Worlds Elsewhere (46 page)

I glanced at the programme. ‘We fear that the disease that plagued Scotland during Macbeth's tyrannical rule has also infected our land and times,' read the director's notes.

After the performance was over, I was directed through to the gallery next door. Fifteen or so people were waiting, most in their twenties or early thirties – directors, actors, designers, a translator or two. A portrait of Mother Teresa gazed gravely down on us from the wall.

They were talkative and passionate. I'd arrived in the middle of a Bardic boom, they said. Following a Bengali translation called
Raja Lear
in 2010 starring the veteran actor Soumitra Chatterjee, revered for his collaborations with Satyajit Ray, there had been no fewer than eight separate Shakespeare productions in Kolkata, a staggering number given the home-grown Bengali drama that usually fills the city's stages.
Raja Lear
itself had been staged nearly forty times, and was still in the repertoire; Bangla productions of
As You Like It, Julius Caesar
and A
Midsummer Night's Dream
had followed.
Macbeth
had been seen more than thirty times already.

A few minutes later Koushik Sen came in, shining with sweat, still in costume. His army fatigues gave him the disquieting appearance of a junior officer about to send the whole bunch of us to military prison.

He had chosen
Macbeth
for unashamedly political reasons, he said: though it was ostensibly about medieval Scotland or Jacobean England, the Banerjee situation had made parallels right here in West Bengal.

‘Shakespeare is a way for us to keep thinking. Macbeth is thinking when no one else is thinking: this is why he wins.'

Another director shouted from the back: ‘We want to say what we want, through a Shakespearian text.'

Had they really come under pressure to censor the performance?

‘There were various pressures,' Sen said, his expression difficult to read. ‘But we talked among ourselves, and we decided that we would put the references back in.'

Macbeth
had a deep history in these parts. The play had been translated by the revered father of Bengali drama, Girish Chandra Ghosh (1844–1912), who staged it at the Minerva theatre in 1893 in the midst of the Bengali Renaissance. The performance was acclaimed as an artistic and political landmark: the
Hindu Patriot
considered it a ‘new departure in the dramatic history of Bengal', and even the
Englishman
admitted that although ‘a Bengali Thane of Cawdor is a living suggestion of incongruity … the reality is an astonishing reproduction of the standard convention of the English stage'.

As I talked with Sen and his colleagues, one name came up more than any other: that of Utpal Dutt. One of the most important theatre-makers of the post-independence generation, Dutt had also become a huge star in Bollywood. I tried to recall when I had first heard of him, then remembered: he'd made a cameo in
Shakespeare Wallah.
He had been a good friend and former collaborator of the Kendal family.

Born in 1929, twenty years after Geoffrey, Dutt had joined the Kendals while still studying at St Xavier's College in Kolkata before striking out with his own company, the Little Theatre Group, which produced cut-down versions of Ibsen, Tagore and Shaw and toured them across India. Of the many remarkable figures I had come across during my travels, Dutt was among the most captivating: one of the most prolific film actors of his generation, responsible for making over 200 Hindi and Urdu movies, most of them entirely forgettable, he had another, more disconcerting, life – as a Marxist political activist in West Bengal.

As Indian politics had intensified in the 1950s and 1960s, Dutt started to write his own plays and joined the underground Maoist Naxalbari movement. In 1965, after the ruling Congress party took umbrage at his drama
Kallol
(‘Waves') about government complicity in the 1946 Mumbai naval mutiny, he was imprisoned for several months without trial. Dutt spent the rest of his days living a fantastical life, somehow supremely Indian: famous actor in Bollywood potboilers by day, leftist guerrilla by night. Shakespeare was the glue that held together these two very separate identities.

Shakespeare haunted Dutt, or perhaps the other way around – most obviously during his career in mainstream theatre, where his Othello was acclaimed as the greatest in Indian history, so famous that in a 1961 Bengali melodrama called
Saptapadi,
which featured a scene from the play, it was the rasping-voiced Dutt who had redubbed the Moor's speeches because it was said no one else was qualified to do them. (Revenge for Baishnava Charan Adhya, perhaps.)

But Shakespeare also nourished Dutt's politics. In the 1960s, declaring that he was finished with staging English-language performances for uncomprehending audiences (‘they sat there with clenched fists – pretending to enjoy it'), he resolved to adapt and act the plays in Bengali. He began with a modern-dress
Julius Caesar
(described as ‘through contemporary eyes') in 1964, with Dutt himself as Caesar. The idea developed of taking the plays out of western-style theatres in the city and touring them to an altogether more challenging constituency – impoverished rural audiences in far-flung corners of the state.

Bengal had a boisterously popular folk-theatre tradition known as
jatra
(from the Sanskrit ‘setting out on a journey'), and Dutt realised that Shakespeare could make excellent sense in the form. Traditional
jatras,
rumbustious melodramas bursting with noise and music, went on all night long, but Dutt's adaptations, created with a team of veteran actors, were abbreviated to make them available to farmers, labourers, housewives and tea-plant workers doing shifts. They were staged most often in the open air, preceded by a free musical performance designed to pull in audiences. Dutt estimated that sometimes they played to 30,000 people at a time, under fierce carbide lights, tannoys sending the dialogue booming out across the fields.

Their Shakespeare was condensed:
Romeo and Juliet
became a folk play called
Bhuli Nai Priya
(‘I Have Not Forgotten, My Love');
A Midsummer Night's Dream
was relocated from the forests outside Athens to the Bengal mangrove forests. Dutt had done
Macbeth,
too – in fact several times, first in 1954 in a ‘fast-moving, noisy' version that toured Bengal villages; then again in September 1975, in response to the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, during which Dutt's own scripts were banned.

Dissatisfied with pre-existing Bengali translations, Dutt wrote his own version of the Scottish play, sharpening its left-wing politics by inserting extra scenes for a cast of Bangla-speaking peasants and filling it with music by Shostakovich and Khachaturian as well as Stravinsky.
When the show came to Kolkata, Dutt printed embittered words spoken by Ross on the front of the theatre programme:

‘We knew that we couldn't find a better play against autocracy,' Dutt said. Koushik Sen smiled quietly: his sentiments exactly.

A passionate Shakespearian who was also a passionate polemicist; a Sanskrit-speaking intellectual who could recite Virgil from memory and mingled with factory workers and farm labourers; a radical Marxist who was also a good pal of the Kendals and made movies for Merchant Ivory – whatever paradoxes I was trying to resolve about the many identities of Shakespeare in India, Dutt seemed to contain plenty, not to mention some I hadn't even thought to consider.

While in Mumbai it had been a struggle to find any traces of Shakespeare at all, in Kolkata he seemed – like the British – to be everywhere. There was a whole street named after him, Shakespeare Sarani (formerly Theatre Road, rechristened in 1964 for the 400th anniversary of the poet's birth). There was a dauntingly active organisation called the Shakespeare Society of Eastern India, run by an affable, Falstaffian academic called Amitava Roy, who welcomed me into one of their Sunday-evening meetings and plied me with sweet tea and disconcertingly knowledgeable questions.

‘Shakespeare is in everyone's hearts here,' Roy beamed, to fervent nods from his congregation. ‘No one else is like him, no one across the world. You know the Indian word
Gurudeva
? It is what Mahatma Gandhi called Rabindranath Tagore.
Guru,
you know, “one who leads”.
Deva
is “maker”. Shakespeare, Rabindranath, Homer – they are
Gurudevas.
They show you the way, and they show you the truth.'

I had seen the statue to Shakespeare on Shakespeare Sarani? I must find it at once and pay tribute, Roy's group said. Feeling a little shaken by the fervour of their belief, I promised to try.

History, as ever, had a great deal to do with this. The shadow
of English literature fell across countless Kolkatan writers of the nineteenth century – not only Young Bengal playwrights such as Michael Madhusudan Dutta and Dinabandhu Mitra, who pioneered drama at the new playhouses during the 1860s and 1870s, but poets, novelists, philosophers, musicians. The lyricist Dwijendralal Ray penned epic dramas much influenced by the English history plays, while the father of the Bengali novel, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, borrowed as liberally from Shakespeare as he did from Thomas Hardy and Walter Scott. Bankim based the heroine of his early novel
Kapalkundala
(1866) partly on Miranda in
The Tempest,
and in an essay pointed out how slow the British had been to ‘grasp the import of [Shakespeare's] wonderful plays'. A modern critic put it well, and in terms that the evangelical Shakespeare Society of Eastern India might have supported: among the English-educated intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Bengal, Shakespeare became a source of ‘non-denominational spirituality'.

One writer engaged with Shakespeare assiduously, the most famous Kolkatan of all: Rabindranath Tagore, India's first Nobel laureate. As a child growing up in a phenomenally wealthy Brahmin family, Tagore was given a thorough western education alongside schooling in classical Indian languages, religion and literature, and read widely in Sanskrit, Bengali and English, including poets such as Byron and Coleridge, as well as Dante in English translation. According to his first English biographer, Tagore was forced by his tutor to produce line-by-line translations of Kalidasa's
Kumarasambhava
(‘Birth of Kumara') and
Macbeth
as punishment for poor behaviour.

Tagore read more when he travelled to Brighton and London in 1879 as a gauche eighteen-year-old, taking classes at University College on
Coriolanus
and
Antony and Cleopatra
(which he ‘liked very much'), but admitted that he was disillusioned by his experiences in the seat of Empire. Before he arrived, he wrote later, he had supposed Britain ‘so devoted to higher culture that from one end to the other it would resound with the strains of Tennyson's lyre'. Real life bore little resemblance to literary fantasy. In a letter home he complained bitterly how some English seemed astonished that Indians knew anything about culture at all. It was a tension that would trouble Tagore for the rest of his life, particularly when he began to call for independence from Britain. Having been knighted by George
V,
he renounced the award in disgust at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, in which
protestors in Amritsar had been fired on without warning by British troops, leaving at least 400 dead and 1,200 wounded.

Some of the same ambiguity touched Tagore's relationship with Shakespeare. It was clear that he was influenced by the older writer a great deal, not least in the playscripts he wrote. In the preface to
Malini
(1896), whose tough-minded heroine owes something to Shakespeare's own female leads, he admitted, ‘[his] plays are always our dramatic model. Their manifold varieties and extensiveness and conflicts had captured our mind from the beginning.'

In 1916, invited by the Anglo-Jewish scholar Israel Gollancz to contribute to a commemorative volume for the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, Tagore composed a brief Bengali verse comparing Shakespeare (in the translation Gollancz printed) to a sun whose ‘fiery disc' had appeared near ‘England's horizon', but whose rays now stretched across the world:

Despite this extravagant tribute, Tagore – unlike many of his Bengali contemporaries – was not an uncritical admirer. Where Bankim had adopted Miranda as one of his own heroines, Tagore took issue with the very substance of
The Tempest,
devoting a critical essay published in 1902 to it and
Shakuntala,
revered as one of the greatest works by the Sanskrit writer Kalidasa. Tagore observed numerous echoes, for instance in the romance between Shakespeare's Miranda and Prince Ferdinand, which resembles that of the innocent young nymph Shakuntala and the wayward King Dushyanta, and in the way both texts use an idyllic remote setting in order to intensify the drama (in Kalidasa's case a secluded forest, in Shakespeare's the near-deserted island).

But Tagore's comparison is not to Shakespeare's favour. While Kalidasa uses the seduction of an all-too-innocent girl as potent dramatic irony – Dushyanta, as the audience well knows from the story's origins in the
Mahabharata,
will abandon Shakuntala – Tagore argues that Shakespeare's Miranda is a more sentimental figure, ‘girt round by ignorance', seen almost entirely through her relationship with her father and Ferdinand, her lover. In contrast, Shakuntala is truly a child
of nature, ‘linked in spirit to her surroundings', whose connection to the forest is implicit and essential. Where Shakespeare, Tagore argues, simply drops his characters like chess pieces into their environment, Kalidasa genuinely understands both his cast and where they end up – and thus the older play has a much more subtle understanding of the relationship between mankind and nature.