I spent months trying to work out where truth ended in Shakespeare Wallah and fiction began. I dug out Geoffrey Kendal’s diaries, published in 1986, and read them cover to cover. They were enjoyably garrulous, retelling Kendal’s first glimpse of Mumbai with the Entertainments National Service Association, sent out to perform for British troops during the second world war, and his return with the troupe that became Shakespeareana in 1947.
Though full of colourful tales and hair’s-breadth escapes – the earthquake that hits halfway through a show; the actor who drives across the Himalayas in a 1935 Wolseley ambulance – the diaries nonetheless seemed remarkably incurious about India or Indians, other than as (generally) polite witnesses to the Kendals’ English-language performances. Despite the film’s many fictions, its downbeat mood seemed accurate enough: it was with tangible bitterness that Kendal recorded a Shakespeareana performance in 1962, where the locally produced poster advertised the presence of Shashi Kapoor – then beginning to make a name for himself in films – but omitted the name of Shakespeare.
Yet this wasn’t the whole story. On a rushed three-day trip to India in 2012, researching a newspaper piece on two acting companies preparing to come to the Globe in London, I’d managed to glean enough about contemporary Indian theatre to realise that Kendal’s gloom (like much else in an extravagantly contoured life) had been excessive.
Shakespeare hadn’t evaporated when the British slipped away on liners bound for foggy Tilbury: on the contrary, there were plentiful modern adaptations of the plays.
Indeed, an entire festival near Chennai was dedicated to Shakespeare translated into Indian languages – proof of the vibrant life of Shakespeare on the subcontinent.
What I was struggling with were linkages. I was missing a sense of how this contemporary theatre connected with the kind of Shakespeare that Kendal and his colleagues were acting – if it connected at all. Were the traditions entirely separate? Was there any traffic between the blood-and-thunder, English-language Shakespeare being done by Shakespeareana and the Indian traditions of translation and adaptation? And what of Indian movies, where Shakespeare has a continued and vivacious presence?
It wasn’t until I stumbled across a slim pamphlet that the pieces began to slot into place. It was entitled Shakespeare in India and it was by the British academic Charles Jasper Sisson. I dimly remembered Sisson’s name from the dusty corners of an MPhil reading list – a don at University College London, he’d written a book on Shakespeare’s lost plays and another on an Elizabethan inn-yard in east London. I wasn’t expecting to see him here, rubbing shoulders with theory-heavy monographs on Indian Shakespeare, their titles stiff with words like “postcolonial” and “diasporic”.
The pamphlet’s subtitle was Popular Adaptations on the Bombay Stage.
It was the date that really caught my eye: 1926. This was far earlier than anything else I’d been reading – the height of the Raj, or very nearly. Why had a British specialist in Jacobethan stage practice written a book on Shakespeare in Mumbai? And what on earth did he mean by “popular”?
Based on his experiences teaching at Elphinstone College, part of the university of Mumbai, Sisson’s account had all the exuberant, pent-up enthusiasm of a man who has stepped outside himself, perhaps for the first time. It began by declaring its lack of interest in “the influence of Shakespeare upon the cultured classes in India”. What Sisson wanted to address was a Shakespeare who had become increasingly remote in Britain (as by now in America), a Shakespeare who was still down-and- dirty popular entertainment. He wrote:
These theatres were spread around Grant Road in Mumbai; the plays weren’t performed in English, but in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu. Tickets cost a handful of rupees. Aside from himself, the only Europeans who had been inside these places, Sisson thought, were policemen on the prowl for pickpockets.
Warming to his theme, he went on:
The liberty-taking shows Sisson discovered, working with MR Shah, an assistant professor at the University of Mumbai, stretched back to the 1890s, perhaps earlier. They were a vigorous and remarkable series of Shakespeare adaptations in the Parsi theatre of Mumbai, named for its inventors in the Parsi community.
Sisson and I were alike in one respect at least: these adaptations were unlike anything either of us had encountered before. They included Vasundhara, an adaptation of Macbeth from 1910 that retold Shakespeare’s story not from the hero’s perspective, but from Lady M’s, for whom it was renamed. There was also Bazm-e-Fani (Mortal Gathering), an Urdu version of Romeo and Juliet in which the balcony scene was, Sisson gleefully remarked, “pretty completely rewritten” (he included a translation). He was particularly entranced by the Mumbai taste for shoehorning comic subplots into even the soberest of tragedies, particularly plots poking fun at Indians excessively devoted to British manners.
Lest anyone think he had gone dotty in the subtropical sun, Sisson included photographs: fey-looking male students from the New High School in Mumbai in doublets and hose; a mysterious shot of an extravagantly moustachioed man apparently about to behead another with a scimitar (captioned “typical costumes”, but providing no clue as to which play they were typical of).
As Sisson described with wonderment the “frequent songs and dances”, the socially varied audiences, the pell-mell competition for tickets, the elaborate staging techniques and lust for theatrical novelty in Parsi theatre, one sensed him eyeing sceptics at the back of the lecture hall.
What about authenticity and scholarship, old chap? What does any of it have to do with our Shakespeare, the British Bard we know and love?
To that, Sisson had a triumphant answer:
Things that are still alive and in process of becoming new things… Here was another, more enlightening perspective on how Shakespeare’s work might operate in India, ways that were largely alien to the English- speaking Geoffrey Kendal and his ilk; ways many British people would still struggle to recognise as “Shakespeare” at all.
Excerpted with permission from Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe, Andrew Dickson.
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Though full of colourful tales and hair’s-breadth escapes – the earthquake that hits halfway through a show; the actor who drives across the Himalayas in a 1935 Wolseley ambulance – the diaries nonetheless seemed remarkably incurious about India or Indians, other than as (generally) polite witnesses to the Kendals’ English-language performances. Despite the film’s many fictions, its downbeat mood seemed accurate enough: it was with tangible bitterness that Kendal recorded a Shakespeareana performance in 1962, where the locally produced poster advertised the presence of Shashi Kapoor – then beginning to make a name for himself in films – but omitted the name of Shakespeare.
Yet this wasn’t the whole story. On a rushed three-day trip to India in 2012, researching a newspaper piece on two acting companies preparing to come to the Globe in London, I’d managed to glean enough about contemporary Indian theatre to realise that Kendal’s gloom (like much else in an extravagantly contoured life) had been excessive.
Shakespeare hadn’t evaporated when the British slipped away on liners bound for foggy Tilbury: on the contrary, there were plentiful modern adaptations of the plays.
Indeed, an entire festival near Chennai was dedicated to Shakespeare translated into Indian languages – proof of the vibrant life of Shakespeare on the subcontinent.
What I was struggling with were linkages. I was missing a sense of how this contemporary theatre connected with the kind of Shakespeare that Kendal and his colleagues were acting – if it connected at all. Were the traditions entirely separate? Was there any traffic between the blood-and-thunder, English-language Shakespeare being done by Shakespeareana and the Indian traditions of translation and adaptation? And what of Indian movies, where Shakespeare has a continued and vivacious presence?
It wasn’t until I stumbled across a slim pamphlet that the pieces began to slot into place. It was entitled Shakespeare in India and it was by the British academic Charles Jasper Sisson. I dimly remembered Sisson’s name from the dusty corners of an MPhil reading list – a don at University College London, he’d written a book on Shakespeare’s lost plays and another on an Elizabethan inn-yard in east London. I wasn’t expecting to see him here, rubbing shoulders with theory-heavy monographs on Indian Shakespeare, their titles stiff with words like “postcolonial” and “diasporic”.
The pamphlet’s subtitle was Popular Adaptations on the Bombay Stage.
It was the date that really caught my eye: 1926. This was far earlier than anything else I’d been reading – the height of the Raj, or very nearly. Why had a British specialist in Jacobethan stage practice written a book on Shakespeare in Mumbai? And what on earth did he mean by “popular”?
Based on his experiences teaching at Elphinstone College, part of the university of Mumbai, Sisson’s account had all the exuberant, pent-up enthusiasm of a man who has stepped outside himself, perhaps for the first time. It began by declaring its lack of interest in “the influence of Shakespeare upon the cultured classes in India”. What Sisson wanted to address was a Shakespeare who had become increasingly remote in Britain (as by now in America), a Shakespeare who was still down-and- dirty popular entertainment. He wrote:
There is but one country in the world, to the best of my knowledge, except possibly Germany, where the plays have of recent times formed the safest and surest attraction to the indiscriminate masses who attend popular theatres, where the proprietor of a theatre could count on a profit on a Shakespeare production. That country is India, and the theatres in question are a group of theatres in the city of Bombay, clustered together in the heart of a poor Indian population.
These theatres were spread around Grant Road in Mumbai; the plays weren’t performed in English, but in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu. Tickets cost a handful of rupees. Aside from himself, the only Europeans who had been inside these places, Sisson thought, were policemen on the prowl for pickpockets.
Warming to his theme, he went on:
The orthodox Shakespearian would experience many a shock if he ventured into this strange temple of his idol. He might accustom himself to the Oriental costume and mise-en-scène, to the disturbing medley of the audience, even, with some study, to the foreign language. But he would be amazed to find that he was being provided with an opera and a ballet as well as a play… and horrified when he realised the extreme liberties that were being taken with the text and plot.
The liberty-taking shows Sisson discovered, working with MR Shah, an assistant professor at the University of Mumbai, stretched back to the 1890s, perhaps earlier. They were a vigorous and remarkable series of Shakespeare adaptations in the Parsi theatre of Mumbai, named for its inventors in the Parsi community.
Sisson and I were alike in one respect at least: these adaptations were unlike anything either of us had encountered before. They included Vasundhara, an adaptation of Macbeth from 1910 that retold Shakespeare’s story not from the hero’s perspective, but from Lady M’s, for whom it was renamed. There was also Bazm-e-Fani (Mortal Gathering), an Urdu version of Romeo and Juliet in which the balcony scene was, Sisson gleefully remarked, “pretty completely rewritten” (he included a translation). He was particularly entranced by the Mumbai taste for shoehorning comic subplots into even the soberest of tragedies, particularly plots poking fun at Indians excessively devoted to British manners.
Lest anyone think he had gone dotty in the subtropical sun, Sisson included photographs: fey-looking male students from the New High School in Mumbai in doublets and hose; a mysterious shot of an extravagantly moustachioed man apparently about to behead another with a scimitar (captioned “typical costumes”, but providing no clue as to which play they were typical of).
As Sisson described with wonderment the “frequent songs and dances”, the socially varied audiences, the pell-mell competition for tickets, the elaborate staging techniques and lust for theatrical novelty in Parsi theatre, one sensed him eyeing sceptics at the back of the lecture hall.
What about authenticity and scholarship, old chap? What does any of it have to do with our Shakespeare, the British Bard we know and love?
To that, Sisson had a triumphant answer:
The Bombay popular stage offers in many respects a parallel to the Tudor stage in England. Its adaptations of Shakespeare, disconcerting at first sight, show his plays to be things that are still alive and in process of becoming new things, being ever born again, even as they were on the Elizabethan stage.
Things that are still alive and in process of becoming new things… Here was another, more enlightening perspective on how Shakespeare’s work might operate in India, ways that were largely alien to the English- speaking Geoffrey Kendal and his ilk; ways many British people would still struggle to recognise as “Shakespeare” at all.
Excerpted with permission from Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe, Andrew Dickson.