Framing Lear’s fool in Indian films: ‘Doth any here know me?’

The beggar / trickster fool

The very first screen adaptation of Lear in India, Gunasundari Katha (Tale of the Virtuous Woman), 1949, in Telugu, directed by K. V. Reddy is a salient example of what early Indian commercial cinema and an intercultural perspective can do with Shakespeare and King Lear. This film exploits the potentialities of the medium to weave in all the popular film genres of the time – the musical, mythological, and magical special effects film – into the frame of the Lear story. It prioritises the folktale elements of the narrative to present it as a fable. No wonder it was a huge box-office success and spawned remakes. Significantly, it makes the Fool figure central to the unravelling of the plot.

The film begins with King Ugrasena announcing that since he has now turned sixty, he wishes to fulfil his last responsibility, that of the future welfare of his three daughters. In a manner which harks back to the source of Shakespeare’s play, King Leir, where the King refers to the absent Mother whose role he has had to fill, the Indian King’s devotion to his daughters is emphasised in several scenes of him in a maternal role, rocking the cradle of the youngest daughter and feeding, teaching, disciplining all three. Cordelia/Guna is the favourite, and he sets up the love test during his 60th birthday celebrations, not out of vanity, but to find out their views on love. He is concerned to marry them off well. The youngest daughter fails the test, but not without a long exchange with the father King on the pativrata ideal of womanhood, which is of total devotion to the pati/husband. This of course enrages the King and out of anger and peeve, Cordelia/Guna is married off to a blind and lame beggar, a Poor Tom figure, named Daivadeenam. Soon it is discovered that the beggar was only pretending to be blind and lame in an attempt to show up the King’s unreason; like a trickster, he further revels in this foolery, enraging the King to banish him along with Guna.

After this the film veers into the marvellous and wonderous, interpolating other tales and motifs. In his rage at the trickster fool, the King slips and injures himself. It is then announced that only a magical mani/jewel will cure him and the three sons-in-law set out on the journey to find the miraculous gem. Through a series of fantastical adventures, one of which reveals that Daivadeenam is in reality a Prince under a curse, it is he who is finally able to wrest the jewel from the throat of a demon, but only to lose it to the other two scheming but inept sons-in-law. The juncture cries out for divine intervention and, unlike in the play where the gods remain immune to human suffering, in the film, the gods, Shiva and Parvati who have been observing the chaos in the world – the film is framed in a flashback by Shiva narrating his response to a young woman’s (Guna) songs of prayer for help – descend to Earth, revoke the curse on the Beggar jester, who restores the ailing King to his health with the magic jewel, exposes the evil machinations of the other daughters and their husbands, unites Guna with her father who begs for forgiveness, and crowns her husband, Daivadeenam, as King. A fabulistic harmony is restored.

The main thrust of the film, as encapsulated in the title, ‘Tale of the Virtuous Woman’, is to uphold the ideal of female virtue, here represented by Guna who, through her unfailing devotion to duty, triumphs over all travails. Yet this model is complicated by the composite character of the Fool, who is given the agonistic drive and who alone overcomes the obstacles, but on behalf of Guna. Daivadeenam fulfils three roles in one – the jester/critic, Edgar and Poor Tom; and he, instead of Cordelia, whose role is confined to singing songs of prayer to the gods, becomes the instrument of the King’s physical and psychological redemption. His name, which means ‘favoured of the gods’, is a clue to his multidimensional persona and, though labouring under a curse, he acquires fantastical powers which overcome all obstacles. He is always seen dressed like the Fool in Iruthiattam, in folk style, only in a loin cloth, and is given to dancing, singing, cavorting around like a jester. In the search for the magical jewel/cure, he reveals an acrobatic and swashbuckling heroic prowess overcoming mythological demons and obstacles – an aspect which contributed considerably to the box-office. He is even cursed to become a bear, a ‘poor bare forked animal’, furthering the equation with Poor Tom, the human in extremis, who becomes a mentor to Lear. He evolves into the wise figure and in turn redeems the King. Blind beggar, trickster, jester, Poor Tom and Edgar, Daivadeenam encapsulates in himself all the aspects of the critique of the King, which Shakespeare put into the hands of these several characters (Figure 2). ⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The Beggar trickster/Fool (left), with Guna, the other sisters, their husbands and the King in Gunasundari Katha.

If we recall the strictures against Shakespeare’s Lear (e.g., by Tolstoy on the Fool), ⁷ we find that the changes of this Indianised appropriation are singularly concerned with making it more intelligible and more suitable for the popular medium of the cinema even while it was reverting back to the older source play. In its conflation of the roles of the Fool, Edgar and Poor Tom, it is again addressing the dissatisfactions with the Fool in the play who disappears when Edgar in the guise of Poor Tom appears. It will not be an exaggeration to say that this early film encapsulates the multivocality of Indian cinema, by weaving dexterously the play’s core folkloric origins and structure into multiple local strands: the music of the folk janapadam form combined with the devotional woman’s virtue film; the magical transformative ‘tilismi’ tales, very popular in early twentieth-century Indian literatures, exploiting the illusionistic magic-making propensities of the new medium of cinema. K. V. Reddy, the director, is acknowledged the master of Telugu cinema’s most successful genre of the 1950s, the ‘action fantasy’, locally dubbed the ‘folklore film’. ⁸ In the assimilation of elite culture with the popular commercial cinema, he produced with Gunasundari Katha a blockbuster and added several new genres to the King Lear cinematic repertoire. The thousands who flocked to this multi-genre film may barely have noticed Shakespeare but it proved that his play, successfully transposed into Indian cultural and cinematic contexts, could entertain too.

The wise and the impish fool

Rui ka Bojh (Weight of Cotton), 1997, in Hindi, directed by Subhash Agarwal, the second film version of Lear that I would like to discuss, is the complete opposite of the first. Based on a Hindi novel, Gawah Gairhazir, by Chandra Kishore Jaiswal, it is an unusual version where both the director and the writer disclaim any influence by Shakespeare, but which resonates a clear Lear ethos and ‘Learness’ ⁹ in its narrative, indicating perhaps that, to an extent, Shakespeare’s stories have been absorbed in Indian literary and performative culture and often float up unbidden, an unacknowledged dimension of our postcoloniality. The film presents a close transposition of the core theme of King Lear, of the generational conflict and the humiliation of an old man into the Indian context. Admittedly, this is a theme which is ubiquitous in all cultures, and several Hindi films have been made around it, ¹⁰ but none contains as many resonances and parallels – as the sudden decision to divide the property, the ensuing frictions, the externment from home and most crucially the introspection stimulated by the presence of several Fool figures, so that one can take the liberty of describing Rui ka Bojh as affording a remarkable instance of an unwitting intertextuality and dialoguing with Shakespeare’s play.

Located in a North Indian village of the 1950s, it is a realistic portrait, sensitively shot with an authentic, almost documentary feel, and without song or dance, or the usual extravagant razzmatazz of a Bollywood film. It was sponsored by the National Film Development Corporation which was set up in the 1960s (as the Film Finance Corporation) by the government to promote serious, socially responsive cinema by granting loans for modest but offbeat films. The film is told in flashback as the central Lear figure is leaving home. It sticks to the part of the original plot depicting the travails of an old man, Kishun Shah, who one day decides to retire and to divide all his property among his three sons, here, mainly to end the constant bickering that takes place between their wives (since they all live together as a joint family in his own house). He continues to stay on with his youngest son, Ram Sharan, who has been given the family house and opts to look after the father. Soon, however, frictions begin when the old man finds himself displaced as master of the household without much money and is forced to petition others for small personal needs. He begins to resent the daughter-in-law’s barbs – she is annoyed by his demands and quirks. Like with Lear, there are predictable differences about food; loneliness and lack of freedom tell on him, and he soon becomes irritable, suspicious and unreasonable, refusing food not to his liking and not bothering to walk to the toilet to relieve himself. Tensions mount, the son asks him to move from the front room to the back yard (closer to the toilet), but he takes offence; there is a big quarrel, violence ensues: he hits the son with his walking stick, the son pushes him and in the heat of the showdown, throws his belongings into the back yard/room, in effect dispossessing him.

At this point, divergences from the Lear plot are introduced: his ego hurt, Kishun himself decides to leave the family home and go and live in a temple. Hearing this, the son and his family are stricken with remorse; they try their best to dissuade him, but Kishun determinedly externs himself from his own house and hearth. However, while he is travelling, slowly, in a bullock cart, he has time to reflect on his situation, and begins to realise that all alone in the temple he would be more miserable without the cheeky mischief of his grandsons and the familiar comfort of his own home. He is chastened, and orders the cart to turn back.

It is clear that while this film focuses on the familial conflict which is the heart of the play, it does not have either the magnitude (no sub-plot) or negativity (siblings do not contest each other and it ends happily) of Shakespeare’s tragedy. But this domestication, in a straightforward narrative, bolstered with some consummate acting in the lead roles, presents a fuller, more realistic portrait of familial alienation because it takes trouble to give the other side of the story too; of how trivial issues can take on huge proportions, of the younger family’s difficulties and how a well-meaning generous old man can become a burden. It takes us into the heart of the rejected patriarch and makes us share Lear’s pain, drawing us in as only cinema can, providing an alternate intercultural view of Lear’s dilemma. Of course, this Lear is no regal authority but an ordinary villager. Yet like Shakespeare’s Lear, he has a conscience keeper and adviser, in the role of Madho Bhagat Vaid. Unlike Kishun who is apt to be impetuous and temperamental, Madho Bhagat Vaid is a wise friend who, like Lear’s Fool, cautions and even rebukes him for giving away all. As his name signifies, he is the village doctor: a vaid is a healer. He acquires shades of Poor Tom’s philosopher when he strongly advises the Lear figure not to be childish and petulant and pick fault with everyone, making mountains out of molehills. In a central analogy, encapsulated in the title of the film, Rui ka Bojh (Weight of Cotton), he compares an old father with cotton, which is lightweight and not oppressive to begin with, but which each passing moment of his remaining life gets wetter: an old father becomes heavy like a bundle of cotton steeped in water, a burden every son wishes to remove from his head and throw away. ‘In truth’, he observes to Kishun, ‘both you and I are heavy wet burdens’. Like Lear’s Fool, Madho Bhagat dies towards the latter half of the story, but it is Madho’s words which reverberate in Kishun’s mind when he has left home and make him see sense and return. The wise Fool’s role is also amplified in a chorus of village elders who often congregate to take stock and give advice. They too caution him, like Lear’s Fool, on the foolishness of giving all away. Their stern admonishments, ‘it is childish to leave home’…‘it is shaming us, the elders’…‘learn to enjoy the noise and bustle of the grandkids’, further resonate and make him change his mind.

The comic notes and satirical jibes of the Shakespearean Fool are not missed out either, rather they are brought in through the young grandsons, aged around 6 and 8, who function as subaltern fools and ludic clown figures in the film. Kishun imposes on them, ordering them about to run errands, interfering with their homework, but is stingy with his monetary rewards for these jobs. The kids, Munma and Chunma, resort to tricks like sneakily pulling off his glasses, blinding him to get at his money, or lose their patience with the crotchety grandfather and give him a piece of their mind in their outspoken ways (Figure 3). They puncture his authority and expose his petulance. Again, it is the recollection of their mischief which makes Kishun change his mind and return. Hence, the critique of Kishun comes from several directions and several figures and serves, in this modified ending, to make him undergo a cathartic self-realisation and see the error of his ways, making him turn back towards a harmonising end. The film, narrated in flashback, opens with the scene of Kishun moving ahead slowly in a bullock cart but looking back in the direction he is coming from. It closes with the same cart moving more briskly, in the opposite direction and with Kishun smiling for the first time in the film.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Grandson attempts to ‘blind’ Kishun by pulling off his glasses so that he can steal his money in Rui ka Bojh.

Thus in Rui ka Bojh, the Hindi film, more than in Gunasundari Katha, the Telugu film, we can see how through the reconfiguration of the Fool into a split figure – the wise healer, choric elders and the impish free-talking children, who both exhort and expose Kishun/Lear – an alternate ending, abjuring violent and unhappy deaths, can be posed as a real possibility. Not fabulist but acutely real and local, and with an urgent socio-political dimension: with the rapidly changing society, the growth of the nuclear family and the consequent erosion of traditional familial norms and power structures, along with the lack of state welfare, care of the elderly has become a pressing national issue in India today. Furthermore, its deeply felt and rooted performances aided by an authentic idiomatic dialogue and realist visualisation ring so true that it serves to expose the ‘happy family’ model of Bollywood films as a ubiquitous fantasy. The film, appropriating and echoing the Shakespearean framework, signals and speaks to concerns of today.

It has been the given norm to refer to Nahum Tate’s happy-ending adaptation as ‘notorious’. But we need to pause and recall that it was persuasive enough to hold sway for 150 years in Shakespeare’s own country. Samuel Johnson had stated that he could not bear to witness Cordelia’s death. Tragedy as a genre was non-existent in early Indian literary culture; it came with colonialism and the introduction of Western literature, especially Shakespeare and the Greeks. Indian writers adopted this new genre only after considerable debate on its philosophical implications. ¹¹ And though today it has been assimilated into all Indian language literary cultures, there persists a dominant preference for a harmonising, happy ending, be it in fiction, on stage or on screen. Indian redactions of Shakespeare are not wild cards, but a response to cultural needs and inclinations. Another better-known version, because circulated abroad, of Lear, Life Goes On (2009), directed in English by Sangeeta Datta, set in contemporary London among diasporic Indians, examines the conflicts faced by an aging doctor with his three daughters after his wife suddenly dies. Added to this challenge are his own demons of the past, of the communal violence experienced during Partition. The ending with his acceptance of the youngest daughter’s relationship and pregnancy with a Muslim boy points to an exorcism of the festering traumas, and a moving forward. Happy-ending Lears have their own message, no less meaningful for the conflict-ridden societies of today. They also raise questions about the efficacy of tragedy as a genre reflective of today’s worldviews.

The wife and actor-friend as fool

The third film, Natsamrat (Actor King), 2016, in Marathi, directed by Mahesh Manjrekar, is again different from the earlier two in that it relocates Shakespeare’s King Lear in the context of the heyday of Marathi theatre, of the early part of the twentieth century, which like all theatres in India since the mid-nineteenth century developed under the influence of the Western model, and specially Shakespeare. It is also closest to the original in retaining the tragic genre, a larger swathe of the plot and characterisation and, most significantly, incorporating lines, not only from Lear, but also Hamlet, Othello, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It. A second-order adaptation, it is based on a stage play of the same name, by the well-known poet V. V. Shirwadkar, and first performed in 1970. The play is animated by a nostalgic, though post-colonial, mood and is an acknowledged classic of Marathi theatre, having been performed countless number of times and still filling the house whenever revived. Natsamrat, the play and the film, dramatise the struggles of an aging but celebrated thespian, Ganpatrao Belwalkar, honoured with the title of natsamrat, ‘King of Actors’ and known for his Shakespearean roles, in facing the real world outside the magic circle of theatre. Like Lear, he divides his property, between son and daughter here, but differences with the daughter-in-law explode; he feels insulted, moves in with the daughter, but is soon forced to leave in the night with an impending storm. The film enhances the play, taking the liberty to add to the play-text: it introduces new characters, a fellow actor Ram Bahu who is a Kent-like devotee-cum-critic and a young theatre-crazy Edgar-like student, both of whom function as Fool figures simultaneously debunking and supporting Lear. It expands the focus, bringing alive locations mentioned but not dramatised on stage like the basti/shelter of the homeless under a bridge (the hovel of Poor Tom/Raja). It also interpolates scenes and dialogue specifically centred around the life of an actor and the theatre to fill in and augment perceived gaps in the stage play. ¹² This film, more than the other two, is closer in form and spirit to Shakespeare’s narrative, but its creative energy and insight, however, lie in the parallel it makes between Lear’s kingdom, under threat from his own misapprehensions, with the changing world of Marathi theatre, where once Ganpatrao Belwalkar was the crowned emperor, a natsamrat, the king of actors, who flourished within the illusions of the stage, but fails, like Lear, in the harsher glare of reality. At the end, destitute and homeless, he finds out that his theatre has burnt down, he rushes back to it, and reliving the past memories and glories, like Lear, collapses on the literal stage of fools.

While the play is mainly centred on the protagonist Lear/Ganpatrao and his familial conflict, the film extends and fleshes out the analogy with theatre. The play, we are told, was written as a vehicle for Nanasehab Phatak, the legendary actor of the heyday of Marathi theatre of the 1930s and 40s: ‘a new play that will suit old actors’ through adapting King Lear. ¹³ But in looking at Lear, Shirwadkar found Natsamrat, a somewhat melodramatic story of an old retired actor, who had been the king of the stage. In performance, the play is famed as a one-man show, one of the meatiest parts of Marathi drama, with the thespian’s past recounted in long monologues and spot-lit soliloquies. The film, on the other hand, with the cinematic freedoms of space and time intercutting, takes the flashback route to actualise the theatre, burnt down now, and bring alive the mood and frisson of a glorious era of Marathi theatre. The film, much more than the play, becomes what Kenneth Rothwell has called a ‘mirror film’, the narrative of the actor’s life reflecting meta-cinematically the Shakespearean plays performed. The film too has been a hit, the highest grossing Marathi film till 2016.

Natsamrat, like Rui ka Bojh, focuses on a single familial conflict (no sub-plot), which is given a different dimension by the presence of Ganpatrao’s wife, Kaveri, obedient and supportive, but also critical and disapproving at crucial moments: ‘I was a little apprehensive about giving everything away.’.., she says after the division of the property. And later, she rebukes him: ‘stop putting on a show’…‘you have not retired from the theatre, you have brought it home’, after his outspokenness with guests. The wife, Kaveri, performs the essential function of the Fool, quietly delivering pungent home truths and countering his ego. That Ganpatrao always calls her ‘Sarkar’ meaning ‘boss’ reveals her unofficial hold on him, like the Fool. She is the alter-ego, helping articulate what he cannot, pushing him when he hesitates: she is the one who decides they must leave the son’s house immediately after their insulting showdown with the daughter-in-law: ‘you showed your weakness’…‘be careful when you give away what belongs to you’. And she is the one to insist they leave the daughter’s house and go to their village after being mistakenly charged with stealing the husband’s pay-packet: ‘we have been cast aside like old unwanted stuff…let’s leave’. She, like Ganpatrao, cannot suffer the barbs of the self-centred children without protest: ‘I am not comfortable here’. She, in fact, takes on the ameliorative role of the Folio Fool in his companionate and tender dimensions, accompanying him into the night storm with pelting rain. Like the Fool, she dies, contracting a fever, after the storm.

Feminist criticism has pointed to the lack of the ‘maternal/female’ principal in Lear as a contributing factor in his devastation. This unique conflation of the roles of absent mother/wife and the Fool companion, in both the play and the film, softens Lear/Ganpatrao’s egotism, his quick temper and refusal to see the other’s point of view. This Lear does not suffer as much due to injured vanity, as due to his high handedness and impetuosity. He is not just the actor king, but also the controlling patriarch; once he has decided to distribute his wealth, he must do it immediately, even though the children protest against it. He has overweening pride, he shows off in the beginning, saying how good his children are because he has brought them up so well. Since there is no truth-telling Cordelia, Ganpatrao is not guilty of an unreasonable banishment, but of taking over the lives of his son and daughter, even as he is giving them their economic freedom. But it is not a case of being more sinned against than sinning: the daughter-in-law and daughter are shown to be uncommonly insensitive, equally impetuously accusing him over trifles. Kaveri, the wife/Fool, though uneasy about the distribution, supports him through thick and thin. She, like the Fool, takes the brunt and is sacrificed to the pain of his faults. Critics have likened her to Cordelia, the ‘good’ daughter, and in the play towards the end, in a lucid moment, the destitute Ganpatrao recalls Kaveri, making the comparison explicit: ‘Kaveri is not alive. Like Cordelia she has died. Dear God, a horse-mouse can remain alive and not my Kaveri. Now she will never return, never ever again…Never, no…never’. ¹⁴ However, Kaveri never opposes or denies her husband’s wishes and this direct Shakespearean quote and open referencing in the play is one of the few that the film does not incorporate. It chooses to see her as a co-actor instead: right at the end, in a delusional state, Ganpat says, ‘It’s time to begin a new show. I can hear the final bell. My actress is already on the stage, waiting for me’.

Other Fool/interrogative figures also appear to humanise the imperious actor-king. Raja (meaning king), ironically named, a lowly shoe shine boy, emerges after the storm and the death of Kaveri to befriend Ganpatrao, alone, crazed and wandering, to give him shelter like Poor Tom and to advise him on the ways of the world: ‘don’t go back to your children, they abandoned you once’. The film adds a third figure, in a quasi-Edgar role, brought in at the beginning, who is shadowing the old actor, refusing to go away because he is crazy about theatre and wants to learn from him. His name, Siddhartha, and the fact that he has done a master’s degree in technology, underline his equation with the studious Edgar who watches and waits. But it is the interpolation of a Kent-like outspoken peer in the shape of Ram Bhau, a fellow actor and friend, which performs the most pungent and damaging critique of the overweening natsamrat through his witticisms and the recall of their acting days in the theatre. Ram Bhau is cast like a veritable vidushaka of Sanskrit drama as described in the Natyashastra: dwarfish, bald, of grotesque appearance and gluttonous. Likewise, Ram Bhau is short, balding, corpulent – ‘if you had taken care of your body’ – and given to drink. And he more than exemplifies the literal meaning of the term, as in Sanskrit, vidu means defiling, corrupting, abusing, when he begins deflating Ganpat right after the award: ‘you have been faking it.…ever since you stepped on stage. You are a half-baked actor’. And he becomes the bitter Fool, continuing on this despoiling note in their several encounters: ‘I am a better actor than you.…But you won our hearts…marched on…all the great roles were reserved for you…Hamlet was one of the few memorable roles you played!’ Ganpat takes this abuse laughingly, so close is the bond between them: ‘even your praise is laced with sarcasm’; and he later admits that Bhau was a ‘better actor in everything and this inferiority complex made my life unbearable. Yet I enjoyed all the success and this realisation won’t let me rest in peace’. Like the vidushaka, Ram Bhau is both a foil to Ganpat and a parody, underlying a deeper similitude. Hemmed in with these multiple Fool figures, companions, alter egos and critics, Ganpatrao, the actor king and irate patriarch who had hundreds applauding his every move, is humbled into a crazed old man.

Most congruent to our purposes, it is surprising how much Shakespeare Natsamrat works in, beyond the plot and character, in what is at first viewing a somewhat predictable story, of familiar family frictions. By doing so, the film encapsulates and celebrates an important period and aspect of the colonial legacy, the formation of modern Indian theatre, and the crucial influence of Shakespearean drama, especially on Marathi theatre. Apart from Lear, quotations from Hamlet, As You Like It, Othello, and Julius Caesar erupt out of his actorly persona. Three key moments are particularly illustrative. When Ganpatrao first sees his burnt-down theatre, the lines which immediately float up in his reverie are from the storm scene of Lear: ‘no, Lear will not cry’. In between he is asked to mentor a rehearsal of Othello adapted to contemporary times which he brutally savages: ‘Why use Shakespeare as a crutch? We are disciples, many have spent entire lives interpreting him’. But he is told that acting styles have changed since his heyday. And then there is his final speech, on his burnt-out stage, where his self, nurtured by inhabiting the roles of great Shakespearean heroes, ‘I Julius Caesar, I Othello, I…Hamlet…, is reasserted: he imperiously stops the police from hitting Raja/Poor Tom, refuses to return to his pleading children, and instead prepares for a final show, of the assassin’s dagger. Mouthing ‘Brutus, Brutus you too’ and then ‘Then die Caesar!’…he collapses. The Shakespearean lives which had animated his being script their own histrionic ending. The melodramatic tenor of this speech in its entirety in the play (but moderated in the film) has been read by Shanta Gokhale as Ganpatrao ‘playing to the gallery. Not for him Lear’s chastened ego,…[he] is full of an actor-king’s pride’. ¹⁵ However, if we glance back at the tragic paradigm, all Shakespearean tragic heroes are given a final moment of renewal and self-assertion, and the film adaptation follows Shakespearean characterisation in this, allowing the homeless Ganpatrao to re-assert his former commanding position as both patriarch and actor king: ‘there is only one human being I know who stands firm in his own place. And that is I, I, Julius Caesar, I Othello, I, Prataprao, Sudhakar and Hamlet.…All great men have come to reside under the canopy of my body.… The film directs the last sentence in this meta-dramatic end to a Fool figure: ‘Did you get it now Siddhartha? This is what theatre acting is all about my dear’, underlining the intertwining of reality and theatrical fiction in Ganpatrao’s life – Prataprao and Sudhakar being protagonists of classic Marathi plays – that the film has foregrounded.

This equation of life off stage with that on stage, of the erosion of the dividing line between being and non-being on stage is unexpectedly captured in another scene, where at the end of a stage performance, where he has been taken to by Raja, Ganpatrao is so restless with awakened memories that he cannot stop himself from reciting and performing Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’, just standing in the aisle. The audience halts in the middle of its exit, listens rapt with attention and applauds vigorously when he finishes. Hamlet’s existential angst is merged with Lear’s, and old, demented Ganpatrao questions how to carry on the struggle of living. The play and the film celebrate the poetry, sound and music of Shakespeare’s words, albeit in translation, as much as their messages for today. In this it is different from The Last Lear (2007), which too is centred on an aging Shakespearean actor, but which takes a more ironic view of the past theatrical culture, also a colonial inheritance in Bengal, which is being overtaken by the cinema.

Natsamrat mirrors not just the humiliation and dislocation of the king but also his catharsis: for Ganpat, it is precipitated in the confrontation with the death of the main Fool figures, wife Kaveri and friend Ram Bhau. He is broken by the gratuitous death of Kaveri: ‘the world is oblivious to a lot of stars in the sky’, intones a background song. But Bhau’s death provokes introspection about the meaning of the inevitably meta-cinematic life of an actor:

we are endlessly insecure people, mirror-loving selfish beings.…those who work in the theatre or cinema live in a false world. It is very difficult to nurture your real self, it is a hard price to pay.…we wear the masks of the characters and lose our real identities…filled my body with the ghosts of so many characters…I gave your grief an identity…but what about me? I may never get justice anywhere in this world…But shouldn’t I find it here? On stage?

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Re-assertion of self by Ganapatrao at the end of Natsamrat.

Non-Anglophone, intercultural adaptations of Shakespeare, for the most part, remain a curiosity in Shakespeare studies. Adaptation theory which veers between the rhizomatic valorisation of all afterlives and the deep reservation about the emergent ‘spectral’ Shakespeare does not provide the resilience for negotiating the intercultural. Rather, it is seen to be providing a space for the reading, particularly Indian adaptations on film, as ‘Fakespeares’ (Jim Casey), as simulacra, masks, several degrees removed from the ‘real’ Shakespeare. ¹⁶ While the concept of a ‘real Shakespeare’ has been destabilised with his own competing Quarto and Folio versions, cinema as a medium produces what are in fact simulacra – a spectral hyperreality. Further, most Shakespeare films, as a rule, do not incorporate more than 30%–35% of the original dialogue and are circumscribed by their financial resources. The intercultural Shakespeare film has an added burden: it must perforce ‘remodel’ the play to speak to different local sensibilities and concerns. The emphasis on ‘dislocations’ of Shakespeare by the editors in their introduction to the latest Shakespeare on Screen volume on King Lear (2019) is a heartening corrective, encouraging critical engagement with intercultural Shakespeare: as they conclude, ‘the various dislocations that King Lear evokes and invites are the condition of its being free and alive: migration is life’. ¹⁷

The three films of King Lear just reviewed ‘dislocate’ and, more, relocate the play into new genres which radicalise, multiply and centralise the Fool, more than in the original play, in resolving the conflicts. In Gunasundari Katha, a folk theatre vidushaka acts as the deus ex machina and sorts out the fallout of the love test and the sisters’ rivalries. Rui ka Bojh presents split figures of wise friends and impish kids who directly instigate a change of heart. In Natsamrat, the most complex of the three films, the several figures of wife, actor friend, lowly shoeshine boy and theatre enthusiast all construct and build up the counter action and critique which provokes the denouement. All these not only amplify the Fool’s chameleon-like personae but also partake of and add weight to Lear’s own questionings, ‘Does any here know me?…who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (1.4.233). In choosing not to delve into the dark underside of the play, or in touching upon it lightly, these Indian appropriations pose alternative readings, which far from being reductive, distant or many shades removed, are the new lives, new configurations of the play, viewed with pleasure and profit by thousands. All these films were popular hits, and today Shakespeare lives through this global interculturality.