Worlds Elsewhere (42 page)

I'd blubbered myself at exactly that moment, back in Virginia.

The action was shifted to two fantastical locations (Suvarnapuri, or ‘golden city', for Britain; Vijaipura, ‘land of victory', for Rome), and a Brahmin astrologer was introduced to help administer the fairy-tale happy ending. Littledale admitted, somewhat grudgingly, that these were improvements. After staggering out six hours later, at 2.55 a.m., he was surprised to find he had enjoyed himself.

As I read his account, particularly in the light of my discoveries in California, it was possible to feel something Littledale himself grasped only dimly. The performance he witnessed in Pune achieved something that British Victorian theatre producers, increasingly obsessed by grandiose sets and finicking historical ‘accuracy', were doing their damnedest to eradicate: a sense of spontaneity.

Here, as in the Sierra Nevada, props were minimal to non-existent, the acting style non-gestural and lacking in ‘ranting and raving'. The swordplay, Littledale wrote, ‘would have astonished Mr Irving' in its deftness. The all-male casting he thought revelatory, particularly when it came to the boy playing Tara/Imogen's adoption of male clothing: ‘His disguise as a boy looked exquisitely girlish, and his manner, timid yet collected, exactly conveyed the impression of Imogen, trembling with womanly fear.' Ellen Terry evidently had competition in Vadodara.

There was perhaps another reason
Cymbeline
resonated with Indian audiences – its echoes of the Hindu scriptures. The image of a virtuous, morally unimpeachable wife who travels to the ends of the earth has parallels in the
Panchakanya
(iconic heroines) of Hindu mythology. One such paragon is Sita, heroine of the
Ramayana,
who, like Imogen, is schemed against by a stepmother, exiled to the wilderness, and suffers numerous trials for the love of Rama, her husband. Another heroine in the
Ramayana
is Tara: though her story is somewhat different from that of her namesake in Mahajani's play (she is abducted by her evil brother-in-law after her husband, Vali, is presumed killed in battle), she still embodies the virtues of chastity and constancy in the face of near-insurmountable odds. Shakespeare's talent for creating strong, self-sacrificing female characters, from Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
to Hermione in
The Winter's Tale
– another script adapted by Mahajani – obviously had much to recommend it to a Hindu culture that still prizes such things as pre-eminent female virtues. Perhaps Victorian England and contemporaneous India weren't so different after all.

Also, I couldn't help noticing a change Littledale barely registered: a tweak to the character of Cloten, the clottish stepbrother who, in Shakespeare's play, tries to woo Imogen despite the fact that she is already married. In order to display the character's peculiar combination of obstreperous idiocy and teetering self-regard, the Marathi actor not only equipped him with a stutter; he was also given a fondness for western classical music. In other words, it seemed the ‘despicably idiotic' Cloten was presented as a Brit. The joke seems to have passed Littledale by.

The National Film Archive of India didn't much resemble a place where fairy-tale transformations were likely to occur. A low-slung complex in grubby grey concrete, it dated from the 1990s but looked several decades older. Scowling from behind the trees, it reminded me of a police headquarters, a functional building in which bland but unspeakable horrors were routinely performed. It was studded with warning notices:
NO PARKING, NO SMOKING PLEASE, CHILDREN NOT ALLOWED
.

In the legal sense, I was not allowed either: I didn't have an appointment. I had eventually managed to get the NFAI's director on the phone – a furtive conversation in which it was clear that only some appalling secretarial oversight had enabled me to be connected at all. I had been asked to supply information on the purpose of my project and the films I wished to research, and had received a curt note reminding me of charges liable, which I acknowledged. Silence had then ensued. ‘Just turn up anyway,' Nandini had advised. ‘They'll have to let you in.'

They had, but it was unclear to what effect. The other researchers I'd seen at the entrance had melted away. The building had a melancholy out-of-term feel. I wandered the dirty and desolate corridors, trying in vain to find out where I should go.

Eventually I was directed to the film-preservation office. I knocked on the door, then swung it cautiously open. No one home. The room reminded me unpleasantly of a prison cell, windowless, the walls
scuffed, a desk crowded high with cardboard files and unruly stacks of A4 paper. A dusty computer sat in a corner, surrounded by piles of VHS tapes.

I took a seat in front of the desk. Twenty-five minutes went by, then another fifteen. No one came in. I went for a walk.

By the time I got back, the office was at least populated; in front of the computer sat a small-framed man with a thin moustache. He looked up impatiently as I knocked. His browser window was open on TripAdvisor.

I explained my project; would it be possible to talk to someone about the history of Indian cinema? A curator, perhaps? I had tried to make an appointment, but had been experiencing some difficulties—

‘There is no one available with expertise in that matter,' he said tightly.

Was the director available?

‘The director is elsewhere on business.'

Would it at least be possible to view one or two of the early Shakespeare films in the collection? I had travelled a long way, and would be most grateful for any assistance.

‘Which titles does this request concern?'

I showed him my list. He glanced at it for a few seconds and handed it back.

‘We have only the
Hamlet,
1954. You may watch that at 2.30 p.m.'

It was now 11.15 a.m. It wasn't possible to see anything before that? Or another film? I was only in Pune a few days.

He waved his hand irritably.

‘Watch that first film, then you may come back. We talk then about the others. You may use the library in the meantime.'

He swung his chair back towards TripAdvisor. Our interview was over.

Fighting the sense that my expedition down here had been wasted, I tried to see if the library contained anything I hadn't already discovered back in Mumbai.

It was tough going. The reference books were outdated, and barely listed any Indian Shakespeare movies at all. The only relevant work was western: Kenneth S. Rothwell and Annabelle Henkin Melzer's
Shakespeare on Screen: An International Filmography and Videography
from 1990. Inclusive on Europe, Japan and the United States, and impressively open-minded about what it considered ‘Shakespearian' – including spin-offs such as
Hamlet and Eggs,
an American short from 1937 – it had a yawning black hole where world cinema should be.
Khoon-ka-Khoon,
the groundbreaking 1935 Hindi-Urdu version of
Hamlet
by the great Parsi actor Sohrab Modi – the world's first sound film of the play – was briefly mentioned, but the only other Indian Shakespeare film was
Shakespeare Wallah
; not really Indian, not fully about Shakespeare.

The online catalogue wasn't much better: it contained some of the films on my list, but by no means all. The silent movies I'd read about so eagerly –
Khoon-e-Nahak, Dil Farosh
– were nowhere to be seen. Neither was
Khoon-ka-Khoon.
There was
Hamlet
by the prolific actor-director Kishore Sahu, the one I'd been permitted to watch, but it came from much later (Hindi, 1954, 35 mm, 15 reels, B&W). Nargis's
Romeo and Juliet,
the film I'd been hoping more than anything to locate, had also gone awol. I tried again, working methodically through my list.
DOCUMENTATION NOT FOUND GO BACK, DOCUMENTATION NOT FOUND GO BACK.
Even the computer sounded stressed.

Trying another tack, I trawled through back issues of
Filmindia,
India's first movie magazine, founded by the journalist and impresario Baburao Patel in 1935, not long after the talkies arrived. This was more worthwhile: in the March 1948 issue, a few pages away from a colour photograph mourning the recent death of Gandhi, were shots taken on the set of
Romeo and Juliet.
(The costumes made it look like Disney's
Snow White,
Nargis adorned with flowers and sporting a tulle cloak.)

The review of
Romeo and Juliet
a few issues later was positive, if rather too cap-doffing to the Hollywood film of twelve years earlier. ‘Nargis Proves Equal Of Norma Shearer', the headline read. ‘Indian Film Version Of Shakespeare's “Romeo And Juliet” Copies MGM Pattern'. Apparently it had taken a total of two years to film, which had caused some troubling continuity issues. ‘Judged from the standards of modern realistic, psychological plays,' the reviewer sniffed, ‘it is an old-fashioned melodramatic tear-jerker.' Of the film itself, other than denunciations of its technique and lighting, there was frustratingly little description.

Filmindia
was more helpful when it came to Kishore Sahu's
Hamlet
: the cover of the September 1954 issue was a painted portrait of Sahu himself brooding against a vivid blood-red background, skull in hand.
Sahu had begun in the golden studio era of the early forties with Bombay Talkies before setting up on his own; this was his biggest picture yet. The publicity agents had obviously been working overtime, judging by the number of tenuous preview stories they had managed to sneak into the magazine. Patel's regular ‘Bombay Calling' column was surmounted by an enormous still of the young girl playing Ophelia. ‘Coy and innocent and yet so engagingly sexy,' it purred.

The girl's face looked familiar, but it took me a few moments to work out why. It was the same face I'd seen in that pile of photos in Bollywood Bazaar: the actress clutching Raj Kapoor, an expression of infinite forbearance etched on to her features. I'd tucked the photo into the cover of my notebook as a kind of mascot. Her name was Mala Sinha. So
this
was the Shakespeare she'd been in.

I tapped away on my phone: yes, the same Mala Sinha. She'd become a huge star, acting with everyone from Raj Kapoor to Raaj Kumar, Dev Anand to Biswajit Chatterjee, and for directors including Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, Yash Chopra – anyone who was anyone in Indian cinema. Playing Ophelia for Kishore Sahu in 1954 had been her breakthrough role.

I opened up a fan site to check when she was born – 1936 – then realised with a start that she was still alive. In the unforgiving language of Mumbai film journalism she was a ‘yesteryear actress', retired and somewhat reclusive. There wasn't much background on her. But she was shortly to be honoured with a Phalke award for lifetime achievement. I wondered if there was any way I could locate her. I texted Nasreen, who had helped me get hold of Gulzar. It was worth a punt.

I read on in
Filmindia
with renewed appetite. The few academic articles that had mentioned Sahu's
Hamlet
had written it off as a poor imitation (naturally) of the British version of 1948, produced and directed by Laurence Olivier. Baburao Patel wasn't much kinder – in fact considerably less. He might have found Mala Sinha ‘engagingly sexy', but for the film itself he had only scorn. Under the headline ‘Sahu's “Hamlet” Flops at the Met', he accused it of ‘slander[ing]' Shakespeare's memory, with its ‘stinking selfishness'. Claudius was portrayed as a ‘stupid drunken clown'; Laertes came in for especial criticism, with his ‘callow and silly face'.

Hamlet
sounded rather good; I began to look forward to seeing it.

*

Somewhat to my surprise, when I came back at 2.15 p.m. Kishore Sahu and
Hamlet
were waiting. I was shown to a screening room, through corridors piled hazardously with canisters of aluminium and bright green plastic.

The room made the film-preservation office look like an operating theatre. It was window-high with more canisters and a tide wrack of DVD boxes. Pushed back against the wall was a huge Steenbeck reel-to-reel editing machine in hospital-blue steel, balanced on which were stacks of old accountancy ledgers. On the table opposite, next to a battered filing cabinet piled with a scree of papers, was a venerable-looking VHS machine. A flat-screen TV was attached to the wall. (This at least appeared to date from the twenty-first century.) On top of everything was a rime of thick, gluey dust. It gave the strong impression of having been burgled, maladroitly, a couple of decades ago.

In the centre of the chaos a chair had been laid on. Trying not to cause an avalanche, I gingerly put down my bag and pulled out the copy of the complete works I'd brought with me (no subtitles, I'd been warned).

After reading so much about how Sahu's movie was an inferior imitation of Olivier's, I was thrilled to discover in fact how different it was. Visually, for sure, there were debts: the same
noir-
ish, tenebrous black-and-white, the same brooding low-angle shots, in fact many of the same sequences – Hamlet sitting alone, clouded in thought, after the wedding banquet at the play's opening; or forcing his mother on to her bed in Freudian lust. Sahu's art director, V. Jadhav, had done a fine job replicating Olivier's crepuscular castle sets and faux-medieval costumes.

But in deeper ways,
Hamlet: A Free Adaptation,
seemed to me exactly that – free. From the jaunty title music onwards (Sahu had wisely drawn the line at mimicking Walton's tremulous score), it kept offering sly surprises. One was Sahu himself, who, in contrast to Olivier's carefully calibrated interiority, made the Prince into a swashbuckling Parsi hero, forever swooping his cloak and flaring his nostrils like a wildcat on the prowl. Whereas Olivier played ‘to be or not to be' with portentous symbolism, balancing on a rocky promontory overlooking the crashing waves, Sahu's approach was commendably lacking in fuss: he fingered a dagger to the tolling of the castle bell.