Worlds Elsewhere (41 page)

By far the most unexpected encounter came in
Bodyguard
(2011), a lumbering comedy-action blockbuster by the journeyman director Siddique. Tipped off that the film contained a nod to Shakespeare, I had added the DVD to my collection.

In time-honoured fashion,
Bodyguard
was not so much a remake as a re-re-re-remake, the third version of a Malayalam movie about a rich daughter who falls for her minder, with obvious debts to the saccharine Hollywood picture from 1992 starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner. Chiefly a vehicle for bovine hard man Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor (who'd also been in
Omkara
: yet another Kapoor scion, a granddaughter of Raj), it seemed an unlikely site for a Shakespearian tribute, and I had nearly given up when, an hour and a bit in, the plot began to take a distinctly familiar turn.

Piqued by the overbearing presence of her bodyguard (Khan),
rich-girl Divya (Kapoor) concocts a scheme whereby she will text and call him, pretending to be a secret admirer, Chhaya, and hoping he will get so distracted that he leaves her alone. Gradually the inevitable happens: the bodyguard (ironically named Lovely) falls head over heels for this imaginary woman, while Divya realises her own feelings for him are genuine. Everything comes to a head in a park, when Divya takes Lovely by the hand and asks him to pretend that she is his mysterious beloved, the fictional Chhaya, so he can rehearse his lines:

Even discounting the prosaic Hindi-into-English subtitles, this was hardly Elizabeth Barrett Browning; but was it imagining things to think the entire scenario was cribbed from act three, scene two of
As You Like It,
where Rosalind (disguised as a man) persuades Orlando to do exactly the same thing, rehearse his love for a woman who is none other than herself? Swap doublet and hose for mobile phones, the forest of Arden for a park in Pune, and the exchange was near-identical.

And were there hints, too, of
Twelfth Night
in the story of a glum killjoy gulled into falling in love with his mistress? There was a lingering shot of the Bodyguard standing in front of a mirror, trying to crack an unaccustomed smile while wearing a yellow T-shirt, the same colour favoured by Malvolio …

Perhaps, perhaps. What really captivated me is how lightly the references were worn. Of course there are western rom-coms based on literary sources –
Clueless
(1995) recasts Jane Austen's
Emma
as a Beverly Hills teen comedy, while 1999's
Ten Things I Hate About You
does something similar with
The Taming of the Shrew,
set in an American high school knowingly named Padua. But the literary overtones are heavily played up, part of the ironic in-joke – a
postmodern gag on ‘highbrow' culture slumming it for the purposes of mass entertainment. Irony was hardly absent in Indian cinema, but it seemed to me that something more straightforward was going on, at least in
Bodyguard
: a borrowing from Shakespeare that treated him with a refreshing lack of reverence.

There had been several western versions of
As You Like It,
notably Paul Czinner's 1936 movie with the young Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh's 2006 movie. The Czinner was a piece of ersatz Elstree pastoral, shot on a leaf-strewn sound stage that resembled
The Adventures of Robin Hood
; the Branagh a campy exercise in hey-nonny-nonny, set weirdly in Japan with a British-American cast. In both, the fact that the scriptwriter was William Shakespeare was entirely the point. I tried to imagine a British or American director stealing a scene from
As You Like It
and stitching it quietly into, say, a Sylvester Stallone movie, and gave up. I couldn't.

Nonetheless, after three days of cramming movies into strange corners of the day, I felt my interpretative skills coming dangerously unstuck. Indian movies seemed to bleed endlessly into each other; they were halls of mirrors, each reflecting yet more sources and influences, on and on into infinity. Were any of these films really Shakespeare? Was that even the point? C. J. Sisson's line kept returning: ‘Things that are still alive and in process of becoming new things …' It was all but impossible, however, to say where the new things began and the old things ended.

If one were searching for an efficient way to go mad, I decided, one could do worse than go source-hunting through the output of Bollywood.

I RESTED THE BACK OF MY HAND
against the heat of the train window, watching the last ragged pieces of suburb float past like clumps of froth on the tide. The sun, high now, made the marks in the pane scatter and glare, a spider's web frozen in hot glass.

We had been travelling for an hour and a half, forty-five minutes late and getting later. It had taken that long simply to crawl up the Mumbai peninsula, wriggle out across the top corner of Navi Mumbai on the east side of the bay and swing slowly south-east for the run down to
Karjat, Lonavala and Pune, home of the National Film Archive. The plain was monotonously clear and flat, the colour and texture of coarse sandpaper. It was stubbled with khaki bushes, the low outlines of purplish hills behind. Soon we'd be up in the cool of the mountains. It seemed unimaginable.

Reluctantly, I dragged myself back to my books. How about pinpointing the earliest translation of Shakespeare on the Indian stage? This wasn't necessarily an easier task than it was with the movies. R. K. Yajnik, so delightfully scandalised by the depredations of Urdu and Gujarati playwrights, had helpfully tabulated the translations he'd found up to the 1930s. I worked down his table with a pencil: the earliest was from 1853, a Bengali version of
The Merchant of Venice
called
Bhanumati Cittavilasa
(‘Bhanumati the Sorceress') by Hara Chandra Ghosh, reportedly the first Indian version of any foreign play at all.

The date snagged my eye before I remembered why. California. The Gold Rush. James and Sarah Stark. Just as Ghosh was settling down to translate
The Merchant of Venice
in Kolkata, the Starks were preparing the very same play in San Francisco, 8,000 miles away – the first time it had been staged on the West Coast. Sarah and Ghosh could almost have exchanged rehearsal notes, if the mail had let them. But then Ghosh became a prominent lawyer; it was an amusing thought that he might have been too grand to correspond with a mere travelling player, let alone a woman.

The play snagged me for other reasons, too.
The Merchant of Venice
was far and away the most popular title to be adapted in India: Yajnik listed no fewer than twenty-one other versions, the majority nineteenth-century – not forgetting, of course, Hashr's
Dil Farosh
(1900), so successful that it had made it into the movies. It was surprising, to put it mildly, that a play so locked into a Judaeo-Christian framework – to the point where it was sometimes considered too controversial to stage, particularly in the US and Israel – resonated so loudly in a culture with quite different religious and ethnic tensions. But perhaps those tensions weren't so different after all: vengeful majorities and embattled minorities (and vengeful minorities and embattled majorities) are everywhere. And one could argue that the play was as much about money and trade as it was about religion, both subjects that must have recommended it to residents of Kolkata, a trading post every bit as powerful as Renaissance Venice. I remembered reading somewhere that
The Merchant of Venice
was also hugely popular in
China, for reasons no one could fathom. I filed away the thought for future use.

In India, the comedies and tragicomedies seemed to provide the most fodder for early translators. This, at least, was straightforwardly explained. Tragedy in the Greek or Shakespearian sense was alien to Hindu dramatic traditions; in classical Sanskrit texts it is almost unknown for major characters to experience the vicious reversals of fate described by Aristotle. According to the
Natyashastra
(‘Science of Drama'), compiled two millennia ago by the priest Bharata and thought to be the oldest study of stagecraft anywhere in the world, Indian plays were divided into distinct and rigidly defined genres. The closest to tragedies were
natakas,
featuring epic characters such as gods and kings and matters of serious or historical import – but with the major difference that, instead of suffering and expiring at the end, they triumphed.

Maybe this was also why
The Comedy of Errors
had been so successful in India (twelve theatrical versions by the 1930s, according to Yajnik). It bore uncanny similarities to another major genre outlined by Bharata,
prakarana
– stories of invented human characters and their foibles, focusing on the comedy of money, love, justice, mistaken identity and the like.

Even more striking was the popularity of the late tragicomedies, especially given their neglect elsewhere: four translations of
Pericles,
a play that vanished from the stage almost entirely for two centuries in London; and seven separate
Winter's Tales.

In the west, the delicate balance between laughter and heart-wrenching sorrow in
The Winter's Tale
has often been regarded with bewilderment: Dryden dismissed the play as ‘so grounded on impossibilities … that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment'. Between 1634 and 1802 it was staged, heavily adapted, a mere handful of times. Yet the play seems to have found a home here in India, perhaps more attuned to dramas more heterogeneous in form.

Cymbeline,
too, seized my attention. This troubling, sprawling late play had been saved from neglect in the Victorian period by the virtuous character of Imogen, who offered British actresses such as Helen Faucit and Ellen Terry the chance to display both their formidable talents and their irreproachable piety. For all that I'd managed to catch it in Virginia, it remained an eccentric rarity for most producers in the west. Yet in India it was a favourite: by Yajnik's count, there had been twelve separate translations between 1868 and 1910, and he ranked it ‘[one] of the most
successful comedies' he had come across. A particularly popular Marathi version called
Tara
by the scholar and schoolmaster V. M. Mahajani was staged frequently and went through several editions in print.

As it happened,
Tara
– first performed in my destination, Pune – was also the subject of one of the earliest accounts by a foreign writer to have witnessed an adaptation of Shakespeare in India in, as it were, the wild. It was printed in
Macmillan's Magazine
and was by an Anglo-Irish academic who was teaching out in India, Harold Littledale. It came from 1880, a year after the play was written; I had brought it with me on the train.

Littledale had been fortunate enough to attend the double marriage festivities of the ruler of Vadodara and his sister – festivities that had been carried out, he wrote, ‘on a scale of magnificence unusual even in ceremonious India'. Many performers came to Gujarat specially; others ('jugglers, snake-charmers, dancers, acrobats') simply rolled up. Among them was a company of touring actors.

The play didn't start until 10 p.m., an hour later than advertised, but the fact that there was a delay meant Littledale had a chance to poke around the theatre. A temporary structure constructed from canvas and bamboo poles, it surrounded an oval whitewashed sandbank stage twenty feet wide and forty feet deep, fronted by a drop curtain, ‘on which an elephant- and tiger-fight was depicted, and by a proscenium of canvas, adorned with full-length portraits of three-headed gods and mythic heroes in strange attire'. An audience of around five hundred, mainly men and children, squatted in an improvised amphitheatre dug from the sand. Light came from kerosene lamps affixed to the trees.

If the decor struck Littledale as ‘strange', this was as nothing to the show. It was preceded by a musical offertory to the god Narayana on voice, sitar and tabla, which (opined Littledale) ‘sound[ed] most like an unavailing attempt to smother the squeals of two babies with the din of a bagpipe'. But once the play finally commenced Littledale fell under its spell: won over partly by the splendid costumes, but most of all by the emotional intensity of the acting, at a pitch far exceeding anything he had witnessed back home.

The cast, like the audience, was all-male; central in every sense was the teenage boy he saw playing Imogen: