On the trail of India’s love affair with Shakespeare
A comprehensive database of over 100 films made in India that adapt Shakespeare plays, or cite them, is part of an EU-funded project on the depiction of Shakespeare in Indian cinema, with a focus on lesser-known regional variations and languages. The database was researched and compiled by Rosa García Periago, now senior lecturer in English at the University of Murcia, Spain, and was supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. It tracks and lists films made over the past 100 years which would otherwise be lost, forgotten or neglected by critics. “This hasn’t been done before,” explains project coordinator and mentor Mark Thornton Burnett, professor at the School of AEL, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and an expert on world depiction of the works of Shakespeare. “It’s an important resource for researchers. A number of people are working on this subject around the world.” Usually, people only reference Indian commercial cinema known as ‘Bollywood’ in the north Indian language Hindi. Burnett describes the ShakespeareIndia initiative as ‘cultural recovery’. “There have been over 100 adaptations and appropriations since the 1920s in 13 Indian languages. Some scholars believe Indian cinema holds the greatest number of films made of Shakespeare’s plays,” he adds.
Research on Indian cinemas
The project involved liaising with India’s National Film Archive in Pune, western India, but even that archive was incomplete. It had to be supplemented by a trawl of many sources that mention films in different regional languages. “There were only piecemeal sources, some of them in older books no longer available, and none are comprehensive. The very thing that makes the Indian depiction of Shakespeare so rich is that it is explored in multiple languages,” Burnett remarks. He says the EU fellowship has helped Periago to become a leading researcher in Europe in the field and substantially raised her research profile internationally, as well as enabling non-academic collaborations with the arts, film and theatre organisations, archives and libraries.
Women and Shakespeare
Also important to ‘cultural recovery’ was examining the role of women in Indian depictions of Shakespeare’s work, and as filmmakers or in other capacities. Periago co-chaired the first international Women and Indian Shakespeares Conference at QUB in 2019 which brought together academics, practitioners and creative artists to discuss the contribution of women to Indian Shakespeare across film, text, theatre and dance. Alongside this, Periago co-curated an exhibition, ‘Discovering Shakespeare’s Indian Connections’, funded by the Being Human Festival. The conference will result in a co-edited volume of essays on women and Indian Shakespeares, from early colonial performances to contemporary experimental theatre. “It is one of the things that is putting this area of study on the map,” notes Burnett. Around the world, Shakespeare’s work inspires conversations and has contemporary impacts. “If you look at how Shakespeare is being used today, it is to intervene in things like regime change or language disputes and territorial discussion,” Burnett explains, referring to the 2014 film Haider, an Indian version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in insurgency-hit Kashmir.
Keywords
ShakespeareIndia, William Shakespeare, film, theatre, culture, India, Indian languages, women and Shakespeare
