Shakespeare haunted Dutt, or perhaps the other way around – most obviously during his career in mainstream theatre, where his Othello was acclaimed as the greatest in Indian history, so famous that in a 1961 Bengali melodrama called Saptapadi, which featured a scene from the play, it was the rasping-voiced Dutt who had redubbed the Moor’s speeches because it was said no one else was qualified to do them. (Revenge for Baishnava Charan Adhya, perhaps.)
But Shakespeare also nourished Dutt’s politics. In the 1960s, declaring that he was finished with staging English-language performances for uncomprehending audiences (‘they sat there with clenched fists – pretending to enjoy it’), he resolved to adapt and act the plays in Bengali. He began with a modern-dress Julius Caesar (described as ‘through contemporary eyes’) in 1964, with Dutt himself as Caesar. The idea developed of taking the plays out of western-style theatres in the city and touring them to an altogether more challenging constituency – impoverished rural audiences in far-flung corners of the state.
Bengal had a boisterously popular folk-theatre tradition known as jatra (from the Sanskrit ‘setting out on a journey’), and Dutt realised that Shakespeare could make excellent sense in the form. Traditional jatras, rumbustious melodramas bursting with noise and music, went on all night long, but Dutt’s adaptations, created with a team of veteran actors, were abbreviated to make them available to farmers, labourers, housewives and tea-plant workers doing shifts. They were staged most often in the open air, preceded by a free musical performance designed to pull in audiences. Dutt estimated that sometimes they played to 30,000 people at a time, under fierce carbide lights, tannoys sending the dialogue booming out across the fields.
Their Shakespeare was condensed: Romeo and Juliet became a folk play called Bhuli Nai Priya (‘I Have Not Forgotten, My Love’); A Midsummer Night’s Dream was relocated from the forests outside Athens to the Bengal mangrove forests. Dutt had done Macbeth, too – in fact several times, first in 1954 in a ‘fast-moving, noisy’ version that toured Bengal villages; then again in September 1975, in response to the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, during which Dutt’s own scripts were banned.
Dissatisfied with pre-existing Bengali translations, Dutt wrote his own version of the Scottish play, sharpening its left-wing politics by inserting extra scenes for a cast of Bangla-speaking peasants and filling it with music by Shostakovich and Khachaturian as well as Stravinsky. When the show came to Kolkata, Dutt printed embittered words spoken by Ross on the front of the theatre programme:
Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing
But who knows nothing is once seen to smile …
‘We knew that we couldn’t find a better play against autocracy,’ Dutt said. Koushik Sen smiled quietly: his sentiments exactly.
A passionate Shakespearian who was also a passionate polemicist; a Sanskrit-speaking intellectual who could recite Virgil from memory and mingled with factory workers and farm labourers; a radical Marxist who was also a good pal of the Kendals and made movies for Merchant Ivory – whatever paradoxes I was trying to resolve about the many identities of Shakespeare in India, Dutt seemed to contain plenty, not to mention some I hadn’t even thought to consider.
While in Mumbai it had been a struggle to find any traces of Shakespeare at all, in Kolkata he seemed – like the British – to be everywhere. There was a whole street named after him, Shakespeare Sarani (formerly Theatre Road, rechristened in 1964 for the 400th anniversary of the poet’s birth). There was a dauntingly active organisation called the Shakespeare Society of Eastern India, run by an affable, Falstaffian academic called Amitava Roy, who welcomed me into one of their Sunday-evening meetings and plied me with sweet tea and disconcertingly knowledgeable questions.
‘Shakespeare is in everyone’s hearts here,’ Roy beamed, to fervent nods from his congregation. ‘No one else is like him, no one across the world. You know the Indian word Gurudeva? It is what Mahatma Gandhi called Rabindranath Tagore. Guru, you know, “one who leads”. Deva is “maker”. Shakespeare, Rabindranath, Homer – they are Gurudevas. They show you the way, and they show you the truth.’
I had seen the statue to Shakespeare on Shakespeare Sarani? I must find it at once and pay tribute, Roy’s group said. Feeling a little shaken by the fervour of their belief, I promised to try.
History, as ever, had a great deal to do with this. The shadow of English literature fell across countless Kolkatan writers of the nineteenth century – not only Young Bengal playwrights such as Michael Madhusudan Dutta and Dinabandhu Mitra, who pioneered drama at the new playhouses during the 1860s and 1870s, but poets, novelists, philosophers, musicians. The lyricist Dwijendralal Ray penned epic dramas much influenced by the English history plays, while the father of the Bengali novel, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, borrowed as liberally from Shakespeare as he did from Thomas Hardy and Walter Scott. Bankim based the heroine of his early novel Kapalkundala (1866) partly on Miranda in The Tempest, and in an essay pointed out how slow the British had been to ‘grasp the import of [Shakespeare’s] wonderful plays’. A modern critic put it well, and in terms that the evangelical Shakespeare Society of Eastern India might have supported: among the English-educated intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Bengal, Shakespeare became a source of ‘non-denominational spirituality’.
One writer engaged with Shakespeare assiduously, the most famous Kolkatan of all: Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first Nobel laureate. As a child growing up in a phenomenally wealthy Brahmin family, Tagore was given a thorough western education alongside schooling in classical Indian languages, religion and literature, and read widely in Sanskrit, Bengali and English, including poets such as Byron and Coleridge, as well as Dante in English translation. According to his first English biographer, Tagore was forced by his tutor to produce line-by-line translations of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava (‘Birth of Kumara’) and Macbeth as punishment for poor behaviour.
Tagore read more when he travelled to Brighton and London in 1879 as a gauche eighteen-year-old, taking classes at University College on Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra (which he ‘liked very much’), but admitted that he was disillusioned by his experiences in the seat of Empire. Before he arrived, he wrote later, he had supposed Britain ‘so devoted to higher culture that from one end to the other it would resound with the strains of Tennyson’s lyre’. Real life bore little resemblance to literary fantasy. In a letter home he complained bitterly how some English seemed astonished that Indians knew anything about culture at all. It was a tension that would trouble Tagore for the rest of his life, particularly when he began to call for independence from Britain. Having been knighted by George V, he renounced the award in disgust at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, in which protestors in Amritsar had been fired on without warning by British troops, leaving at least 400 dead and 1,200 wounded.
Some of the same ambiguity touched Tagore’s relationship with Shakespeare. It was clear that he was influenced by the older writer a great deal, not least in the playscripts he wrote. In the preface to Malini (1896), whose tough-minded heroine owes something to Shakespeare’s own female leads, he admitted, ‘[his] plays are always our dramatic model. Their manifold varieties and extensiveness and conflicts had captured our mind from the beginning.’
In 1916, invited by the Anglo-Jewish scholar Israel Gollancz to contribute to a commemorative volume for the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Tagore composed a brief Bengali verse comparing Shakespeare (in the translation Gollancz printed) to a sun whose ‘fiery disc’ had appeared near ‘England’s horizon’, but whose rays now stretched across the world:
Therefore at this moment, after the end of centuries, the palm groves by the Indian sea raise their tremulous branches to the sky murmuring your praise.
Despite this extravagant tribute, Tagore – unlike many of his Bengali contemporaries – was not an uncritical admirer. Where Ba
nkim had adopted Miranda as one of his own heroines, Tagore took issue with the very substance of The Tempest, devoting a critical essay published in 1902 to it and Shakuntala, revered as one of the greatest works by the Sanskrit writer Kalidasa. Tagore observed numerous echoes, for instance in the romance between Shakespeare’s Miranda and Prince Ferdinand, which resembles that of the innocent young nymph Shakuntala and the wayward King Dushyanta, and in the way both texts use an idyllic remote setting in order to intensify the drama (in Kalidasa’s case a secluded forest, in Shakespeare’s the near-deserted island).
But Tagore’s comparison is not to Shakespeare’s favour. While Kalidasa uses the seduction of an all-too-innocent girl as potent dramatic irony – Dushyanta, as the audience well knows from the story’s origins in the Mahabharata, will abandon Shakuntala – Tagore argues that Shakespeare’s Miranda is a more sentimental figure, ‘girt round by ignorance’, seen almost entirely through her relationship with her father and Ferdinand, her lover. In contrast, Shakuntala is truly a child of nature, ‘linked in spirit to her surroundings’, whose connection to the forest is implicit and essential. Where Shakespeare, Tagore argues, simply drops his characters like chess pieces into their environment, Kalidasa genuinely understands both his cast and where they end up – and thus the older play has a much more subtle understanding of the relationship between mankind and nature.
It would be easy to argue that Tagore misunderstood, that the object of The Tempest is not the ‘isle’ it is set on but the power-plays of the humans stranded there. Still, I felt that his argument was persuasive, particularly when it came to the troubled relationship between master and servants in the play. Contrary to the best efforts of British Victorian critics, who fell over themselves to argue that Prospero was a benign foreign ruler bringing enlightened civilisation to the island and its natives, Tagore identified a bleaker truth about the relationship between coloniser and colonised: ‘[Ariel] wishes to be free, but, bound and oppressed by human force, he is made to work like a slave. He has no love in his heart, no tears in his eyes.’
In Shakuntala, he wrote, there was ‘love, peace and fellowship’. The Tempest, meanwhile, offered ‘oppression, rule, rigour’. It would take western scholars decades to reach similar conclusions.
My final day in Kolkata flew past in a blur – dinner at the house of a theatre critic, followed by a surreal evening in the company of Amitava Roy, who gamely offered to take me to the last night of a jatra festival. Together he and I crammed into a dusty auditorium in a run-down district of Kolkata, overflowing with stout middle-aged couples, and watched an hour of wild and indecipherable melodrama: a cross (as far as I could construe) between Dallas, the Hindu epics and the more tumultuous sections of a revivalist prayer meeting, all to the raucous accompaniment of electric guitar, keyboard and drums. The show’s title was Anurager Chhoya (‘The Touch of Love’).
Over ten million tickets are said to be sold for jatra performances each year in West Bengal, and perhaps a hundred companies are active, touring far-flung villages in the poor rural parts of the state. This is one of the few corners of the world where theatre remains more popular than cinema. Despite their mythological origins, jatra shows now draw on everything from news events to Bollywood movies and American television shows; there is even reputed to have been a jatra based on James Cameron’s film Titanic.
It wasn’t just the dry ice, strobe lights and chest-thumping acting that made me wonder if this was what Parsi theatre would have been like to watch: jatra, yet another Indian melting pot of cultural influences, was surely one of its offspring. And it suddenly occurred to me that this, too, was what it might have been like to watch theatre in the California Gold Rush – except here in India the tradition was vigorously, full-bloodedly alive. Utpal Dutt had described this kind of folk theatre as ‘tempestuous incantation’. Having seen it live, I felt I understood exactly what he was trying to summon.
I had one place remaining on my itinerary: Delhi, where I was due at a conference being held by the Shakespeare Society of India (no relation to the Shakespeare Society of Eastern India, it appeared: yet another Indian doubling). I’d wangled an invitation by offering to speak about the World Shakespeare Festival. I also hoped that, after two and a half weeks of hectic travel, the conference might offer a pause for reflection – a way of putting into focus the many colliding Shakespearian images I had accumulated in India, America and Germany. Many of India’s leading Shakespeare scholars were due to be in attendance. At least some of them might be able to tell me what was really going on in global Shakespeare.
A little after 4.30 p.m., I boarded the Rajdhani Express, pushing through the hooting crowds of red-turbaned porters on the platform. Only one other passenger was in my compartment: a small, neat man in his late fifties, with bulldog jowls and a tidy grey moustache. He was buried in the Times of India crossword; we gave each other absent nods, like seasoned commuters.
Twenty-five minutes later, right on time, we slid out of Howrah station. The sun, fierce orange, was sinking into the west, burnishing the marshy streams and lakes as we slipped out of the city. Every so often there was a glimpse of the darkening River Hugli. As we gained speed, the shuddering and creaking of the train settling into a ponderous, bottom-heavy sway, I experienced a sensation that had evaded me since arriving in India: something approaching peace.
FOR MY LAST THREE DAYS IN INDIA, I played at knowing what I was doing. I rose early in my spartan student quarters at the University of Delhi guesthouse, attempting not to electrocute myself on the power socket placed inexplicably beneath the shower. I walked for twenty-five minutes through the morning haze to Indraprastha College, bought a glass of freshly pressed orange juice from the juice-wallah by the gates. I attended lectures and seminars, asked questions, filled most of another notebook with neat lines of ink. On manicured lawns, I sipped sweet chai and made small talk with students and professors. I gave my paper. It was mediocre.
Whatever clear ideas I possessed about Shakespeare in India, I sensed them slipping away. It wasn’t the organisers’ fault: the sessions were insightful on everything from differing translations of Macbeth to the relationship between Shakespeare and Kalidasa (yet another Shakespeare of India: the subcontinent was groaning with them).
No – it was me who was to blame. Whatever story I was trying to tell, I was losing track of it. Tamil Shakespeare, Kannada Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Hindu philosophy, Shakespeare and Tagore, Shakespeare and Gandhi, postcolonial Shakespeare, post-postcolonial Shakespeare, remakes of Shakespeare, re-remakes, re-re-remakes, re-re-re-remakes: too many Shakespeares, for my cluttered brain at least. Too many Indias.
One elderly academic, white-haired, shrunken inside his overlarge suit, kept trying to show me his magnum opus, a titanic compendium of Indian writings in praise of Shakespeare. The book was nearly a thousand pages long. Had I known about its existence when I arrived, it might have been a useful companion, if somewhat bulky. Now, though, it was the last thing I wanted to read. It seemed an all-too-pointed reminder of how little I knew about India – and, for that matter, about Shakespeare.
Back in Mumbai I’d spent a morning with a playwright, Ramu Ramanathan. He told me about a project he’d done with students in which he’d asked them to go out on the streets and imagine Shakespeare’s plays happening right there in the city: Shylock spotted on the concourse at Masjid Bunder station, Cleopatra sunning herself on Versova beach. I’d loved the idea of a cast of Shakespearian characters on the loose – a glimpse of Ophelia here, a half-caught Coriolanus there. But one could spend a lifetime searching for their faces, and never quite succeed. It struck me as not so different from the journey I was on.
It wasn’t just India; I felt all the different Shakespeares I’d encountered juddering and blurring into each other. Grey concrete and green ice and biting Baltic air; King Lear amidst the grain elevators of the Midwest; Richard III in a saloon bar in Malakoff Diggins; a smirking Romantic statue in Weimar; a punk singer yell
ing out Shakespearian couplets in a basement in Washington DC. And this was before one even got to Shakespeare’s myriad Indian faces: Gulzar’s elderly actor in beard and ruff, winking knowingly over the credits to Angoor; that Star Wars-style Macbeth in West Bengal in the shadow of the government; the girlish figure of Mala Sinha, sinking beneath the water’s surface …
Perhaps it had been unwise to commence a journey with The Comedy of Errors: the metaphor seemed rather too obvious. What was it that Antipholus said – ‘in quest of them, unhappy, lose myself …’? I had long since lost myself. At the end of the summer I was due in South Africa, to chase down a whole new set of Shakespeares. The thought made me dizzy.
During a break late one morning, I sat on a chair on the grass, putting off returning to the overheated lecture hall. In a few days, the forecast said, the loo winds would start to blow, and Delhi would surrender to high summer. By then, I would be above them, in a plane bound for London. High over the Himalayas, angled towards Turkmenistan and the Caspian Sea.
Everyone had gone back in. Or nearly everyone: a few chairs away was a professor I had met the previous day. His research on Hindi cinema I had found hugely useful when planning my journey; I had been glad to make his acquaintance.
‘Bunking class?’ he said, fanning himself with his programme. ‘Me also. After a few days at these things I begin to switch off.’ He tapped his temple. ‘The old brain, you know.’
A white-jacketed waiter was carrying tiffin boxes across the lawn. We watched the shadows shifting and shimmering in the hot breeze.
‘How’s your trip? Getting what you need?’
I admitted I was finding it difficult to join the dots. So many theories about Shakespeare, about India, about Germany and the US, so many cultures, interpretations, languages – I was having trouble working out if any of them combined. Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata had left my head in even more of a scramble than usual. All these different adaptations … It felt as though one could go on for ever, and never reach the end.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 34
