Bollywood Adaptations of Shakespeare
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Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Lingue e Letterature Europee, Americane e Postcoloniali ordinamento ex D.M. 270/2004 Tesi di Laurea Bollywood Adaptations of Shakespeare An Analysis of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Trilogy Relatore Ch. Prof. Shaul Bassi Correlatore Ch. Prof. Flavio Gregori Laureanda Debora Gnes Matricola 841785 Anno Accademico 2017 / 2018 Table of Contents List of Figures Introduction p. 1 Chapter 1. Shakespeare in Colonial and Postcolonial India p. 10 1.1 Shakespeare in Indian education p. 14 1.2 Shakespeare in Indian theatre p. 19 1.2.1 Shakespeare in Parsi theatre p. 25 1.3 Shakespeare in Indian cinema p. 29 Chapter 2. The Indian Film Industry: From Parsi Theatre to Bollywood p. 34 2.1 Sources and definitions of the term “Bollywood” p. 34 2.2 The origins and development of Indian cinema p. 35 2.2.1 Photography and early cinema p. 35 2.2.2 The influence of Parsi theatre p. 36 2.2.3 The silent era p. 37 2.2.4 The sound era p. 39 2.2.5 The studio era p. 41 2.2.6 The impact of World War II and Partition on Indian cinema p. 42 2.2.7 Post-independence Indian cinema p. 43 2.2.7.1 The first era, or the “Golden Age” (1950s) p. 44 2.2.7.2 The second era, or the “decade of the angry man” (1970s) p. 46 2.2.7.3 The third era: liberalisation and the “satellite invasion” (1990s – today) p. 48 Chapter 3. Maqbool (2003) p. 53 3.1 The context p. 53 3.1.1 A displaced Muslim community in Mumbai p. 60 3.2 The characters p. 65 3.2.1 The power relationship between Nimmi and Maqbool p. 65 3.2.2 Pandit and Purohit’s clairvoyance and their connivance with Mumbai’s gangland p. 71 3.3 Analysis of a scene p. 78 3.3.1 The main character’s death in Bhardwaj, Besson, Shakespeare and Kurosawa p. 78 Chapter 4. Omkara (2006) p. 84 4.1 The context p. 84 4.1.1 Bollywood conventions: songs, dances and marriage rituals p. 91 4.2 The characters p. 97 4.2.1 Indu and Langda face to face with their family’s izzat p. 97 4.2.2 Outsiders: the “Dark Lord” and the “Firangi” p. 106 4.3 Analysis of a scene p. 112 4.3.1 A tragic ending: differences and similarities in Bhardwaj, Khan, Shakespeare and Welles p. 112 Chapter 5. Haider (2014) p. 123 5.1 The context p. 123 5.1.1 The politically volatile Kashmir of the 1990s p. 132 5.2 The characters p. 142 5.2.1 The oedipal relationship between Ghazala and Haider and the mother’s self-sacrifice p. 142 5.2.2 Roohdaar: the physical incarnation of the Ghost p. 150 5.3 Analysis of a scene p. 156 5.3.1 “To be or not to be” and “The Mousetrap” in Shakespeare, Bhardwaj and Almereyda p. 156 Conclusion p. 166 Bibliography p. 173 List of Figures Figure 1 – Thirteen qawwals perform Ru-ba-ru during a Sufi funeral. Figures 2, 3, 4 – Passion between Maqbool and Nimmi is finally aroused during Rone Do. Figure 5 – Nimmi and Sameera dance during Sameera’s sangeet. Figure 6 – Nimmi aims the gun at Maqbool. Figure 7 – Maqbool aims the gun at Nimmi’s head. Figure 8 – Mumbai’s horoscope predicts Maqbool’s rise to power. Figure 9 – Mumbai’s horoscope covered in blood. Figure 10 – Pandit and Purohit in a moment of comic relief. Figures 11, 12, 13 – Maqbool’s death. Figure 14 – Léon’s dying face after having been shot by Stansfield. Figure 15 – Washizu’s grimace after his throat has been reached by an arrow. Figure 16 – Billo performs Beedi. Figure 17 – Billo performs Namak. Figure 18 – Dolly aims the rifle at Omkara’s bosom. Figure 19 – Omkara sings Jag Ja to dead Dolly. Figure 20 – Omkara’s last scene. Figure 21 – Indu screams over a well. Figure 22 – Radha holds the rifle with which she has just fired at her son Birju. Figure 23 – Radha hugs and mourns her dying son. Figure 24 – Radha’s bloodstained hand overlaps with the red water of the new irrigation canal. Figure 25 – The upside-down shot of Othello’s face with which Orson Welles’s Othello begins. Figure 26 – Desdemona smothered to death in Orson Welles’s Othello. Figure 27 – Haider kisses his mother’s neck. Figure 28 – At Lal Chowk, Haider makes the finger gun gesture. Figure 29 – In Hamlet 2000, Hamlet watches a film clip of himself in which he points a gun at his own temple. Figure 30 – In Hamlet 2000, Hamlet walks down the central aisle of a Blockbuster store and pronounces the “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Figure 31 – Haider performs Bismil. Introduction Indian Empire or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us. T. Carlyle, Lecture on “The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakespeare”, 1840 We certainly cannot give up our Shakespeare. S. Viswanathan, Lecture on “Shakespeare’s Plays and an Indian Sensibility”, 1986 In these two quotations, an analogous sentiment towards Shakespeare (1564-1616) is endorsed by a Scottish philosopher and an Indian professor: in 1840, during a lecture on “The Hero as Poet,” Thomas Carlyle expressed the opinion that, unlike the Empire, which he was willing to give up, Shakespeare would always remain with the British; in 1986, almost a century and a half later, an Indian professor placed the same possessive adjective, “our,” before Shakespeare’s name. In their speeches, only the references are different. In effect, while offering some speculations about what he called “a possible community of sensibility between the Indian [...] and Shakespearean drama,” Viswanathan underpinned the cardinal importance that the playwright of Stratford has acquired in the subcontinent, “fortunately” surviving the end of the political empire and enduring “happily” the passing of time (Viswanathan, 1986: 269-270). In India, which the British left in 1947 bringing the British Raj to an end after ninety years of government and three centuries of commercial domination and colonial monopoly, Shakespeare’s influence is considerable still today. Although independence was achieved, Indians did not fully reject the substantial body of literature that the British had brought into the subcontinent: Shakespeare’s theatrical works, used first to entertain British colonisers and European traders, then to civilise native Indians, are part of today’s Indian education and, though having disappeared almost completely from stages approximately between the 1910s and the 1940s, they continue to affect Indian arts and culture. Poonam Trivedi distinguishes various phases, each characterised by different approaches to the playwright: when his plays were incorporated into the civilising mission of the British Empire, Indians seemed to be awed by them, thus taking them probably “too respectfully;” in the late 19th and 20th centuries, instead, Parsi theatre productions tended to treat Shakespeare “in a cavalier fashion, mixing and mashing up his plays into hybrid and melodramatic versions,” so much so that their 1 representations were a source of embarrassment for academics, who considered them “populist travesties.” This period was followed by other three moments: firstly a phase of faithful translations and performances, secondly a phase of creative adaptations and assimilations into local theatrical forms, ultimately the current moment of “irreverence,” in which theatre and film directors are feeling free to “play around” with Shakespearean works (Trivedi, 2016). Globalisation and the growing accessibility to the Internet are possibly enhancing Indian youth’s confidence in the postcolonial, so that, among the various initiatives, an annual festival called “Hamara Shakespeare” (meaning “Our Shakespeare”) is held in Chennai and an annual short play competition is organised by the Shakespeare Society of India in Delhi. In August 2015, even the students of an Indian Engineering and Technological University organised an original “Great Indian Shakespeare Festival” in which, for instance, Julius Caesar was set in the corporate world and entailed the deposition of the title character as CEO (Trivedi, 2016). Julius Caesar, together with other Shakespearean plays that deal with the theme of guilt (i.e. King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth), has also been used in translation as a form of rehabilitation therapy in Indian prisons (Trivedi, 2012). In the Indian context, screen adaptations too (become successful at a transnational level) and unconventional stage productions testify to today’s different types of engagement with the playwright, who, “detached from the colonial baggage, [...] continues to speak in strange and wondrous forms to newer generations” (Trivedi, 2016). Especially in recent years, Shakespeare has thus been rewritten and reinvented in a multitude of ways and in multiple media; outside Great Britain and India, he has been read, translated, and interpreted in both English-speaking and non-English speaking countries. Scholarly debates have arisen over the playwright’s presence in almost every age and culture, leading some academics to link his works with a presumed universality, this being an idea already present in Ben Jonson’s famous assertion in the Preface to the First Folio (1623) that Shakespeare “was not for an age but for all time.” Despite recognising that Shakespearean plays have crossed the borders of both their cradle (Great Britain) and the theatre medium (Such Tweet Sorrow, for instance, is a unique Twitter adaptation of Romeo and Juliet “performed” by professional actors in a five- week time span in 2010), my dissertation departs from the use of the ambiguous and misleading concept of “universality” to embrace the idea of the adaptability and easy transculturation of the playwright’s theatrical works.