Book review: Thea Buckley,Mark Thornton Burnett,Sangeeta Datta and Rosa García-Periago (Eds.),Women and Indian Shakespeares

Shakespeare in study and performance has been deeply embedded in academic as well as non-academic understandings of modernity and education in India. The study of Shakespeare as ‘the’ English literary icon and also the most established cultural signifier of colonial education is equally enmeshed with the notions of (paradoxically) tradition and modernity in India. Many studies on Shakespeare have focused on the history of performance of Shakespeare in India, the growth and development of modern Indian drama, including adaptations and appropriations of Shakespearean plays, the impact of Shakespeare on Indian cinema, the performance of Shakespeare in college campuses and, of course, now we have the collection on Indian Shakespeares and women. This collection fills a critical gap in the burgeoning shelves of Shakespeare studies in India and is of immense value not only from a gendered or feminist perspective but also from a more general perspective of understanding modernity in India.

Gender and modernity, or, to put it the other way, tradition and gender, have been deeply interlinked in our understanding of social development. If we add the layers of English education, performance and Shakespeare to this rich intertextuality, we arrive at a complex and deeply intersectional approach to understanding the development of the idea of the modern in postcolonial India. For me, that is the real value and critical contribution of this collection. The Introduction is itself a valuable literature review of Shakespeare studies and also helps us trace the ways in which modernity and education have impinged on the idea of the woman—the female performer, academic, director and character—and her space and representation in Indian societies.

The anthology is divided into parts based on the approaches and perspectives they offer—the first part, ‘Histories’, is a rich insight into the contribution of women who translated, studied and circulated the idea of Shakespeare in India from colonial times to postcolonial society. The opening essay is by Poonam Trivedi, one of the pioneers and leading women scholars in the field. She has been writing on Shakespeare in India from different perspectives for decades and still brings new and illuminating insights to the subject. Her essay ‘The “woman’s part”: Recovering the Contribution of Women to the Circulation of Shakespeare in India’ on selected and specific women scholars in different roles—translators, academics and directors—draws attention to the neglected contribution of women to all these domains. An invaluable source of early theatre history in Bombay (as it was then) is pointed out in this essay, a fact that many young scholars will benefit by enormously. Paromita Chakravarti’s ‘Framing Femininities: Desdemona and Indian Modernities’ essay tracing the changing representations of Desdemona through several works is another brilliant example of how we can trace the idea of the evolving Indian woman through different socio-temporal iterations of the protagonist.

‘Translations’, the second section, takes us through the archives of Indian language translations of Shakespeare’s works, offering rich insights into different regional social and cultural fault lines as essays compare Tamil, Telegu, Kannada and Malayalam versions of Shakespearean heroines with Hindu epics and analyse the prescribed roles for women in these societies, with dress codes and rules for how much to speak and when.

Part Three—‘Representations’ is perhaps the most ‘contemporary’ section, focusing on cinematic and theatrical representations of women in Shakespeare. Mark Thornton Burnett and Jyotsna G Singh’s essay ‘“I dare do all that may become a man”: Martial Desires and Women as Warriors in Veeram, a Film Adaptation of Macbeth’ on the Malayalam film Veeram offers a close reading of the result of the melding of cultures and influences that perhaps lie at the heart of Indian modernity. The film is itself a ‘double adaptation’ of Macbeth and characters and tales from the Vadakkan Pattukal or ‘Northern Ballads’. Reading the film as a combination of international and intercultural production and influences, Burnett and Singh weave a textured analysis of gender, ritual and ceremonial inter-sectionalities. The combination of the Northern Ballads with Macbeth results in a text perhaps greater than its parts (if that is possible) where the complications of personal feeling, guilt and sexuality highlight the basic equations of power and gender in rich and complex ways.

In the same section (for me the richest part of the collection), Taarini Mookherjee’s ‘“You should be women”: Bengali Femininity and the Supernatural in Adaptations of Macbeth’ brings together two archives that seem unlikely partners but which she argues serve as ‘examples of two dominant archives—the ancient and the colonial—that shape cultural production in India today’. This carries forward the point made by the previous essay beautifully—that we cannot understand contemporary India in any sort of historical vacuum or one that seeks to erase any strand of history. All our pasts are paths that have led to the present. Mookherjee brings together two archetypal female ‘seductresses’—Kaikeyi from the Ramayana and Lady Macbeth—to explore representations of Bengali femininity in three contemporary texts—a novel, a dance performance and a theatrical production. Crossing genres and locating the contemporary in a context of diverse histories, this essay is a great example of the kind of rich and deep insights a focus on gender can yield.

The other two essays in this section focus on contemporary cinematic adaptations of Shakespearean plays—Sairat as an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in rural Maharashtra with the added complexities of caste and class, and of course the trilogy that has garnered the maximum attention in adapting Shakespeare, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool, Omkaara and Haider. Nishi Pulugurtha in ‘Romeo and Juliet Meets Rural India: Sairat and the Representation of Women’ locates the 2016 Marathi film Sairat’s history in the line of Romeo and Juliet adaptations in Indian cinema from 1937 onwards. The Juliet figure in Sairat has much more agency and troubles stereotypical gender representations, unlike previous iterations of the play in Indian cinema. However, the agency remains bound in caste frameworks as Pulugurtha points out: none of the Dalit women have any agency or autonomy; it is only the upper-caste Archi who calls the shots.

Jennifer T. Birkett’s ‘Dy(e)ing Hands: The Hennaed Female Agent in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Tragedies’ takes on Vishal Bharadwaj’s muchanalysed trilogy and focuses on a specific detail that brings together gender, femininity, ritual, blood symbolism, sexuality and guilt in all three heroines—their hennaed hands. This very culture-specific detail of henna not only highlights the local contextualisation of Shakespeare but also reveals a fresh insight into the female agent and her agency in the violence of the play. Playing with the ‘Bollywood’ fascination with wedding ceremonies and the tragedies where marriage is a source of conflict, Birkett demonstrates how Bharadwaj complicates both genres while imbuing each of the female characters with motivation and agency through a symbol that connotes both blood and sexuality.

The last section, ‘Critics and Creatives’ brings together essays that look at women as directors, practitioners and critics of Shakespearean texts, from Rosa Garcia Periago’s reading ‘Embattled Bodies: Women, Land and Contemporary Politics in Arshinagar, a Film Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet’ of Aparna Sen’s female-centric cinematic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet to a film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice set in a boarding school for boys and a reading of one of the oldest campus societies in Delhi—the Shakespeare Society and how it gradually included women and produced all female performances. This essay on campus theatre (with personal anecdotes) by N. P. Ashley is important because it brings in the obvious connection that has so far been missing from the collection—that of education and Shakespeare in India. N. P. Ashley takes us through the insider/outsider position of being Staff Advisor to the Shakespeare Society in St Stephens, a college that was exclusively male till 1975, and where he tries to look at the ways in which women have engaged with Shakespearean performances.

The very last chapter, which brings together directors and practitioners in conversation also provides the clearest indication that the genesis of this collection was a conference. While the essays are all important and bring nuanced readings of specific texts and performances to the scholar, the anthology is a little hampered by the fact that the papers were read a while ago, thus lending itself to a danger of being ‘dated’ when it does not deserve to be.

In conclusion, Women and Indian Shakespeares is an important addition to the shelf of studies on Shakespeare in India, even if some of the essays cover repeated ground, many of them bring most valuable and fresh insights into a topic that will never cease to fascinate us.