Worlds Elsewhere (36 page)

Parsi actors worked a great deal harder than most of their British brethren: they were required to sing, dance and do acrobatics, as well as have voices strong enough to carry across auditoriums packed to the rafters. Women were initially forbidden from performing, so there was competition to find sweet-voiced, girlish young men who could play female parts. Even once professional actresses began to appear from the 1870s onwards – to howls of outrage from traditionalists – men predominated, often named for their most famous roles. One, the honey-voiced Pestanji Framji Madan, became known as ‘Pesu
Avan' after the character he played in a Gujarati adaptation of
Pericles.

Competition was cut-throat. There are tales, as in Elizabethan England, that companies paid spies to attend rival performances and copy down what they heard and saw. Other companies hired claques to hiss their opponents. Audiences expected a great deal: one critic took a production of
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
to task for having fewer than forty thieves on stage (though conceded that the company had imported a live tree from England). The latest theatrical technology offered spectators ever-more awe-inspiring effects: trapdoors, flying beds, dazzling lighting changes, real running water.

For a flavour of what it might have been like to sit among the audience, there is the testimony of a nineteenth-century actor whose company brought a Marathi version of
Macbeth
to Mumbai:

There are reports of such dire warnings not succeeding, and the action shuddering to a halt in order to allow songs to be sung three, four, five extra times. Some shows dragged on until dawn.

Above all, this was Indianised Shakespeare: as well as being translated into Indian languages, the plays were freely relocated to the subcontinent and adjusted for local conditions. In the New Alfred Dramatic Company's Urdu
Twelfth Night
from 1905, Dilera, Princess of Baghdad (Viola), and Jafar (Sebastian) are travelling on a train rather than a ship when they are caught in bad weather. A bridge collapses, the twins are flung into the water far below – Shakespeare's storm reimagined for the largest railway nation in the world.

Worlds often collide in Parsi scripts, mirroring the cosmopolitan
make-up of Mumbai. A Parsi
Hamlet
renamed
Khoon-e-Nahaq
(‘Unjustified Killing/Blood') from 1898 featured stage designs closely based on reports of Henry Irving's hugely popular British production, but was set in a medieval Indian court filled with Kathak dancers, and out of respect to its Muslim context Gertrude was poisoned with a glass of milk rather than wine. An Urdu
Comedy of Errors
from 1912 by the well-known playwright Narayan Prasad Betab, nicely renamed
Gorakh Dhandha
(‘A Puzzle'), opens with, of all things, a spectacular scene in a coal mine. ‘It has not,' writes the scholar R. K. Yajnik, whose 1933 study of Indian theatre is still invaluable, ‘reverence for the original.'

Yajnik was perhaps missing the point. Parsi theatre managers and playwrights had little interest in reverence; their driving need was to cram in audiences and beat their competitors. The Lucknow-born playwright Syed Mehdi Hasan Ahsan, who began working in the Parsi theatre in the late 1890s and was one of the earliest to translate Shakespeare into Urdu –
Khoon-e-Nahaq
is his – put it like this in the preface to
Bazm-e-Fani
(1898), the adaptation of
Romeo and Juliet
Sisson had mentioned:

‘A mosque of my own design': the metaphor chosen by Ahsan, a Muslim, is revealing. Shakespeare may have provided the foundations, but Parsi playwrights felt little compunction about demolishing his dramatic fabric and rebuilding plays from the ground up.

To me, one of the most appealing facets of these adaptations is the way they sometimes cock a snook at the very people who had exported Shakespeare to India as part of the noble colonial project, the British. An early version of
The Taming of the Shrew
performed at Surat in 1852 has the literal title ‘A Bad European Woman Brought to her Senses'.

Even more deliciously, the scholar Poonam Trivedi records a Hindi version of
The Comedy of Errors
from 1882 by Munshi Ratan Chand that bears some fascinating changes. In Shakespeare's version of the story, just as the plot builds to its climax, there is a scene in which the horrified
servant Dromio – continually being mistaken for his twin brother – tells his master how he is being pursued by a ‘kitchen wench … all grease' who has convinced herself he is her lover. ‘She is spherical, like a globe,' Dromio says, then launches into a laboured series of similes identifying precisely which bits of the ‘globe' she reminds him of:

It is rough stuff: that line about the ‘heir' must have got a boozy groan at the law college of Gray's Inn, where
Errors
was performed in December 1594. But this comic Grand Tour must also have resonated with Shakespeare's well-to-do audience, who would have heard of the places Dromio mentions, even if they had never visited.

Working on his adaptation – wittily entitled
Bhramjalak Natak
(‘A Web of Confusion') – Ratan Chand realised that although his own audience in late-nineteenth-century Mumbai was more cosmopolitan, the scene needed an overhaul. Several of his alterations are worth observing. First, the ‘Indies' (here referring to America) are gone; and instead of a nod to England's ‘chalky cliffs' at Dover, it is India that stands, patriotically, ‘in [the woman's] face, for just as Hindustan is the best of all countries, so was her face the best part of her person'.

Second, England doesn't disappear entirely – it is relegated to the location occupied by the Netherlands in Shakespeare's text, the bottom. ‘This was such a tiny country,' Chand's Dromio character scornfully remarks, ‘that exceedingly hard as I looked, I could find it nowhere. It must be hidden among those parts of the body I didn't look at.'

I found this gratifying: Shakespeare's text not only translated, but used to reorder the world according to an Indian perspective. The tiny, frigid British Isles were exactly where they should be – at the arse-end of nowhere.

DOUBLE CHIN REMOVAL,
read the sign.
JAW LINE ENHANCEMENT.

I was outside the address, or thought I was, but all I could see were dilapidated apartment blocks, paint coming off the concrete, and a scattering of small businesses. I wasn't expecting armies of men carrying clapperboards, but I'd been hoping for more from my first visit to a Bollywood studio than this. Was the studio doubling as a Botox clinic? Could it be hidden inside the estate agent's next door?

Just after 9.30 a.m., I was already dead on my feet. Jostling north through Mumbai at rush hour had been like swimming through an onrush of warm tar. It had taken the taxi the best part of two hours to get here from my hotel in the southern district of Marine Lines, a journey of roughly sixteen miles. The driver had pleaded to take the Worli suspension bridge, which elegantly solves the problem of Mumbai's geography – the fact that much of it is concentrated in a narrow spit of sand less than a mile wide – by ignoring it altogether, swooping out from Worli beach in a lordly sweep before reconnecting with dry land a few miles further north. Miscalculating the exchange rate of the toll, I'd insisted we go through the city instead. Every so often, as we got wedged in a hooting mob of motor rickshaws or overflowing buses, young men clinging casually to the doors, I caught his weary glance in the rear-view mirror. I had a lot to learn about Mumbai.

Fretful about the time, I tried to extract the phone number of my producer contact from the tangle of notes and figures on my pad. I'd got lucky, getting this interview (which is to say it had taken a phalanx of phone calls and the intercession of a friend of a friend). I was in danger of losing my slot.

Vishal Bhardwaj was high on my Bollywood hit list. A composer-director from the rural northern state of Uttar Pradesh, he had burst on to the international scene in 2003 with his film
Maqbool,
a startling remake of
Macbeth
that translated the play into a sleazy underworld version of modern-day Mumbai. Renowned Bollywood tough guy Irrfan Khan played a hit man bent on taking over a Muslim crime gang; the Witches were recast as corrupt cops obsessed with
kundli
astrology. Bhardwaj had followed this surprise hit with the lavish
Omkara
(2006), in which a muscle-bound enforcer called Omkara/Othello – the illegitimate son of a low-caste mother – romances the high-born, ‘fair-skinned' Dolly, played by the screen siren Kareena Kapoor.

Smartly contemporary, made with an eye on the box office as well as anxieties about crime rates and caste tensions, Bhardwaj's were a new breed of Indian Shakespeare adaptation. They had made the outside world at long last pay attention to the fact that Shakespeare was a major presence in the subcontinent.

After several phone calls and twenty minutes' searching, I located VB Productions on the fifth floor of an accommodation block marginally more run-down than the rest. Released from the tiny cage elevator, I was rushed through a dark apartment, crammed with young faces crouched over laptops. It looked more like a student flat share than a movie office.

Near the back was a space roughly the size of the front room in my one-bed London flat. It had been converted into a recording studio. In a glass booth on one side, not much larger than a phone box, a teenage male singer with bee-stung lips was pouting into a microphone. On the other, sitting in front of a small red harmonium and surrounded by a bevy of technicians, was Bhardwaj himself: a small figure with plump, genial features and a pudding-bowl haircut frizzed with grey. I was issued a cup of sweet tea and directed to a corner stool to observe.

They were halfway through recording one of the songs for the new VB movie, a ghost thriller called
Ek Thi Daayan
(‘Once There Was a Witch'). Seeing them record was a drama in itself. Bhardwaj would issue a stream of instructions in rat-a-tat Hindi, his right hand cresting the air in little curlicues and waves. The singer watched him apprehensively, as if trying to remember a complex series of road directions. Then a pre-recorded guitar track, a sultry love ballad, would blast out at full volume. The singer would croon a couple of notes, whereupon
Bhardwaj would interrupt to correct some indiscernible accent of phrasing or gesture – a shade more vibrato here, less of a swoop there. They would go again, Bhardwaj occasionally demonstrating on the harmonium. There was one English word I understood amid the Hindi. ‘
Heartfelt
,' he kept saying. ‘
Heartfelt
.'

They spent fifteen minutes on the first section of the first phrase alone. Many popular Indian films relied on a hit song – and the free air time and advertising – to turn a profit, but it wasn't just this: the songs Bhardwaj wrote were miniature masterpieces, crafted with the kind of care that was going out of fashion in mainstream Hindi film. Watching him at work was like seeing a poet in the frenzy of creation.

After half an hour, the wrung-out-looking singer was dispatched to take a break, and Bhardwaj guided me through yet another door to a corner office. It contained little more than a desk and two chairs, with a scruffy divan folded in the corner.

He was an accidental Shakespearian, he admitted. He'd been forced to learn Shakespeare in English Literature lessons at school, but hadn't thought much of him – deadly boring, painful to read. He mimicked throttling someone. ‘If you see him alive, you want to kill him.'

All that changed in the early 2000s when Bhardwaj went to collect his godson for the holidays. They'd been travelling on a train to Mussoorie in the far north, a five-hour journey. Casting around for something to read, Bhardwaj had borrowed his godson's
Tales from Shakespeare.