minor strand in the stage encounter, much more important in print, above all in the educational curriculum. Yet, as Poonam Trivedi's essay in this collection brings out, Shakespearean theatre for the colonial English audience had its own creative extensions and transformations. At the opposite, most inclusive end of the spectrum (and time-frame), Tim Supple's celebrated A Midsummer Night's Dream weaves seven Indian languages besides English into its fabric. Ananda Lal's essay examines this challenging cultural artefact.

The terns of India's engagement with Shakespeare are endlessly debated, because the evidence is complex and of contrary purport. Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841:

Consider now, if they asked us. Will you give-up your Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English; ... should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire, we cannot do without Shakespeare!¹

The English genius dodged this weighty choice by placing Shakespeare at the service of Empire. His works became the cornerstone of an education system to service the operation of the Raj, and also condition the colonized population in suitable cultural and ideological terms. Given the notorious difficulty of restricting Shakespeare to a specific ideology, it is not surprising that the effort misfired. English education in general, and Shakespeare in particular, came to foster unsuspected adventures of the intellect, stirrings of a freedom of spirit that came to foster nation-wide stirrings towards political freedom.

Shakespeare was also integrated into the social and cultural resurgence set off across India over this period and (especially in the context of Bengal) often, if controversially, called a "Renaissance." As might be expected, Shakespearean influence was most apparent in drama, where it followed a graded trajectory: from "straight" translation through a range of adaptations—often with radical departures, the Shakespearean connection further obscured by Indian names for the characters; thence to sporadic adoption of Shakespearean lines, themes and motifs; finally to plays that might owe nothing directly to Shakespeare, but that could not have been written without his background presence. Shakespeare has been absorbed in the mother element of modern Indian drama.

Still more remarkably, Shakespeare has impregnated popular and folk theatre across India: sometimes in urban or elite redactions, but also in original reworkings closer to the soil, like Habib Tanvir's celebrated version of A Midsummer-Night's Dream using a tribal troupe from central India. Where does one place the Shakespeare performances across rural Bengal by a Marxist group, the Indian People's Theatre Association? And how does one gauge the melding of Shakespearean drama with the virile, often melodramatic, music-rich traditions of the jatra in Bengal, nautanki in northern India, or yakshagana in Karnataka? In yet another direction, Shakespeare penetrated the Parsi theatre, the precursor of the Bollywood film that provided popular urban entertainment across India from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and sometimes later.

It is harder to trace a sustained Shakespearean line through Indian cinema, but individual directors have turned so often to the Bard as to practically build up a tradition. Rajiva Verma takes us through the whole sweep of Urdu and Hindi Shakespearean cinema from the colonial to the global age, set against radical shifts of audience, technology, and economics of production. Other contributors zoom in on particular films. Supriya Chaudhuri examines in detail a celebrated Shakespearean adaptation in recent Indian cinema. Paromita Chakravarti analyses the encounter of stage and screen as viewed in a Shakespearean glass, and reflected in the work of two eminent directors in the two media from two generations. Beyond formal concerns, both essays illustrate how Shakespearean elements can be assimilated to contemporary Indian life. And Chaudhuri, in particular, prompts us to ask how that life, in turn, might illuminate Shakespeare's own problematic contexts.

From the beginning, the pedagogic projection of Shakespeare in India was arguably more extensive than the theatrical, if less productive in creative terms. Far more people encountered Shakespeare in print than on stage; and the greater number did so in the original English texts. (This might have been the single biggest curb on creativity.) But, as Rangana Banerjee's account illustrates, the classroom study of Shakespeare led at least certain privileged groups of students to visit the theatre and even launch productions; while yet others worked Shakespeare into their own writings, in English or the vernacular.

These writings were not exclusively dramatic. Received through the page rather than the stage, Shakespeare was identified as a poet simpliciter rather than a specifically dramatic poet. Hence his works could activate complex critical exercises, even entire critical discourses. Aniket Jaaware and Urmila Bhirdikar trace the theoretical ramifications of the rich legacy of Marathi translations of Shakespeare. Infusing Shakespearean themes and characters with the concept of rasa and other premises of classical Indian theory, the critics cited by Jaaware and Bhirdikar set up an elaborate discourse of not only literary but moral and philosophic import. This indicates how far Shakespeare had penetrated the social and ethical fabric of the Indian 'Renaissance'.

Yet the entire intellectual edifice rests on translations. Marathi has one of the richest Shakespearean legacies of any Indian language, both textual and theatrical. Its translations are the foundation of a much more complex Shakespearean mindscape. Jatin Nayak's essay provides the contrasting picture in Orissa, where translations are few and the Shakespearean context unfamiliar, so that each rendering is a little discursive island of its own. And yet, as Nayak indicates, the translations reflect the evolution of modem Odiya society, and load the Shakespearean rifts with growing social and ideological concerns.

Eight essays can do scant justice to the range and depth of India's engagement with Shakespeare. But they may serve as markers staking out the extent of Shakespearean territory on the subcontinent.

NOTE

1. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes. Hero-Worsliip and the Heroic in History (1841; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 148.

2 Impudent Imperialists: Burlesque and the Bard in Nineteenth-Century India

Poonam Trivedi

It is commonly accepted that the staging of Shakespeare in English in the colonial period in India was an act of showcasing imperial culture. Like the propagation of English literature, the performance of English drama, particularly Shakespeare, was part of the burden of the empire, of the politics of educating and re-forming native society. Shakespeare and English literature were both consciously used as instruments of political control. As Gauri Viswanathan has demonstrated, the formation and development of the very discipline of English literature was predicated on the needs of the empire.¹

A prime instance of such an exegesis of Shakespeare in the service of the imperial order is to be found in William Miller's collection of lectures entitled Shakespeare's King Lear and Indian Politics (1900). In his preface Miller, who was an eminent educationist and Principal of Madras Christian College, feels impelled to point out that "some of the morals with which Lear abounds" have "so direct a bearing on the present condition of India." The play, he says, shows "the moral force of love [in] the body politic," and marks how "fatal disorganization is the sure result if force be withdrawn before "love' [that is, love of common good] has gained sufficient power." Hence the play cannot but be interpreted as "a warning ... against rushing too fast" towards self-rule! He rhetorically cautions that "As plainly as in the days of Lear, the time is upon us when if there be not such transition as he felt to be required, there will be such phenomena as were rising around him, 'in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord.'" Therefore, Shakespeare's view—if the interpretation given to this drama be correct—must regulate this indispensable transition."²

On the stage, too, the performance of English drama, whether amateur or professional, carried an intent to instruct, to reform the taste of the natives. Promoting the cause for a public theatre for Indians in Calcutta in 1832, the Asiatic Journal affirmed that "the natives thereby will acquire a taste after European luxury, and advance rapidly in civilisation" (pp. 176-7). In 1835, The Reformer, a paper run by Indians, remonstrated that "it is high time that our educated countrymen should substitute for the senses as well as the imagination, whilst they inform and instruct the mind, and improve taste in the place of their ancient rude and gross Cobies and jatras and nautches [indigenous performance forms]" (p. 10).

No engagement with English literature and Shakespeare was free of hegemonic pressure. English teachers famed for their elocutionary skills strove to inculcate authentic pronunciation and intonation; declamation contests in which schools and colleges showed off the fruits of their instruction in the "propah" speaking of English became mandatory. The effect of Macaulay's Minute (1835) and Lord Hardinge's resolution of 1844, assuring preference in selection for governmental positions to Indians who had distinguished themselves in European literature, was that a growing middle class undertook to master English literature—and its performance, elocuting, quoting, spectating, and playing was an integral part of this process. A diary entry of 11 November 1841 by Emily Eden, sister of Governor-General Lord Auckland, notes how "the quantities of baboos" who had crowded the theatre in Calcutta to watch Macbeth were all "applauding on the backs of their books."³ Actor-manager Geoffrey Kendal, in his reminiscences of his Shakespearean tours of India in the 1940s and '50s, remarks that "At one time English plays meant everything; unless you could quote Shakespeare you would not get a job."⁴

Hence it follows that English drama, especially Shakespeare, was performed by the English, professionals and amateurs alike, in the prevailing histrionic style of the period, moving from the classical realism of the eighteenth century to a more emotive histrionic realism and greater emphasis on spectacle among the Victorians. Visiting companies of players were a conduit whereby the mode of performance favored in the metropolis was brought to the colony, to be quickly imitated by local amateurs. The yardstick was always that of London theatre, and reviewers commended players by appellations such as "the Garrick of the East," "the Indian Siddons," and "our own Irving." Shakespeare was almost always performed straight, as "high art": there is no evidence of any Shakespeare performance in English, unlike those in the Indian languages, which was adapted or localized, though often it was edited.

It therefore comes as a surprise, as a shock in fact, to discover that the repertory of the Gai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Part I: Special Section: Shakespeare in India
• Part II
• Part III
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index