Romping with Romeo: Shakespeare in India

Shakespeare, who turned 455 this year, might be England’s original Bard but is also easily Bollywood’s most successful screenplay writer

May 18, 2019 04:00 pm | Updated 04:00 pm IST

Masala mix: A still from ‘Maqbool’.

Masala mix: A still from ‘Maqbool’.

Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted within an infinite variety of regional performance traditions, from the nautanki of north India and the jatra of Bengal to the bhangwadi of Gujarat and the kathakali of Kerala. But his vibrant Indian afterlife is nowhere more apparent than in cinema. One could make the case that Shakespeare has been Bollywood’s most successful screenplay writer: there have been many Hindi-language film versions of his plays, and countless more influenced by them.

Shakespeare’s Bollywood career long precedes the popularity of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Goliyon ki Rasleela Ram-Leela (2013), inspired by Romeo and Juliet ; Vishal Bhardwaj’s acclaimed trilogy Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014), based on Macbeth , Othello , and Hamlet ; or even Gulzar’s enduringly popular Angoor (1982), a reimagining of The Comedy of Errors .

One of the first “talkies” in the Bombay cinema was the 1935 film Khoon ka Khoon , a Hindi-Urdu version of Hamlet crammed with shayari and no less than 17 songs. Its director, the actor-impresario Sohrab Modi, repeated the formula the following year with Said - e - Havas, a musical reworking of King John .

These early Shakespeare film adaptations, like the railways or Horlicks or even the English language itself, are legacies of British colonialism. But Shakespeare’s enduring popularity in Hindi cinema cannot be chalked up just to the cultural influence of the Raj. What connects Shakespeare to Bollywood boils down to one ingredient: masala.

Hot messes

We aren’t conditioned to think of Shakespeare as masala. That’s a term we usually reserve for a certain type of popular

entertainment widely regarded as escapist and even crass — in particular, the so-called “masala movies” of the 70s and the 80s. Manmohan Desai’s and Ramesh Sippy’s films were, as the word “masala” implies, hot messes. They mixed tragedy and comedy, realistic dialogue and stylised naach-gaana . And they were shown in large single-screen halls to mixed audiences from different classes, religions, and linguistic communities.

The masala movie’s commitment to mixture eerily mirrors a defining feature of Shakespeare’s theatre. We may think of his plays as the summit of great literature. But it’s important to remember that they too were initially conceived as mass entertainment for huge audiences, spanning the social spectrum from aristocrat to casual labourer. And just like masala movies, Shakespeare’s plays reflected their mixed audiences by being stylistically mixed: his tragedies were leavened with clowns, his comedies heightened by tragedy. They also contained soaring poetry and colloquial prose.

Shakespeare mirrors the mixtures of the masala movie in another way. So-called ‘Hindi’ films are not purely Hindi: they are more accurately a khichdi of Hindi and Urdu (occasionally seasoned by Punjabi, Bhojpuri and English).

Shakespeare’s language is similarly mixed. Paradoxically, the greatest exponent of ‘English’ literature didn’t really write in English at all — because English was not yet a standardised language. He wrote for audiences who spoke a Babel of diverse tongues, varying from the Scandinavian-heavy dialects of the north to the Norman French-influenced argot of the southern upper classes, and the church Latin of those who had grown up hearing the Catholic Mass. Shakespeare had to cater to all these constituencies.

Just listen to the opening four lines of Romeo and Juliet ’s first act. We hear, in quick sequence, four punned words — “coal,” “collier,” “choler,” and “collar” — that derive from four different languages: German, French, Latin and Italian. Shakespeare wasn’t showing off. He was writing for customers who, like Indian masala moviegoers, were used to swerving between different dialects, to starting a thought in one language and finishing it in another.

Being polyglot

That’s why I tell my multilingual Indian students that they are far better equipped to understand how Shakespeare uses language

than are their monolingual counterparts in Britain or America. Take a word like “dauntless,” which Shakespeare is credited with having invented (its first recorded use is in Macbeth ): “daunt” comes from a medieval French word for ‘tame’: “less” comes from an old Germanic word meaning ‘lacking.’ But Shakespeare joined these two different languages as easily as the title of Jab We Met joins Hindi and English.

Before Bollywood, the impresarios of the Parsi theatre in 19th and early 20th-century Bombay recognised Shakespeare’s masala. They offered entertainments to mixed audiences from different classes and religious communities who diversely spoke Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi.

To cater to this diversity, they adapted familiar indigenous Indian performance traditions such as sangeet natak and the plays of Kalidasa. But their biggest source of inspiration was Shakespeare. Nearly 100 adaptations of his plays were mounted in the Parsi theatre.

Among these was a stage version of Sohrab Modi’s Khoon ka Khoon , the Hindi-Urdu Hamlet that was later reworked for the screen as an early Bombay talkie. Its mixture of high shayari and populist naach-gaana was not just a desi innovation: it mirrored Shakespeare’s own stylistic mixtures.

We can forget that Hamlet is itself a masala play, blending tragedy with comedy (think of the wisecracking gravediggers), poetry with prose and, most importantly, dialogue with song. One of the play’s most memorable moments basically amounts to an item number, in which mad Ophelia sings a bawdy, sexually suggestive song in a state of sartorial disarray. Khoon ka Khoon highlights the direct line of influence that led from Shakespeare through Parsi theatre to the Bollywood masala movie.

High art?

Of course, we have been trained to see Shakespeare very differently. In school, we largely encounter him on the page rather than the stage, which is to say as High Literature rather than as masala entertainment. Perhaps that’s why many of my Anglophone

Indian friends cringe when I talk about the affinities between Shakespeare and masala movies. “Gil ji,” they say, “Random item numbers, idiotic dances by lovers around trees, unoriginal stories: surely all this is a world away from the lofty accomplishment of Shakespeare! You of all people should know that!”

These friends balk when I tell them that Shakespeare’s plays — at least as acted 400 years ago — also routinely featured naach-gaana (every performance would end with the players performing a “bergomask,” a highly stylised group dance), celebrated sanams in the presence of trees (just ask the tree-hugging lovers Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It ), and plundered their stories from everywhere (of Shakespeare’s 37 surviving plays, 35 lifted their stories from other sources).

The assumption that a great work of literature must have an original story derives from a capitalist understanding of creativity as individual intellectual property, produced by the artist from his or her lofty imagination alone.

Shakespeare’s and Bollywood’s entertainments, by contrast, suggest the analogy not of property but of cooking. A good chef doesn’t devise a new recipe every time she cooks. Rather, she cooks with old familiar recipes and flavours them in new ways, adding fresh ingredients.

Shakespeare and Bollywood scriptwriters are chefs in exactly this manner. They work with a mixture of elements from a variety of sources — a masala — to prepare tasty new versions of old dishes for diverse diners.

Vanishing taste

Vishal Bhardwaj’s trilogy resembles the talkies of Sohrab Modi and the plays of William Shakespeare in precisely this respect. When in Maqbool Irrfan Khan’s title character presides as the chef at a shaadi reception, he stirs a cauldron in an ironic invocation of Shakespeare’s witches: “ achche se peesne ka ” (grind the spices well), he says. But the scene is also a wonderful visual metaphor for how Bhardwaj, like Modi and Shakespeare before him, has seasoned old material to produce tasty new fare for a large audience from diverse backgrounds.

In the new age of the multiplex cinema and online streaming, however, masala is a vanishing taste. Nowadays when we watch a film, we’re less likely to sit with audience members who belong to different classes and communities and more likely to sit alone. As audiences have become more homogeneous, so too have Hindi films become more niche-oriented.

Bornila Chatterjee’s film The Hungry (2017) — an adaptation of Shakespeare’s violent tragedy Titus Andronicus — is a case in point. Made for view-on-demand by Amazon Prime, its sensibility is a world away from old Bollywood. The film may be “hungry,” but its appetite shuns masala: there is no naach-gaana, no mixed languages and communities. It ends instead with a lone woman, triumphant over her male tormentors. That may be a powerful conclusion in the age of #MeToo. But its final image of an individual, alone in a room, also reflects the largely solitary viewing experience of the new consumer.

In this context, the masala space of the crowded single-screen hall suddenly seems less escapist. Masala films presume a mixed world: different people, praying to different gods, speaking different languages, who have to live with each other.

How our world has shrunk — when Shakespeare has migrated from the aptly named Globe Theatre to the equally aptly named iPad. When “I” is what comes first, those who are different from me become a distraction to be escaped from or even enemies to be violently erased. Masala Shakespeare, whether in 16th century London or in modern Bombay, is a reminder of a more capacious, interconnected way of being.

The writer is the author, most recently, of Masala Shakespeare: How a Firangi Writer Became Indian .

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