At one time Shakespeareana boasted Countess Mountbatten as a patron, but by the time Ivory met the Kendals things were considerably less exalted. Interest in their brand of touring, English-language Shakespeare was dimming. Felicity had already left to make her name in England; Geoffrey and Laura would follow in the 1970s. If not quite on their uppers, they were perilously close.
Ivory sensed that there was a film here, one that touched large themes: the turmoil of India as it fought to find a post-independence identity; the changing face of Indian entertainment; colonial and postcolonial loss. Above all, the film could describe the paradoxical position of the Anglo-Indians, a class who had once ruled India but were now stranded between a country that no longer wanted them and a British ‘home’ many had never even visited. Perhaps this could be the movie that explained – as The Householder had singularly failed to – the contradictions of India to the west.
Ivory himself, a Californian, would direct, with the renowned Bengali director-composer Satyajit Ray writing the music. Ismail Merchant, born into a Muslim family in Mumbai, produced. A German-born Jewish emigrant who had spent many years in India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, would write the script. The Kendals and Kapoor could play themselves, thinly disguised as a troupe called the Buckinghams.
The film this wobbly-legged multinational conglomerate made – the earliest success of their remarkable forty-year partnership – was called Shakespeare Wallah. It was a hit.
By the time I came to watch Merchant Ivory films as a teenager in the 1990s, they were well on their way to being despised. They were written off in the cleverer newspapers (the ones I tried to read) as heritage porn: Reader’s Digest on 35 millimetre, classic novels seen through the soft-focus lens of Laura Ashley or Ralph Lauren. Film buffs scorned them; even fans grew weary of their morbid period detail and blue-blood casting. The perspective on England and Englishness offered by A Room With a View (1985) or Howards End (1992) was more National Trust than National Front. But still: not serious cinema, even though I quietly had a soft spot for them.
Thus it was with some trepidation that, years later, I sat down to watch Shakespeare Wallah. Conditioned by late-period Merchant Ivory to expect something in the mould of the plushly upholstered The Jewel in the Crown television adaptations or David Lean’s A Passage to India, I was disconcerted to find myself watching what appeared to be experimental postmodern cinema.
The film’s opening is startling, a surreal silent tableau in which the Kendal/Buckingham family, strangely clad in periwigs and breeches, perform in front of what seems to be a French chateau beside a lake. The period locations are present and correct, but (with the exception of that chateau, a folly near Lucknow) they are dingy expat digs, not stately homes. Instead of over-saturated period colour, the film is in austere black-and-white, the hot glare of the subtropical sun fraying the corners of the frame. There is Ray’s music, deft and sprightly, performed on flute and tabla with the occasional vivacious flurry of strings. And of course India, not England, is the movie’s subject as well as its location – a society both complex and tantalisingly elusive, a place where the film-makers’ interest in postcolonial tensions can bubble and simmer.
One thing is consistent with the Merchant Ivory brand, though: Shakespeare Wallah’s unrepentant nostalgia. Ivory and Jhabvala shift the timeframe from the late 1940s (the period Shakespeareana had been in their pomp) to the early 1960s, fifteen years after independence, making the Kendals seem more hopelessly out of date than they had ever been in reality. Shakespeare Wallah translates as ‘Shakespeare seller’, Geoffrey Kendal’s real-life nickname, but it becomes mournfully clear that India is no longer in the market for what the Buckinghams have to offer. Their vehicles repeatedly break down, a heavy hint that their travelling days are done. An elderly cast member abruptly dies. A performance of Romeo and Juliet collapses into a fist fight. Tony Buckingham’s response to this sea of troubles chimes with everything being felt in painfully post-imperial, about-to-become-postcolonial Britain: ‘It’s a rejection of everything I am.’
Shakespeare’s name is inscribed deep into this narrative of loss – lost ground, lost culture, lost empire. Just as India has shaken off the British yoke, so it is attempting to shrug off Britain’s National Poet. ‘I’ve been to see Hamlet,’ Shashi Kapoor’s playboy Sanju announces to his girlfriend Manjula, played with delicious archness by Madhur Jaffrey. ‘Who?’ she asks.
In the wings of Shakespeare Wallah looms a bogeyman, the Indian film industry – a creature that also seems to be out for Shakespeare’s blood. As well as being involved with the filmi star Manjula, Sanju has also become disastrously entangled with the strolling player Lizzie, and this becomes a metaphor for the movement of the movie. As well as a love rivalry, it is also a contest between theatre (educated, highbrow, old, English) and cinema (jejune, populist, new, Indian). Sanju talks Manjula into attending the Buckinghams’ version of Othello, but when she arrives in the auditorium it causes such a stir among the movie-mad audience that the show is held up.
The conclusion drawn by Shakespeare Wallah is stark: Shakespeare is all but finished in India, and Bollywood is almost entirely to blame. One might even adopt the title of another Merchant Ivory film (one I also secretly liked): these are the remains of the day.
I spent months trying to work out where truth ended in Shakespeare Wallah and fiction began. I dug out Geoffrey Kendal’s diaries, published in 1986, and read them cover to cover. They were enjoyably garrulous, retelling Kendal’s first glimpse of Mumbai with the Entertainments National Service Association, sent out to perform for British troops during the second world war, and his return with the troupe that became Shakespeareana in 1947. Though full of colourful tales and hair’s-breadth escapes – the earthquake that hits halfway through a show; the actor who drives across the Himalayas in a 1935 Wolseley ambulance – the diaries nonetheless seemed remarkably incurious about India or Indians, other than as (generally) polite witnesses to the Kendals’ English-language performances. Despite the film’s many fictions, its downbeat mood seemed accurate enough: it was with tangible bitterness that Kendal recorded a Shakespeareana performance in 1962, where the locally produced poster advertised the presence of Shashi Kapoor – then beginning to make a name for himself in films – but omitted the name of Shakespeare.
Yet this wasn’t the whole story. On a rushed three-day trip to India in 2012, researching a newspaper piece on two acting companies preparing to come to the Globe in London, I’d managed to glean enough about contemporary Indian theatre to realise that Kendal’s gloom (like much else in an extravagantly contoured life) had been excessive. Shakespeare hadn’t evaporated when the British slipped away on liners bound for foggy Tilbury: on the contrary, there were plentiful modern adaptations of the plays. Indeed, an entire festival near Chennai was dedicated to Shakespeare translated into Indian languages – proof of the vibrant life of Shakespeare on the subcontinent.
What I was struggling with were linkages. I was missing a sense of how this contemporary theatre connected with the kind of Shakespeare that Kendal and his colleagues were acting – if it connected at all. Were the traditions entirely separate? Was there any traffic between the blood-and-thunder, English-language Shakespeare being done by Shakespeareana and the Indian traditions of translation and adaptation? And what of Indian movies, where Shakespeare has a continued and vivacious presence?
It wasn’t until I stumbled across a slim pamphlet that the pieces began to slot into place. It was entitled Shakespeare in India and it was by the British academic Charles Jasper Sisson. I dimly remembered Sisson’s name from the dusty corners of an MPhil reading list – a don at University College London, he’d written a book on Shakespeare’s lost plays and another on an Elizabethan inn-yard in east London. I wasn’t expecting to see him here, rubbing shoulders with theory-heavy monographs on Indian Shakespeare, their titles stiff with words like ‘postcolonial’ and ‘diasporic’.
The pamphlet’s subtitle was ‘Popula
r Adaptations on the Bombay Stage’. It was the date that really caught my eye: 1926. This was far earlier than anything else I’d been reading – the height of the Raj, or very nearly. Why had a British specialist in Jacobethan stage practice written a book on Shakespeare in Mumbai? And what on earth did he mean by ‘popular’?
Based on his experiences teaching at Elphinstone College, part of the university of Mumbai, Sisson’s account had all the exuberant, pent-up enthusiasm of a man who has stepped outside himself, perhaps for the first time. It began by declaring its lack of interest in ‘the influence of Shakespeare upon the cultured classes in India’. What Sisson wanted to address was a Shakespeare who had become increasingly remote in Britain (as by now in America), a Shakespeare who was still down-and-dirty popular entertainment. He wrote:
There is but one country in the world, to the best of my knowledge, except possibly Germany, where the plays have of recent times formed the safest and surest attraction to the indiscriminate masses who attend popular theatres, where the proprietor of a theatre could count on a profit on a Shakespeare production. That country is India, and the theatres in question are a group of theatres in the city of Bombay, clustered together in the heart of a poor Indian population.
These theatres were spread around Grant Road in Mumbai; the plays weren’t performed in English, but in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu. Tickets cost a handful of rupees. Aside from himself, the only Europeans who had been inside these places, Sisson thought, were policemen on the prowl for pickpockets.
Warming to his theme, he went on:
The orthodox Shakespearian would experience many a shock if he ventured into this strange temple of his idol. He might accustom himself to the Oriental costume and mise-en-scène, to the disturbing medley of the audience, even, with some study, to the foreign language. But he would be amazed to find that he was being provided with an opera and a ballet as well as a play … and horrified when he realised the extreme liberties that were being taken with the text and plot.
The liberty-taking shows Sisson discovered, working with M. R. Shah, an assistant professor at the university of Mumbai, stretched back to the 1890s, perhaps earlier. They were a vigorous and remarkable series of Shakespeare adaptations in the Parsi theatre of Mumbai, named for its inventors in the Parsi community.
Sisson and I were alike in one respect at least: these adaptations were unlike anything either of us had encountered before. They included Vasundhara, an adaptation of Macbeth from 1910 that retold Shakespeare’s story not from the hero’s perspective, but from Lady M’s, for whom it was renamed. There was also Bazm-e-Fani (‘Mortal Gathering’), an Urdu version of Romeo and Juliet in which the balcony scene was, Sisson gleefully remarked, ‘pretty completely rewritten’ (he included a translation). He was particularly entranced by the Mumbai taste for shoehorning comic subplots into even the soberest of tragedies, particularly plots poking fun at Indians excessively devoted to British manners.
Lest anyone think he had gone dotty in the subtropical sun, Sisson included photographs: fey-looking male students from the New High School in Mumbai in doublets and hose; a mysterious shot of an extravagantly moustachioed man apparently about to behead another with a scimitar (captioned ‘typical costumes’, but providing no clue as to which play they were typical of).
As Sisson described with wonderment the ‘frequent songs and dances’, the socially varied audiences, the pell-mell competition for tickets, the elaborate staging techniques and lust for theatrical novelty in Parsi theatre, one sensed him eyeing sceptics at the back of the lecture hall. What about authenticity and scholarship, old chap? What does any of it have to do with our Shakespeare, the British Bard we know and love?
To that, Sisson had a triumphant answer:
The Bombay popular stage offers in many respects a parallel to the Tudor stage in England. Its adaptations of Shakespeare, disconcerting at first sight, show his plays to be things that are still alive and in process of becoming new things, being ever born again, even as they were on the Elizabethan stage.
Things that are still alive and in process of becoming new things … Here was another, more enlightening perspective on how Shakespeare’s work might operate in India, ways that were largely alien to the English-speaking Geoffrey Kendal and his ilk; ways many British people would still struggle to recognise as ‘Shakespeare’ at all.
More, in the twenty-first century, the tradition is very much alive. No one seems sure of current numbers, but there are now estimated to be several hundred adaptations of Shakespeare plays into nearly all of India’s twenty-plus official languages, and more versions of Shakespeare in Indian cinema than anywhere else on the globe.
Film I found an especially enticing subject, and not only because of Shakespeare Wallah: the world’s oldest synchronised-sound version of Hamlet turned out to be Indian, from 1935, and Shakespeare has been cited as the most-adapted writer in Bollywood history. There were echoes of the plays – so I read – in even the most unlikely Indian films, if one knew where to look: action thrillers, rom-coms, gangster movies, farces.
There was surely something here. Even by the time Kendal arrived in India in 1944, three years before independence, Shakespeareana was already past its sell-by date, but not because Shakespeare had lost India or India had discarded Shakespeare. If Sisson was correct, Indian urban culture had absorbed Shakespeare – translated him, adapted him, localised him, remade him, and by the time Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala were shooting their film, had been doing so for the best part of seven decades. What Shakespeare Wallah figured as something made waste was, viewed another way, the creation of something else new. It’s just that Kendal and co. didn’t realise it. Perhaps they didn’t want to.
INNOVATION IS GREAT … BRITAIN
HERITAGE IS GREAT … BRITAIN
CULTURE IS GREAT … BRITAIN
SHOPPING IS GREAT … BRITAIN
At the airport, the British tourist board was out in force. Five or six metres long and almost as tall, the posters marched down the concourse, a blur of fantastical scenes: the tail fin of a formula one racing car, Bodiam Castle in East Sussex, Norman Foster’s swooping roof for the British Museum, someone’s designer stiletto.
What these posters were doing in the arrivals terminal at Mumbai was anyone’s guess. I tried to work out what kind of Britain they were intended to evoke: a proud nation of stiletto-wearing, castle-haunting racing drivers, perhaps. O brave new world that has such racing drivers in’t … Whatever it was, I was delighted to be fleeing it.
To orientate myself in India’s movie capital, I had arranged to meet a film critic called Nandini Ramnath. She wrote for Mint, a slick, business-orientated newspaper with links to the Wall Street Journal. Her reviews were sharp and cosmopolitan, her tone just this side of libellously sardonic. If anyone could guide me safely through the hyperbole of the Indian film industry, I hoped it would be her.
On the evening of my arrival, we arranged a rendezvous by the Flora Fountain in the old Fort district of South Mumbai. This was the heart of Raj territory: down the road from the Byzantine-Gothic pile of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus; on the same street as Elphinstone College, where C. J. Sisson had taught. An appropriate place to debate the colonial reach of Shakespeare, I thought as I walked down from my hotel. In the rust-red dust of the Oval Maidan, bathed in honey-coloured evening light, whippet-thin boys in trousers and shirtsleeves were playing cricket beneath the shadow of the university clock tower. Had it not been for the heat, we could have been in Hyde Park.
In contrast to her surroundings, Nandini resembled a character in a 1930s American newsroom comedy: fast-walking, furrow-browed, an unruly tangle of dark hair bunched over her fashionably thick-rimmed glasses. She barely broke stride as she collected me, disposing of one cigarette and lighting another in the same fluid, virtuosic movement.
‘You need to learn the Bombay shuffle,’ she yelled over her shoulder as she crossed the road, executing a neat lower-body swerve
through the maelstrom of lurching, blaring steel. The closest I could get was two paces behind.
Nandini talked as fast as she walked. In the first ten minutes, drinking warm lager at the roof bar of the Sea Palace hotel, we had raced through my plans for South Africa, the influence of Jacques Derrida on Indian university education, the state of the British newspaper market and her views on my publisher.
She moved on to Shakespeare Wallah, which I had watched again on the flight.
‘Oh, I love that film,’ she said, brow momentarily unfurrowing.
I had my doubts, I said; the politics, the colonial-era nostalgia …
She expelled an impatient rivulet of smoke in the general direction of the sunset. ‘Oh, that. That’s not the important thing. The important thing is how important Satyajit Ray is to the film. As well as writing the music, you can see his influence in how beautifully it’s shot. He chose some of the locations, loaned them his cinematographer, sat in the editing studio telling Ivory to cut, cut. All the later Merchant Ivories are just so corseted, so cosseted, you know? That one’s kind of free.’
What I really wanted was a primer on Bollywood. I’d read books and seen a small handful of Hindi movies, but was lacking an overall sense of how the industry worked. What made it tick?
‘You have to remember where it came from. Indian cinema has always relied on things borrowed from all over the place. There’s the nautanki tradition – a kind of variety act or vaudeville – a bit of acting, a bit of singing, as well as bits from the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Until about ten years ago – maybe less so now – the typical Hindi film was exactly like that. A real composite.’
Worlds Elsewhere Page 25
