Shakespeare Bulletin

The two edited collections under review make an interesting pairing, both exploring, from different perspectives, the purposes Shakespeare serves in contexts that do not inherently require his presence. While neither wholly explains quite why Shakespeare should be present in these contexts, both provide rich descriptions of the functions that his works serve in cultures not his own.

The essays in Bollywood Shakespeares “analyze the historical and cultural assumptions behind Bollywood’s appropriation of the Bard, asking whether or not [End Page 537] Shakespeare’s plays serve merely as [… an] exotic [space] through which Bollywood film directors ‘whisk’ their audience, or if there are not deeper valences between early modern perspectives and poetics and twenty-first century global cinema” (11). The majority of the essays, whether historical or analytical, answer this query affirmatively. Bollywood Shakespeares describes how Shakespeare has been recast and repackaged as a cultural and commercial entity in the “global context” of the burgeoning Bollywood film industry, arguing that “Bollywood is not only a style that mirrors the production and commercial techniques of Western filmmaking […] but also a convergent and competing global phase of Indian cinema” (9).

The book is divided into three sections: “Bollywood’s Debt to the Theater: Aesthetic and Cultural Multivalence,” “Shakespeare’s Local Face: Using Shakespeare to Rearticulate Indian Identities,” and “Bollywood’s Cultural Capital: Bollywood Sells Shakespeare.” Vikram Singh Thakur’s opening chapter, “Parsi Shakespeare: The Precursor to ‘Bollywood Shakespeare,’” traces the origins of Parsi theater in India to the opening of the Grant Road Theatre in 1846. This theater “succeeded in […] broadening the audience base, which was hitherto the educated elite of Bombay, by including the working classes” (25). Thakur explains that “the greatest influence on Parsi theater was Shakespeare, who offered theatermakers the “necessary material to cater to the needs of this audience in terms of action, spectacle, rhetoric, declamation,” while in exchange the “thrill of Parsi theater in turn popularized Shakespeare among the masses” (27). As Thakur explains, the translation of Shakespeare into Parsi also involved cultural adaptation, the “‘indigenization’ of the English traditions rather than the ‘Englishization’ of Indian traditions” (33). The result, according to Thakur’s analysis, is that “Parsi theater creates […] a syncretic form of theater by yoking together elements of Indian and English theatrical traditions without any obvious foreignness about it. The materiality of Parsi theater, as against the textuality of academic Shakespeare, allows it to invert the logic of colonial mimicry” (33).

Parmita Kapadia’s essay “Bollywood Battles the Bard” analyzes the “Bollywood component” of the 1965 film Shakespeare Wallah that traces the dwindling success of a traveling theatrical company performing Shakespeare in post-colonial India. While she agrees that the film appropriates “Shakespeare’s texts and language,” she argues that it also “simultaneously appropriates Bollywood to construct a trope of Indian nationhood” (47). The film underscores the “cultural struggle between former colonizers and colonized [that] is played out as a struggle between British high theater and popular Indian films” (48). As Kapadia argues, a “rereading of Shakespeare Wallah prompts us to locate the film against the historical developments of Indian independence and the end of British colonial rule as well as the emergence and massive success of Bollywood” (48). The analysis concludes, as Thakur does, with an emphasis on the successful and mutually-beneficial synthesis of two seemingly discrete practices: “Shakespeare Wallah’s clear conflict between Shakespearean theater and Bollywood cinema no longer exists; the old conflict has developed into an alliance, one where Bollywood uses [End Page 538] Shakespeare and Shakespeare embraces Bollywood” (57). Recent Bollywood-influenced productions in the UK, such as the RSC’s Much Ado About Nothing in 2012, suggest that this embrace is wide-reaching.

The three chapters in Part II focus on specific Indian cinematic appropriations...