Worlds Elsewhere (38 page)

In India, however, Gulzar explained, the story has always been a hit. Fittingly for a script about multiple sets of twins, something like six separate cinematic versions had been made in the past fifty years.
Angoor
itself was based on two earlier movies: a literary Bengali version called
Bhranti Bilas
(1963); and a Hindi one wittily called
Do Dooni Char
(‘Two Times Two Equals Four', 1968).

He emitted an avuncular chuckle. ‘You know the Bollywood interpretation of copyright? We call it the right to copy.'

Sanjeev Kumar, by then one of the most recognisable faces in Bollywood, had been persuaded to make
Angoor
on the basis that he would get quite literally double the screen time, playing both Antipholus characters, here called Ashok. One Ashok is living a contented if not wholly blameless life in a quiet modern-day Indian town with his wife, sister-in-law and a mistress around the corner; the other Ashok just happens to be in the area. The character actor Deven Verma played the Bahadurs, servants to the
Ashoks. Screen trickery did the rest.
Angoor
means ‘grapes' in Hindi. Gulzar permitted himself a smile: it was as wilfully nonsensical as anything else.

‘There are plenty of stories of twins, but two sets of twins – that was only Shakespeare. There is no other example in literature anywhere that I have come across. So I wanted to adapt it.'

There was even a cunning Shakespearian joke for those watching out for it, right at the film's conclusion, when the series of confusions came to an end and the two sets of twins were finally reunited.

The reference is to the climax of
Twelfth Night,
when Viola and her long-lost twin Sebastian confirm each other's identities by describing the ‘mole' on their father's brow. I thought it a nicely nonchalant touch.

Gulzar shrugged. ‘We talk about adaptation, but of course this is the same process for Shakespeare: he himself is adapting, from Plautus, from other comedies. That's how it is.'

I wondered if there was another reason
The Comedy of Errors
proved attractive to Indian film-makers. As its critics were forever lamenting, Bollywood had long been dominated by the requirements of genre, expectations about character types or plot development as rigid as medieval chivalric codes or the operation of the Japanese tea ceremony. Despite its Shakespearian ancestry,
Angoor
also fitted neatly into the category of so-called ‘lost-and-found' movies.

Films such as
Kismet, Awara, Waqt
and the most renowned classic of all,
Mother India
(1957), portray nuclear families broken up by circumstances beyond the characters' control – an errant or absent husband, natural disaster, the intercession of violence or evil.
Waqt
(‘Time', 1965) begins with an earthquake that sunders a husband, wife and their three sons. The action-comedy
Amar Akbar Anthony
(1977) features a plot line that would have given even Shakespeare migraines: three brothers are separated as children and raised in three separate households in three different religions. After a preposterous series of coincidences, all are reunited to take revenge on their mutual foe.

The lost-and-found genre didn't merely allow for a blizzard of joyous confusion. It was also, like many things in Bollywood, a way to reflect Indian audiences' concerns and anxieties back at them. Millions of families
had been wrenched apart during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947; increasing urbanisation had separated millions more. Religion, class, caste, wealth: India remained, as the newspaper headlines kept insisting, a country fractiously divided. In a land of 1.25 billion people and growing, it would not be hard, like the Ashoks, to lose yourself.

There was one moment I was especially keen to know about in
Angoor
: the final few frames, which depicted a portrait of Shakespeare played by an elderly Indian actor sporting beard and ruff – a frank acknowledgement of Gulzar's source, but also (it seemed to me) a kind of repossession, a literal demonstration that Shakespeare was now Indian.

Gulzar smiled thinly: top marks. ‘I didn't want to make Shakespeare English. I didn't want him to be a stranger to the audience. You know, one reason Shakespeare is so good is that he is a mix. You have heard of
nautanki
?'

Nandini had mentioned it, the folk theatre popular in northern India; it had influenced Parsi theatre too.

‘
Nautanki
is a mixed form, prose, poetry, songs, music. A comedian also, for a relief for the audience. Those shows went on all night. Indian screenplays, they're long – three hours, four hours. We used to have regular comedians, too, as part of the subplot, to engage the audience. Shakespeare does that, like the gravedigger in
Hamlet.
He knows how to keep the audience engaged.'

Rising to show us out, he paused. ‘I was talking to Vishal Bhardwaj just now on the phone,' he said. ‘You know he is thinking about a new movie? I encouraged him. I said, “The ground belongs to Shakespeare, you have built your house on it.”'

A learned reference to Syed Mehdi Hasan Ahsan's ‘mosque', or happy coincidence? Bollywood was full of copies, after all.

He bowed formally and, Hollywood-style, also offered me his hand. ‘This is the right way of putting it: the land belongs to Shakespeare, the house belongs to us.'

Everything in Mumbai had a touch of melodrama. The sober broadsheet pushed under the door of my hotel room was a hair-raising read, full of cartoonish journalese that wouldn't have disgraced William Randolph Hearst's hacks at their yellowest. ‘Gay Man Faces Cops' Chin Music,' read one headline about a man who'd
been violently attacked by police. ‘Dalit Honour Killing: Kin Against Tardy CID Probe,' read another. Even dull-as-ditchwater stories about rail fares were given the gee-whizz subediting treatment. Indian CNBC's coverage of the forthcoming budget was being advertised on billboards forty feet high.

These were as nothing, though, compared to the real news: Bollywood and its comings and goings. Every paper had a lavish colour section containing the latest
filmi
gossip, and on the web things were more breathless still. I tried to get my head around the cast of characters: a parade of interchangeable nymphets, typically papped on the arms of rugged older men on their way into tedious-looking PR events. The stories were tissue thin: a male actor was proclaimed to ‘have feelings' for a female colleague because a dance sequence had been mildly rearranged; a minor disagreement on Twitter had spiralled (opined a source, anonymous of course) into a venomous ‘cat fight'.

Even so, Bollywood seemed innocent, certainly compared with the hard-bitten celebrity coverage of the US or Britain. There was talk of ‘crushes' and ‘dating'; a screen kiss in this still-conservative society was a major event. And it was a world on first-name terms: Sallu, SRK, Big B, Bebo, Chi Chi (‘little finger' in Punjabi, but which had somewhat ruder connotations when applied to the actor Govinda). Bollywood seemed simultaneously to share the characteristics of a shimmering royal court and the dysfunctional family just down the street.

I delighted in the lingo. ‘B-Town' was, grandiosely, a Bollywood metonym for Mumbai. A ‘grey role' was one in which an actor who specialised in villainous characters attempted to transition to more sympathetic ones. ‘Item number' I'd heard before: the dubious tradition of shoehorning in an arousing dance sequence regardless of the plot (‘item' being a derogatory term for the women who danced). To my disappointment, a ‘starer' wasn't a film one
stared
at in horror or surprise, but a film
starring
someone big (
videt
, ‘multi-starer'). I liked the concept of ‘acting pricey' – getting above yourself, especially on set.

No wonder lexicographers agree that Indian English – melded by the newest technologies, hungrily absorbing parcels of languages such as Hindi and Punjabi – is not just a dialect but a language in its own right. In the west, it's often treated as the butt of a joke: there is a bestselling book called
Entry from Backside Only
devoted to what are perceived as the Mistress Quickly-level malapropisms of ‘Indlish'
or ‘Hinglish' – turning the concept of ‘passing time' into a noun, ‘timepass'; or ‘preponing' (instead of postponing) appointments by moving them forward, etc.

Such things are still often dismissed with a snigger, particularly as many of these linguistic innovations come from the ground up, from the millions of Indians working their way out of poverty by taking English lessons and getting a middle-class job in the IT or service sectors. But I relished the language. It made the English that came out of my own mouth sound ponderous and auntly. I couldn't help feeling that Shakespeare – a worshipper of the crowdedly over-extended metaphor and the crafty half-buried meaning – would have warmed to it, too.

There is certainly one way he would have found the Indian film world congenial. Gulzar was dead right: Shakespeare's plays, like a significant percentage of commercial Indian cinema, are magnificent in their unoriginality.

For all that people instinctively regard him as a supreme creator, it is more accurate to describe the playwright as a uniquely gifted magpie who plundered everything around him for clues, hints, suggestions, anything that could fire an idea. The written sources he read and digested were in the hundreds, and are still being chased down; less durable influences (phrases borrowed, people met or observed) will surely never be recovered. The more time one spends with Shakespeare, the more one realises his world is a glittering collage of others' worlds; that his brilliance lies in his ability to make something fresh from the most trite and cliché-ridden of materials.

The post-Romantic obsession with solitary, remote genius would have been near-unrecognisable to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. During the Renaissance, the concept known as
copia,
the ability to present humdrum matter with abundance and grace – and thus exhibit one's learning – was a cornerstone of the education system. Grammar-school boys like Shakespeare were expected to be copious, and drilled relentlessly so they might become so: inscribing set phrases from writers ancient and modern into their commonplace books, memorising and regurgitating biblical quotations, learning to scan and fillet texts for anything recyclable. Desiderius Erasmus's textbook
De duplici copia verborum ac rerum
(‘On the Twofold Abundance of Expressions and Ideas', 1512), famously includes several hundred different ways to say ‘thank you for your letter'.

For moderns, the word ‘imitation' carries the taint of something
plagiarised, knocked-off; for Elizabethan writers, schooled in the Erasmian arts of
imitatio,
it was high praise. The critic Robert Miola puts it nicely: ‘The genius lay not in the invention but in the translation.'

Translation was what Shakespeare spent much of his life engaged in: literally from sources in languages such as Latin, ancient Greek, French and Italian; but also from English texts in many forms – histories, books of philosophy, avant-garde poetry, sermons, official documents, broadsides, other plays. The most thoroughgoing attempt to trace and reprint these texts, Geoffrey Bullough's monumental
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare,
fills eight stout volumes, occupied its author from 1957 to 1975, and even then is judged incomplete. Shakespeare apparently found it impossible to write without first examining from every conceivable angle what others had done with similar material, only then working out how to overmaster them.

Take
Othello,
the play Vishal Bhardwaj had so smartly remade as
Omkara.
Shakespeare's primary source was a tale from 1565 by the Ferrarese scholar Giambattista Giraldi, nicknamed Cinthio, which gave him the outline of a scheming ensign who convinces his Moorish captain that the captain's wife has been unfaithful. (No English version seems to have been available in the early 1600s when Shakespeare was writing the play, so he must have read Cinthio in Italian or French.) To this Shakespeare added picturesque real-life details drawn from a translation of Gasparo Contarini's account of Venetian government, Richard Knolles's
The Generall Historie of the Turks
(1603), Pliny the Elder's
Natural History
and a travelogue from 1550 by the Tunisian diplomat and writer Leo Africanus, translated into English as
A Geographical Historie of Africa
(1600).

Leo, born a Muslim and enslaved by Christian pirates, was freed by Pope Leo X (hence his adopted name) and converted to Christianity; his unusual life story might have supplied a model for the character of Othello, as might the 1600 visit to London of the Moroccan ambassador Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun. Even the hero's name – one thing none of these sources supplied – is not entirely original. The first version of Ben Jonson's play
Every Man in his Humour
(1598) has a jealous husband called Thorello; Shakespeare borrowed the idea, changing the syllables just enough to get away with it.

Another example of Shakespeare's shameless willingness to borrow from others comes in
Antony and Cleopatra.
Enobarbus's lustrous set-piece speech about the Egyptian queen is deservedly famous:

Yet the play is so intimate with its source, Plutarch's
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
in the 1579 translation by Thomas North, that the similarities are uncanny: