That single damning sentence – a solitary shelf of a ‘good’ European library worth more than the output of several different languages stretching back thousands of years – proved momentous. When the English Education Act was passed later in 1835, it allocated funds to western-style educational projects only. Sanskrit and Arabic, so nonchalantly dismissed by Macaulay, were out; Shakespeare and his language – the language of government, administration, literature, empire – were in.
To get the tenor of this debate, the way it recast shabby commercial and political self-interest as an act of selfless intellectual endeavour, one need only look up the January 1850 edition of the Edinburgh Review, which published an account of a select committee report on the subject of ‘Colonisation’ given to the House of Lords in 1847. It contains the following passage:
It is a noble work to plant the foot of England and extend her sceptre by the banks of streams unnamed, and over regions yet unknown and to conquer, not by the tyrannous subjugation of inferior races, but by the victories of mind over brute matter and blind mechanic obstacles. A yet nobler work is it to diffuse over a few created worlds the laws of Alfred, the language of Shakespeare, and the Christian religion, the last great heritage of man.
‘Yet nobler …’ In this account, the imposition of Shakespeare is quite literally God’s work.
Macaulay’s Minute explicitly stated that his reforms were aimed at creating ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect’. This, too, became reality. In 1844, the governor general, Henry Hardinge, passed a resolution ‘assuring preference in selection for public office to Indians who had distinguished themselves in European literature’. In doing so, he ensured that generations of aspiring Indian civil servants would experience the night terror recorded in this anonymous mandarin’s ditty, of not having revised the doyen of late-Victorian Shakespeare critics, A. C. Bradley:
I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.
Mountstuart Elphinstone, the man whose name bespatters so much of Mumbai, was firmly on the other side of this debate. He had been a passionate Orientalist, a knowledgeable admirer of traditional government in the Maratha states and a respectful proponent of Maratha culture, and as governor of Mumbai had resisted the introduction of English. It was one of many gloomy ironies that the college founded in his name in the city in 1856 – and at which, sixty years later, C. J. Sisson would get a job teaching Shakespeare – became a bastion of the new learning.
I FOUND MUMBAI A MAZE, quite apart from the traffic and the people (20 million of them, someone said, though there were so many informal settlements no one was really sure). The city’s drive to decolonise had rendered the street plan a tangle of double meanings that would have taxed the most ingenious of semioticians. Most people still used the old names. There seemed to be a cheerful acceptance that none of us could say with certainty where we were.
What did one even call the city? The change from ‘Bombay’ to ‘Mumbai’ had happened in 1995 at the behest of a hard-line right-wing state government. The government argued that ‘Bombay’ was a corruption of the name for the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi, and that the city should be renamed accordingly. Others utterly rejected this theory on combined etymological and political grounds, arguing that in fact ‘Bombay’ derived from the Portuguese bom bahia (‘good bay’) after the old European settlement, and that to deny the city’s colonial inheritance was both ignorant and ideologically dangerous. Which side one was on revealed much about one’s attitude to life and politics. Wary about causing offence, I took to mumbling the name of the city until the person I was speaking to had declared their hand.
I was also trying to navigate past a number of investigative dead ends. None of the researchers I’d spoken to had been able to help me get access to Parsi theatre scripts – difficult to find, almost never translated back into English. (‘I would love to get a PhD student to work on the archive,’ a professor told me, ‘but no one wants to do it. It’s so unfashionable now, and there isn’t the funding.’)
A morning trip to Elphinstone College itself – a teetering nineteenth-century pile that had the morbid whimsy of a Victorian sanatorium – also turned up little. In a dank classroom deep inside the building, staff and students had listened politely as I prattled on about the nocturnal activities of C. J. Sisson. But there were no marks of his presence, or of the university dramatic societies that had given birth to the first Parsi companies in the 1850s. Shakespeare was still taught, one academic sighed as we patrolled the Gormenghastian corridors, but kids these days wanted ‘business English’: more useful on the job market. It was hard to dispute the logic.
One afternoon I walked through the crowds down Grant Road (now Maulana Shaukat Ali Road) in search of the theatres that had once clustered there. Nearly all had gone, and the early cinemas that had replaced them in the 1920s and 1930s were shuttered and forlorn, victims of multiplexes and cheap DVDs. The area known as Pila House – a corruption of ‘playhouse’ – had reverted to a previous incarnation: it was now the name of a famous brothel, part of the red-light district of Falkland Road/Patthe Bapurao Marg. Some forms of entertainment never went out of fashion.
At the junction of Grant and Falkland Roads, amid a jostling flow of pedestrians, yellow-and-black taxis, motorbikes and peanut-wallahs, I stood in front of the famous Alfred Talkies. It was one of the few remaining survivors, having begun life as the Ripon theatre in the 1880s, home to many Parsi plays, before converting to a picture house in 1932.
The Alfred was still an impressive sight: recently painted a daring shade of peach, it had a resplendent three-storey facade boasting a trio of Corinthian pilasters and an irregular arrangement of windows that gave it a raffish, gap-toothed appearance. A hand-painted marquee stretched the length of the first floor, advertising a battalion of macho, gun-toting Bollywood heroes. Just behind, partially obscured, I could see the older sign in blocky black letters: RIPON THEATRE. It was said that behind the screen there was still a functioning stage.
Dashing through a gap in the traffic, trying to shut out the roaring din all around me, I scrutinised the bill. The Alfred appeared to specialise in so-called ‘morning shows’, softcore porn spliced into old action movies or romances. An academic paper had declared these yet another example of hybridising masala culture, multiple ingredients stirred together to create a uniquely Indian fusion. Did I have the courage to find out? I felt my nerve failing me. I wasn’t sure I could stomach a morning show, especially one seen at 4 p.m. on a Sunday.
Movies, movies, movies. Every spare millimetre of wall was covered with posters, twenty or thirty at a time. Explosions, helicopters, the smouldering eyes of lovers, pendulous bosoms, striding men in sunglasses packing heat: the requirements seemed as severe and unyielding as the Petrarchan sonnet. SUPERHIT, MEGAHIT, BLOCKBUSTER, TOP GROSSER, they yelled.
The hornet-striped rickshaws buzzing around town were emblazoned with home-made tributes: Salman Khan in the new Ek Tha Tiger, a stencil of Big B in the old movie The Great Gambler. Songs from the movies warbled from every roadside barber’s stall, keening, seductive women’s voices enveloped by swooning strings. One day I passed a Christian church. The sign read, ‘The Oscar for Best Supporting Actor Goes to … God Almighty.’
Surrounded by such imprecations, it seemed churlish to resist. But I’d read so many conflicting accounts of early Indian cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare that I hardly knew where to begin. There was cautious consent that a version of The Merchant of Venice called Dil Farosh (a punning title that means ‘The Seller of Hearts’/‘One who Has Sold His Heart’), produced in 1927 and based on Syed Mehdi Hasan Ahsan’s wildly popular adaptation from 1900, was the first full version of
Shakespeare to be seen on the Indian screen. Thereafter, though, the historians splintered into vehement disagreement.
Khoon-e-Nahaq (‘Unjustified Killing/Blood’), a rendering of Hamlet from 1928 again based on Ahsan’s earlier Parsi script, might have come next; unless it was a silent version of Cymbeline drawn from Betab, Meetha Zehar (‘Sweet Poison’). Some rejected this sequence entirely, insisting that Savkari Pash (‘Moneylender’s Clutches’, also known as ‘The Indian Shylock’) from 1925 by the Marathi-Hindi director Baburao Painter was in fact the earliest Merchant of Venice because of its central theme.
I didn’t much care who was first across the line, but how could one not adore the titles? Zan Mureed (‘Henpecked Love’), an Antony and Cleopatra released in 1936; Hathili Dulhan (‘The Stubborn Bride’), a Parsi-influenced Taming of the Shrew from 1932. None of these pictures had appeared in any of the British- or American-published filmographies of Shakespearian cinema I’d consulted; in fact most of them contained barely a single non-white director. Shakespeare film studies, so modish in the western academy, had done its utmost to ignore Indian cinema’s rich seam of adaptations.
Were any of these movies still extant? Could one watch them? I ransacked every shop and street stall I passed. DVD boxes accumulated in my hotel room, a colourful jumble of remastered classics with eye-searing period covers, cheap pirated copies, and sleek modern releases. Chori Chori (roughly translatable as ‘With Utmost Stealth’), a warmly admired comedy from 1956, starred Nargis – the immortal star of Mother India, whose portrayal of a saintly village woman battling for the sake of her sons helped the movie become one of the most famous in Indian cinematic history. Her love interest in Chori Chori was the suave lothario Raj Kapoor; technically the film was an unofficial remake of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, but it was also reputed to borrow from The Taming of the Shrew. It went on the pile.
Raj was the elder brother of Shashi Kapoor, who’d begun in Shakespeareana with the Kendals; though he’d never performed with the troupe himself, Raj had obviously been bitten by the Shakespearian bug: a later film he directed, Bobby (1973), was supposedly a version of Romeo and Juliet. Teasing out the Kendal connection, I also managed to find 36 Chowringhee Lane, a film from 1981 starring Jennifer Kendal (sister of Felicity), about an Anglo-Indian teacher living in Kolkata and teaching Shakespeare. These went on the pile too.
Anything earlier than Chori Chori was a definite no-go, I was told: best to ask at the National Film Archive in Pune a hundred miles south-west. I was still trying to get someone there to answer my calls, but I booked a train ticket anyway.
I was luckier with modern films, ones that bore little relation to classic Bollywood. The Malayali auteur Jayaraj Rajasekharan Nair had produced two well-regarded adaptations, Kaliyattam (1997), which places a version of Othello around a performance of the incantatory Keralan dance form theyyam; and Kannaki (2002), which has heavy echoes of Antony and Cleopatra.
I chased down ever-more tangential titles. The Last Lear (2007), a creaky vehicle for the actor Amitabh Bachchan about a retired thespian who knows all the plays by heart. Sangeeta Datta’s Life Goes On (2009), another King Lear, this time set in the British Bengali community. As I watched shop assistants scurrying from store cupboards to stock computers and back again, I asked myself if there existed Indian films that weren’t based in some way on Shakespeare.
Wondering whether it would be possible to find traces of anything earlier, I took myself off to the Chor Bazaar flea market. I’d heard of a stall called Bollywood Bazaar, a famous centre for the secondary market in movie-related items. I might not be able to buy the films, but perhaps there’d be a Shakespearian gleam or two in the dust. A poster for Sweet Poison? A publicity still for Henpecked Love?
When I arrived, the place looked promising. It was a joyous clutter, a cross between a junk shop and a shrine, barely roomier than the taxi in which I’d got there. So many items dangled above the door – three Indonesian masks, a sombrero, an electric guitar, a bronze fire bucket – that it was perilous to duck in.
The owner started on the patter even as I was adjusting to the gloom. I was interested in posters, artefacts, props, all original, all super-good quality? Right place, no question.
There was the sweet scent of mothballs and damp paper. In the back of the shop was what appeared to be a full set of Roman armour.
The owner rapped it smartly with a knuckle: ding! ‘Bollywood, 1960s! Excellent price!’
I stressed that I was researching the history of Shakespeare in Indian cinema, a big book, very serious project. He didn’t skip a beat. Nodding gravely, he scanned my list with cool professionalism.
He clicked his tongue. ‘Some, some. But these very rare films.’
After about ten minutes, working in tandem, we had turned up a few posters, but they were titles I’d already come across: interesting to see, but hardly the cinematic rarities I was after.
I spotted a pile of photographs in a corner. He walked me over sadly. ‘Very minor movies, sir …’
I flipped through: head shots. The faces were seductive, coy, noble, stern, gazing full of long-lost meaning into a permanent middle distance. I was no expert, but I didn’t recognise a single one.
Then I came across a face I did recognise: that of Raj Kapoor. Here he was, looking terribly young, being cradled by an actress I didn’t know. The gesture was of – what? Exhaustion? Forgiveness? Consolation? It was maternal, somehow, and I thought immediately of Gertrude and Hamlet. There were many versions of Hamlet in Indian film, but none starring Kapoor that I knew of (a pity: he had a damaged grace that might have suited the role).
The actress was unbearably beautiful: a swan-like neck, dark almond eyes, with the hint of something remote in her looks – Tibet? Nepal? She wore an expression of sadness and forbearance.
The owner ran a fingernail along the text at the bottom: Main Nashe Mein Hoon.
‘Late fifties, I am thinking. Title means, “I am drunk”.’ He tipped his thumb towards his teeth. ‘Raj Kapoor often drunk!’
Who was the woman?
‘Ah, Mala Sinha! Very beautiful. Many movies, big, big star.’
The name stirred something – had she been in a Shakespeare? Which one?
But the shopkeeper had already moved on. With a conjuror’s flourish he pulled out an A5-sized copy of a poster. In the centre was the title, huge and bold, white-on-black on a curlicued frame: Romeo and Juliet.
This was more like it. I remembered reading about the movie: another Nargis film, it was meant to be based on the Hollywood version of 1936 with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. It was filmed during 1947, the year of independence and partition – an interesting time, to say the least, to make a film about love across the barricades.
At the top of the poster Nargis looked adoringly up at D. K. Sapru’s Romeo, who wore a European-style jerkin with a gold chain. The text proclaimed, ‘NARGIS ART CONCERN presents the world’s greatest love story … Romance supreme against a background of clashing swords, brought to thrilling reality.’ Below was an inset panel: ‘THE FAMED BALCONY SCENE: Moments of rapturous bliss stolen while danger awaits …’ The address of the studio was in tiny type: 335 Grant Road. I must have walked past it the other day.
I was determined to watch Nargis’s Romeo and Juliet at the National Film Archive, and finding a poster – particularly a poster I had never seen reproduced – was a step closer. This was definitely coming with me back to England, along with the photo and a couple of other posters.
‘All together … four thousand rupees.’
At Indian prices, it was a shockingly high amount: £40. The photo looked authentic, but the posters were only copies, for all that they had been aged with what looked suspiciously like tea. I’d fondly imagined I might have been able to get originals for that.
The owner looked at me in genuine pity. ‘Originals much, much more expensive.’ He steepled his fingers together. ‘Sir – sorry – I would not sell original if you giv
e me … one thousand dollars!’
We settled on R2,000. ‘I am not making business with you, sir,’ he said as we concluded. ‘This is pleasure for me.’
I was surprised that he had such intimate knowledge of the history of Shakespeare in Indian cinema. He looked gratified, and lowered his voice.
‘BBC call me,’ he said. ‘Man from BBC. They make TV programme about Shakespeare. They come here to Bollywood Bazaar. They film right here!’
I remembered. There had been a documentary, presented by Felicity Kendal, telling part of the story of Shakespeareana and her early years in India. Bhardwaj had briefly been interviewed; was there also a scene in a shop? Possibly.
I felt suddenly deflated: bruising to have been beaten to the scene by a British television crew. Indian cinema’s lack of originality was catching.
As I made a fuss of gathering up my photocopies, I noticed a small bust, a couple of inches high, leaning against a snuff box decorated with a Mughal miniature. Shakespeare.
‘From Goa,’ the owner said. ‘Very, very old.’
It seemed unlikely; I suspected a canny piece of TV set dressing. This was Bollywood, after all.
In spare hours between interviews, in the cool of the morning or the thick, treacly heat of evening, I hunkered in my hotel room, feeding my laptop with DVD after DVD and searching for corner-of-the-eye glimpses of Shakespeare in Hindi cinema.
The first film I watched was Bobby, Raj Kapoor’s 1973 classic. Regarded as taboo-breaking for having introduced illicit teenage romance to mainstream Bollywood, it did so with extensive debts to other, older stories. Depicting the tortured romance between the plutocratic son of a Mumbai businessman (played by Raj’s son Rishi) and Bobby, the daughter of an impoverished Goan fisherman, its basic plot device owed plenty to Romeo and Juliet – most obviously in its portrayal of a love affair against the odds, but more interestingly (I thought) in the way it addressed some of the polarities that divided Indian society: rich versus poor, young versus old, Hindu versus Christian, modernising/westernised versus conservative/traditional.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 29
