He emitted an avuncular chuckle. ‘You know the Bollywood interpretation of copyright? We call it the right to copy.’
Sanjeev Kumar, by then one of the most recognisable faces in Bollywood, had been persuaded to make Angoor on the basis that he would get quite literally double the screen time, playing both Antipholus characters, here called Ashok. One Ashok is living a contented if not wholly blameless life in a quiet modern-day Indian town with his wife, sister-in-law and a mistress around the corner; the other Ashok just happens to be in the area. The character actor Deven Verma played the Bahadurs, servants to the Ashoks. Screen trickery did the rest. Angoor means ‘grapes’ in Hindi. Gulzar permitted himself a smile: it was as wilfully nonsensical as anything else.
‘There are plenty of stories of twins, but two sets of twins – that was only Shakespeare. There is no other example in literature anywhere that I have come across. So I wanted to adapt it.’
There was even a cunning Shakespearian joke for those watching out for it, right at the film’s conclusion, when the series of confusions came to an end and the two sets of twins were finally reunited.
ASHOK I OK, tell me. Do you have a mole on your right shoulder?
ASHOK II No.
ASHOK I Neither do I. We must be brothers, then! [laughs]
The reference is to the climax of Twelfth Night, when Viola and her long-lost twin Sebastian confirm each other’s identities by describing the ‘mole’ on their father’s brow. I thought it a nicely nonchalant touch.
Gulzar shrugged. ‘We talk about adaptation, but of course this is the same process for Shakespeare: he himself is adapting, from Plautus, from other comedies. That’s how it is.’
I wondered if there was another reason The Comedy of Errors proved attractive to Indian film-makers. As its critics were forever lamenting, Bollywood had long been dominated by the requirements of genre, expectations about character types or plot development as rigid as medieval chivalric codes or the operation of the Japanese tea ceremony. Despite its Shakespearian ancestry, Angoor also fitted neatly into the category of so-called ‘lost-and-found’ movies.
Films such as Kismet, Awara, Waqt and the most renowned classic of all, Mother India (1957), portray nuclear families broken up by circumstances beyond the characters’ control – an errant or absent husband, natural disaster, the intercession of violence or evil. Waqt (‘Time’, 1965) begins with an earthquake that sunders a husband, wife and their three sons. The action-comedy Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) features a plot line that would have given even Shakespeare migraines: three brothers are separated as children and raised in three separate households in three different religions. After a preposterous series of coincidences, all are reunited to take revenge on their mutual foe.
The lost-and-found genre didn’t merely allow for a blizzard of joyous confusion. It was also, like many things in Bollywood, a way to reflect Indian audiences’ concerns and anxieties back at them. Millions of families had been wrenched apart during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947; increasing urbanisation had separated millions more. Religion, class, caste, wealth: India remained, as the newspaper headlines kept insisting, a country fractiously divided. In a land of 1.25 billion people and growing, it would not be hard, like the Ashoks, to lose yourself.
There was one moment I was especially keen to know about in Angoor: the final few frames, which depicted a portrait of Shakespeare played by an elderly Indian actor sporting beard and ruff – a frank acknowledgement of Gulzar’s source, but also (it seemed to me) a kind of repossession, a literal demonstration that Shakespeare was now Indian.
Gulzar smiled thinly: top marks. ‘I didn’t want to make Shakespeare English. I didn’t want him to be a stranger to the audience. You know, one reason Shakespeare is so good is that he is a mix. You have heard of nautanki?’
Nandini had mentioned it, the folk theatre popular in northern India; it had influenced Parsi theatre too.
‘Nautanki is a mixed form, prose, poetry, songs, music. A comedian also, for a relief for the audience. Those shows went on all night. Indian screenplays, they’re long – three hours, four hours. We used to have regular comedians, too, as part of the subplot, to engage the audience. Shakespeare does that, like the gravedigger in Hamlet. He knows how to keep the audience engaged.’
Rising to show us out, he paused. ‘I was talking to Vishal Bhardwaj just now on the phone,’ he said. ‘You know he is thinking about a new movie? I encouraged him. I said, “The ground belongs to Shakespeare, you have built your house on it.”’
A learned reference to Syed Mehdi Hasan Ahsan’s ‘mosque’, or happy coincidence? Bollywood was full of copies, after all.
He bowed formally and, Hollywood-style, also offered me his hand. ‘This is the right way of putting it: the land belongs to Shakespeare, the house belongs to us.’
Everything in Mumbai had a touch of melodrama. The sober broadsheet pushed under the door of my hotel room was a hair-raising read, full of cartoonish journalese that wouldn’t have disgraced William Randolph Hearst’s hacks at their yellowest. ‘Gay Man Faces Cops’ Chin Music,’ read one headline about a man who’d been violently attacked by police. ‘Dalit Honour Killing: Kin Against Tardy CID Probe,’ read another. Even dull-as-ditchwater stories about rail fares were given the gee-whizz subediting treatment. Indian CNBC’s coverage of the forthcoming budget was being advertised on billboards forty feet high.
These were as nothing, though, compared to the real news: Bollywood and its comings and goings. Every paper had a lavish colour section containing the latest filmi gossip, and on the web things were more breathless still. I tried to get my head around the cast of characters: a parade of interchangeable nymphets, typically papped on the arms of rugged older men on their way into tedious-looking PR events. The stories were tissue thin: a male actor was proclaimed to ‘have feelings’ for a female colleague because a dance sequence had been mildly rearranged; a minor disagreement on Twitter had spiralled (opined a source, anonymous of course) into a venomous ‘cat fight’.
Even so, Bollywood seemed innocent, certainly compared with the hard-bitten celebrity coverage of the US or Britain. There was talk of ‘crushes’ and ‘dating’; a screen kiss in this still-conservative society was a major event. And it was a world on first-name terms: Sallu, SRK, Big B, Bebo, Chi Chi (‘little finger’ in Punjabi, but which had somewhat ruder connotations when applied to the actor Govinda). Bollywood seemed simultaneously to share the characteristics of a shimmering royal court and the dysfunctional family just down the street.
I delighted in the lingo. ‘B-Town’ was, grandiosely, a Bollywood metonym for Mumbai. A ‘grey role’ was one in which an actor who specialised in villainous characters attempted to transition to more sympathetic ones. ‘Item number’ I’d heard before: the dubious tradition of shoehorning in an arousing dance sequence regardless of the plot (‘item’ being a derogatory term for the women who danced). To my disappointment, a ‘starer’ wasn’t a film one stared at in horror or surprise, but a film starring someone big (videt, ‘multi-starer’). I liked the concept of ‘acting pricey’ – getting above yourself, especially on set.
No wonder lexicographers agree that Indian English – melded by the newest technologies, hungrily absorbing parcels of languages such as Hindi and Punjabi – is not just a dialect but a language in its own right. In the west, it’s often treated as the butt of a joke: there is a bestselling book called Entry from Backside Only devoted to what are perceived as the Mistress Quickly-level malapropisms of ‘Indlish’ or ‘Hinglish’ – turning the concept of ‘passing time’ into a noun, ‘timepass’; or ‘preponing’ (instead of postponing) appointments by moving them forward, etc.
Such things are still often dismissed with a snigger, particularly as many of these linguistic innovations come from the ground up, from the millions of Indians working their way out of poverty by taking English lessons and getting a middle-class job in the IT or service sectors. But I relished the language. It m
ade the English that came out of my own mouth sound ponderous and auntly. I couldn’t help feeling that Shakespeare – a worshipper of the crowdedly over-extended metaphor and the crafty half-buried meaning – would have warmed to it, too.
There is certainly one way he would have found the Indian film world congenial. Gulzar was dead right: Shakespeare’s plays, like a significant percentage of commercial Indian cinema, are magnificent in their unoriginality.
For all that people instinctively regard him as a supreme creator, it is more accurate to describe the playwright as a uniquely gifted magpie who plundered everything around him for clues, hints, suggestions, anything that could fire an idea. The written sources he read and digested were in the hundreds, and are still being chased down; less durable influences (phrases borrowed, people met or observed) will surely never be recovered. The more time one spends with Shakespeare, the more one realises his world is a glittering collage of others’ worlds; that his brilliance lies in his ability to make something fresh from the most trite and cliché-ridden of materials.
The post-Romantic obsession with solitary, remote genius would have been near-unrecognisable to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. During the Renaissance, the concept known as copia, the ability to present humdrum matter with abundance and grace – and thus exhibit one’s learning – was a cornerstone of the education system. Grammar-school boys like Shakespeare were expected to be copious, and drilled relentlessly so they might become so: inscribing set phrases from writers ancient and modern into their commonplace books, memorising and regurgitating biblical quotations, learning to scan and fillet texts for anything recyclable. Desiderius Erasmus’s textbook De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (‘On the Twofold Abundance of Expressions and Ideas’, 1512), famously includes several hundred different ways to say ‘thank you for your letter’.
For moderns, the word ‘imitation’ carries the taint of something plagiarised, knocked-off; for Elizabethan writers, schooled in the Erasmian arts of imitatio, it was high praise. The critic Robert Miola puts it nicely: ‘The genius lay not in the invention but in the translation.’
Translation was what Shakespeare spent much of his life engaged in: literally from sources in languages such as Latin, ancient Greek, French and Italian; but also from English texts in many forms – histories, books of philosophy, avant-garde poetry, sermons, official documents, broadsides, other plays. The most thoroughgoing attempt to trace and reprint these texts, Geoffrey Bullough’s monumental Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, fills eight stout volumes, occupied its author from 1957 to 1975, and even then is judged incomplete. Shakespeare apparently found it impossible to write without first examining from every conceivable angle what others had done with similar material, only then working out how to overmaster them.
Take Othello, the play Vishal Bhardwaj had so smartly remade as Omkara. Shakespeare’s primary source was a tale from 1565 by the Ferrarese scholar Giambattista Giraldi, nicknamed Cinthio, which gave him the outline of a scheming ensign who convinces his Moorish captain that the captain’s wife has been unfaithful. (No English version seems to have been available in the early 1600s when Shakespeare was writing the play, so he must have read Cinthio in Italian or French.) To this Shakespeare added picturesque real-life details drawn from a translation of Gasparo Contarini’s account of Venetian government, Richard Knolles’s The Generall Historie of the Turks (1603), Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and a travelogue from 1550 by the Tunisian diplomat and writer Leo Africanus, translated into English as A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600).
Leo, born a Muslim and enslaved by Christian pirates, was freed by Pope Leo X (hence his adopted name) and converted to Christianity; his unusual life story might have supplied a model for the character of Othello, as might the 1600 visit to London of the Moroccan ambassador Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun. Even the hero’s name – one thing none of these sources supplied – is not entirely original. The first version of Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in his Humour (1598) has a jealous husband called Thorello; Shakespeare borrowed the idea, changing the syllables just enough to get away with it.
Another example of Shakespeare’s shameless willingness to borrow from others comes in Antony and Cleopatra. Enobarbus’s lustrous set-piece speech about the Egyptian queen is deservedly famous:
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that
The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke […]
Yet the play is so intimate with its source, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans in the 1579 translation by Thomas North, that the similarities are uncanny:
To take [Cleopatra’s] barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of herself: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her …
Here copia comes perilously close to outright copying. Despite being renowned as an example of Shakespeare’s surging late style, Enobarbus’s speech is largely in the voice of Plutarch filtered through Thomas North. Only a few deft poetical touches lift it from workmanlike historianese into scintillating brilliance: ‘beaten gold’ for the poop; ‘tune of flutes kept stroke’ rather than ‘kept stroke in rowing after the sound of music of flutes’.
Shakespeare may have sometimes borrowed too much, even by broad Jacobethan standards. In 1592, when the Warwickshireman was emerging as a dramatist in London, the playwright Robert Greene accused Shakespeare of plagiarism, calling him ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ – a young pretender who stole from his older, better-educated betters. Shakespeare perhaps remembered the slight, and got his own back. Nearly two decades later, his rival long since dead, he filched a story from Greene’s novella Pandosto of a king who becomes convinced that his wife has slept with his best friend. The play became The Winter’s Tale.
‘Translation, not invention’: I thought of Bollywood, and what the film critic Tejaswini Ganti has theorised as the process of ‘Indianising’ pre-existing cinematic material, either films from the west or older Indian classics – not quite remakes, exactly, more a subtle process of ingestion and digestion that went back to Indian cinema’s origins in Parsi theatre and its own extravagant amalgam of sources. Gulzar’s description of Indian copyright as the ‘right to copy’ was glib (and, for that matter, second-hand – I heard the line in India at least twice), but it wasn’t a million miles from the truth. The Indian Copyright Act, amended in 1999, has an unusually wide conception of what exists in the public domain, and vests originality in how an idea is expressed rather than the idea itself. In the UK and US, the law focuses on the idea’s intrinsic originality, which results in something much more restrictive.
Shakespeare, who worked in a world where intellectual property was at best an uncertain and emerging concept, would surely have fitted into this environment with ease. It was sometimes said that if he were alive now, he would be working as a Hollywood screenwriter. I wondered whether he mightn’t have been happier right here in Mumbai.
Needless to say, the British had intended none of this. Determined to impose their own brand of education upon their subject populations, they had brought Shakespeare to the newly founded schools of India and other colonies partly as an instrument of political control. It was in the classroom that the colonial master could be obediently copied, a new class of Indians forged.
Though English had been taught in missionary schools from the early ei
ghteenth century, it wasn’t until the beginning of the nineteenth that the project became systematised. After the signing of the Charter Act of 1813, which brought the Indian territories controlled by the almighty East India Company under the direct control of the British crown, western-style academic institutions began to flourish. The first, the Hindu College in Kolkata, was founded in 1817; similar colleges followed in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and elsewhere. But a thorny issue arose: what should these new colleges teach? A curriculum that reflected local conditions, languages and customs, or one imported from England? The question raged between so-called ‘Anglicists’ and ‘Orientalists’. In the end, the Anglicists won: if India was to be dragged out of backwardness and barbarity, then it needed the guiding light of European education.
One man who certainly believed so was Thomas Babington Macaulay, who in 1834, still many years away from completing his epic History of England, travelled to India and returned to Britain flushed with reforming pedagogical zeal. Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ on the subject, based on a speech he gave to parliament in February 1835 during the debates about Indian education, has become justly notorious. ‘I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic,’ the Honourable Member for Leeds announced:
but I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 28
