She smiled wickedly. ‘There’s even an industry term: the “unofficial remake”. You get the official remake, then you get the unofficial remakes, sometimes several of them. That happens to western films, to Indian films also. Many different versions of the same story.’
Even the term ‘Bollywood’ was a composite, and often misapplied. Originally a term of affectionate abuse created by the Indian English-language press in the 1970s, outside India it has come to stand for any Indian-made film. In fact the subcontinent is home to a number of different local movie industries, operating in many of its official languages and in an awe-inspiring variety of forms, from art-house indie films to lumbering commercial franchises.
Nandini marked them out with the glowing end of her cigarette. ‘Three main industries: Tamil film from the south, Telugu film from Andhra Pradesh, which is huge now, Hindi here in Bombay. But the list goes on, many different languages. And of course Bengali cinema.’ She sniffed. ‘That’s a cut above.’
‘Bollywood’ – the mass-market, Hindi-language, Mumbai-based movie industry – produces perhaps 200 movies annually. All told, though, there are something like 1,000 films produced in India each year, double the output of Hollywood.
What these industries shared was a hunger for making money. According to a report by the consultants KPMG and crawled over by a slavering Hollywood Reporter, revenues in Indian cinema were around 94 billion rupees in 2013 (£0.9 billion), with growth pegged at 10 per cent-plus annually. This was half what Hollywood brought in because of the difference in ticket prices, but far higher in terms of sales. Over 3 billion seats were flogged in India each year, and the subcontinent was still what the analysts called heavily ‘under-screened’ – lacking in cinemas per head of population. No wonder mass appeal was the name of the game.
‘Of course there are a lot of modernist trends in Indian cinema, some art-house, but that’s broadly where the popular stuff comes from. That’s the overarching idiom: a big audience, getting bigger, who must be entertained at all costs.’
I was curious as to where the notion of artistic originality came into things. Even at the major Hollywood studios there was an emphasis on making product distinctive. Did the same obtain here?
‘I don’t think it’s so important. What is more important is, do you make people laugh, do you make them cry? Can you appeal to a family audience? Can you sell tickets? I’m speaking very broadly. But I think that’s true.’
So if one saw echoes of, say, Shakespeare in Indian cinema, they wouldn’t necessarily be there for factors of high culture or prestige? There’d be more functional factors at work?
Nandini ducked her head. ‘Got it. You pick and choose as a film-maker. You may not have read As You Like It, but you think – wow, great idea, girl dressed as boy. You want to get to a particular place in a film, but you haven’t found a way, and it turns out Shakespeare has solved it for you. You just borrow it, and disguise the source – if you can be bothered.’
Surreptitiously, I glanced at my watch: 9 p.m. We’d been talking for an hour and a half. Nandini’s evening was far from over; there were still two events to go to, a book launch and a drinks party hosted by a film-director friend. My head was throbbing, though whether from the working practices of Bollywood, jet lag or the cigarette smoke, I wasn’t sure.
‘Good luck with your project,’ she called as she strode purposefully into the night, past the recumbent shadows of people sleeping rough on the pavement. ‘You might even have fun!’
Holed up in my hotel room, waiting on a series of appointments, I tried to get to grips with what C. J. Sisson had been watching all those years before.
Parsi theatre combined two of the most important things in Mumbai: pleasure and profit. Parsi Zoroastrians began arriving in India perhaps as early as the 700s, driven by persecution in what is now Iran. By the early nineteenth century, they were one of the city’s most important communities, with powerful interests in shipbuilding and trading, and an eagerness to do business with anyone and everyone. Cricket was one early obsession: the Parsis were among the first Indians to become obsessed by the game, and in 1848 formed the Parsi Oriental Cricket Club in Mumbai, perhaps the oldest on the subcontinent. Horses and polo were other obsessions, particularly among well-to-do Parsis – of which there were many.
British-style theatrical entertainment was yet another fascination. In 1840, a consortium of leading Mumbai citizens led by the successful merchant Jagannath Sunkersett lamented to the British governor about the lack of a ‘place of public amusement in the Island’ and appealed to be allowed to build one, claiming that ‘such a measure would promote good humour and tend to induce a desirable tone of feeling in Society at large’. The result was the erection in 1846 of the Grant Road theatre on what were then the northern fringes of the rapidly expanding city. A fifth of the size of its approximate model, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London, with a tight capacity of 337, it became the crucible for Indian drama in Mumbai.
Back in the eighteenth century, drama had been performed for and by British employees of the East India Company as an alternative to other principal ways of passing the off-hours in Mumbai – playing cards at home or shooting rabbits on Malabar Hill. At the Bombay theatre on Bombay Green, built in 1776 at the heart of the British settlement, amateur troupes assuaged their homesickness by staging versions of fashionable London comedies and farces. But interest gradually shrank and the Bombay theatre fell into disrepair, until it was acquired in 1835 by another eminent Parsi businessman, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (whose statue still lords it over the Oval Maidan, and who once sent four Arab horses to Queen Victoria as a gift).
Once they had control of the playhouses, Parsi producers began to change the scene. Shows in English were gradually replaced by plays in Gujarati, Urdu and Hindustani (a mixture of Hindi and Urdu), serious works drawn from the Persian epics as well as lighter pieces. By the 1850s, theatregoing had become a fashionable pastime among the upwardly mobile Mumbai middle classes.
At first, Parsi theatre was amateur only: small drama clubs performing among their own community. Yet within a decade Parsi theatre had become a fully fledged professional, commercial operation. By the 1890s, as many as twenty companies were vying for audiences, each with teams of actors and playwrights, their own playhouses in the Grant Road area and rival publishing businesses to print scripts. According to one historian, this new drama ‘created perhaps the largest ticket-buying audience in Indian stage history’.
Despite the name, Parsi theatre, like the city that gave birth to it, was by no means monocultural. Parsi money fed the operation, but actors and spectators were drawn from many different communities and religions. Nor was it just Mumbai: rival Parsi troupes eventually operated in every corner of the subcontinent. Using the fast-growing infrastructure of the railways, companies went on tour, sometimes taking over entire trains with sets, costumes, equipment and armies of stagehands and actors. Several troupes took steamships far south across the Bay of Bengal to what is now Sri Lanka; others travelled to Burma and Singapore. One even made it to London for the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1885, led by Khurshed Mehrvan Balivala, one of numerous actors acclaimed as the ‘Irving of India’ after the renowned British star Henry Irving.
The drama they offered was a swaggering, eclectic amalgam of anything that would dazzle the eyes and stir the hearts of audiences. Early Parsi scripts had been based on the Persian Shahnama and the Sanskrit Mahabharata, but before long the Arabic Arabian Nights were being raided for stories, as were Victorian melodramas and the nautanki private theatre seen in north Indian royal courts.
Also here at the birth of popular Indian drama, as Sisson realised, was Shakespeare. Estimates vary, but between seventy-five and a hundred Shakespearian translations were created during this golden era of Parsi theatre. The first recognisable adaptation was of Cymbeline in 1871; others followed thick and fast. As Sisson also recognised, these adaptations were not remotely purist, even by the indulgent
standards of the versions I had encountered in the western United States. Texts were gutted for their moving parts and reassembled into appealing commercial formulas: sensation was amped up, plots and characters more strongly delineated. An improving moral gloss was invariably applied.
Music was central in every sense. Space was made for ‘orchestras’, usually assembled from the classical core of harmonium plus tabla and nakkara drums, also amplified by western instruments such as the clarinet. The critic Ania Loomba describes an Urdu version of Othello performed in 1918 that opens with Brabantio entertaining the hero with dance and music, followed by a duet between Roderigo and Iago. Sisson noted a version of Titus Andronicus that squeezed in an English music-hall number.
Parsi actors worked a great deal harder than most of their British brethren: they were required to sing, dance and do acrobatics, as well as have voices strong enough to carry across auditoriums packed to the rafters. Women were initially forbidden from performing, so there was competition to find sweet-voiced, girlish young men who could play female parts. Even once professional actresses began to appear from the 1870s onwards – to howls of outrage from traditionalists – men predominated, often named for their most famous roles. One, the honey-voiced Pestanji Framji Madan, became known as ‘Pesu Avan’ after the character he played in a Gujarati adaptation of Pericles.
Competition was cut-throat. There are tales, as in Elizabethan England, that companies paid spies to attend rival performances and copy down what they heard and saw. Other companies hired claques to hiss their opponents. Audiences expected a great deal: one critic took a production of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves to task for having fewer than forty thieves on stage (though conceded that the company had imported a live tree from England). The latest theatrical technology offered spectators ever-more awe-inspiring effects: trapdoors, flying beds, dazzling lighting changes, real running water.
For a flavour of what it might have been like to sit among the audience, there is the testimony of a nineteenth-century actor whose company brought a Marathi version of Macbeth to Mumbai:
On the night of its first production the tumultuous enthusiasm of the audience reached such a high pitch that they continued shouting ‘once more!’ (meaning repeat the sleepwalking scene), declaring that they would not allow the play to continue until they were satisfied. Then the great Ganapatrao, who played Macbeth with distinction, came forward and lectured the audience: ‘This is not a music-hall, where you can encore a song as many times as you like. If you still persist in your demand, realise that such a consummate piece of acting cannot be repeated devoid of its context. Yes, I shall start the whole play again, and will need three more hours to reach this point. It is already one in the morning; but I have no objection if you get the necessary police sanction.’ The effect was instantaneous; the play proceeded.
There are reports of such dire warnings not succeeding, and the action shuddering to a halt in order to allow songs to be sung three, four, five extra times. Some shows dragged on until dawn.
Above all, this was Indianised Shakespeare: as well as being translated into Indian languages, the plays were freely relocated to the subcontinent and adjusted for local conditions. In the New Alfred Dramatic Company’s Urdu Twelfth Night from 1905, Dilera, Princess of Baghdad (Viola), and Jafar (Sebastian) are travelling on a train rather than a ship when they are caught in bad weather. A bridge collapses, the twins are flung into the water far below – Shakespeare’s storm reimagined for the largest railway nation in the world.
Worlds often collide in Parsi scripts, mirroring the cosmopolitan make-up of Mumbai. A Parsi Hamlet renamed Khoon-e-Nahaq (‘Unjustified Killing/Blood’) from 1898 featured stage designs closely based on reports of Henry Irving’s hugely popular British production, but was set in a medieval Indian court filled with Kathak dancers, and out of respect to its Muslim context Gertrude was poisoned with a glass of milk rather than wine. An Urdu Comedy of Errors from 1912 by the well-known playwright Narayan Prasad Betab, nicely renamed Gorakh Dhandha (‘A Puzzle’), opens with, of all things, a spectacular scene in a coal mine. ‘It has not,’ writes the scholar R. K. Yajnik, whose 1933 study of Indian theatre is still invaluable, ‘reverence for the original.’
Yajnik was perhaps missing the point. Parsi theatre managers and playwrights had little interest in reverence; their driving need was to cram in audiences and beat their competitors. The Lucknow-born playwright Syed Mehdi Hasan Ahsan, who began working in the Parsi theatre in the late 1890s and was one of the earliest to translate Shakespeare into Urdu – Khoon-e-Nahaq is his – put it like this in the preface to Bazm-e-Fani (1898), the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet Sisson had mentioned:
I have not taken the help of Shakespeare’s poetic imagination, but built a little mosque of my own design because, in my opinion, Shakespeare’s way of thinking does not harmonise with the Indian way of thinking. That is why the plays have been greatly altered.
‘A mosque of my own design’: the metaphor chosen by Ahsan, a Muslim, is revealing. Shakespeare may have provided the foundations, but Parsi playwrights felt little compunction about demolishing his dramatic fabric and rebuilding plays from the ground up.
To me, one of the most appealing facets of these adaptations is the way they sometimes cock a snook at the very people who had exported Shakespeare to India as part of the noble colonial project, the British. An early version of The Taming of the Shrew performed at Surat in 1852 has the literal title ‘A Bad European Woman Brought to her Senses’.
Even more deliciously, the scholar Poonam Trivedi records a Hindi version of The Comedy of Errors from 1882 by Munshi Ratan Chand that bears some fascinating changes. In Shakespeare’s version of the story, just as the plot builds to its climax, there is a scene in which the horrified servant Dromio – continually being mistaken for his twin brother – tells his master how he is being pursued by a ‘kitchen wench … all grease’ who has convinced herself he is her lover. ‘She is spherical, like a globe,’ Dromio says, then launches into a laboured series of similes identifying precisely which bits of the ‘globe’ she reminds him of:
ANTIPHOLUS In what part of her body stands Ireland?
DROMIO Marry, sir, in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs.
ANTIPHOLUS Where Scotland?
DROMIO I found it by the barrenness, hard in the palm of her hand.
ANTIPHOLUS Where France?
DROMIO In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir.
ANTIPHOLUS Where England?
DROMIO I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them. But I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.
ANTIPHOLUS Where Spain?
DROMIO Faith, I saw it not, but I felt it hot in her breath.
ANTIPHOLUS Where America, the Indies?
DROMIO O, sir, upon her nose, all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadas of carracks to be ballast at her nose.
ANTIPHOLUS Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
DROMIO O, sir, I did not look so low.
It is rough stuff: that line about the ‘heir’ must have got a boozy groan at the law college of Gray’s Inn, where Errors was performed in December 1594. But this comic Grand Tour must also have resonated with Shakespeare’s well-to-do audience, who would have heard of the places Dromio mentions, even if they had never visited.
Working on his adaptation – wittily entitled Bhramjalak Natak (‘A Web of Confusion’) – Ratan Chand realised that although his own audience in late-nineteenth-century Mumbai was more cosmopolitan, the scene needed an overhaul. Several of his alterations are worth observing. First, the ‘Indies’ (here referring to America) are gone; and instead of a nod to England’s ‘chalky cliffs’ at Dover, it is India that stands, patriotically, ‘in [the woman’s] face, for just as Hindustan is the best of all countries, so was her face the best part of her person
’.
Second, England doesn’t disappear entirely – it is relegated to the location occupied by the Netherlands in Shakespeare’s text, the bottom. ‘This was such a tiny country,’ Chand’s Dromio character scornfully remarks, ‘that exceedingly hard as I looked, I could find it nowhere. It must be hidden among those parts of the body I didn’t look at.’
I found this gratifying: Shakespeare’s text not only translated, but used to reorder the world according to an Indian perspective. The tiny, frigid British Isles were exactly where they should be – at the arse-end of nowhere.
DOUBLE CHIN REMOVAL, read the sign. JAW LINE ENHANCEMENT.
I was outside the address, or thought I was, but all I could see were dilapidated apartment blocks, paint coming off the concrete, and a scattering of small businesses. I wasn’t expecting armies of men carrying clapperboards, but I’d been hoping for more from my first visit to a Bollywood studio than this. Was the studio doubling as a Botox clinic? Could it be hidden inside the estate agent’s next door?
Just after 9.30 a.m., I was already dead on my feet. Jostling north through Mumbai at rush hour had been like swimming through an onrush of warm tar. It had taken the taxi the best part of two hours to get here from my hotel in the southern district of Marine Lines, a journey of roughly sixteen miles. The driver had pleaded to take the Worli suspension bridge, which elegantly solves the problem of Mumbai’s geography – the fact that much of it is concentrated in a narrow spit of sand less than a mile wide – by ignoring it altogether, swooping out from Worli beach in a lordly sweep before reconnecting with dry land a few miles further north. Miscalculating the exchange rate of the toll, I’d insisted we go through the city instead. Every so often, as we got wedged in a hooting mob of motor rickshaws or overflowing buses, young men clinging casually to the doors, I caught his weary glance in the rear-view mirror. I had a lot to learn about Mumbai.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 26
