Worlds Elsewhere (45 page)

It was peculiar, watching this medieval European art form to a soundtrack provided by the Indian night. The gossiping of crickets was loud above the distant rumble of traffic and – just discernible – the shushing of the Arabian Sea. But the four actors were whip-smart and the crowd was gulping it up. Some things really did need no translation.

I'D ALWAYS ASSUMED THAT
what the history books said was correct: the British had left India in 1947. Not in Kolkata, they hadn't. They seemed to be everywhere I turned. I saw them in the cathedral spire of St Paul's floating above the trees, a dead ringer for Canterbury. They were here in the lions that guarded the gates of Fort William, flanked by a massive – and massively dyspeptic – monument to Queen Victoria. The mustard-yellow taxis, Hindustan Ambassadors, had an accountantly British manner: modelled on 1950s Morris Oxfords, their small round headlights gave them a peering aspect, as if they were perennially displeased by what they saw. The British were even here, somehow, in the grass and leaves: after nine days in the dust and smog and haze of Mumbai, Kolkata seemed almost indecently green.

They were certainly out in force in South Park Street Cemetery at the heart of the old city. I trekked across several fields of Brits. When the cemetery opened in the mid-eighteenth century, it was the largest Christian burial site outside Britain and America. Calcutta had become Kolkata, Park Street Mother Teresa Sarani, but its erstwhile residents clung grimly on, occupying numberless sarcophagi that looked – as doubtless they were intended to – as if Doomsday itself couldn't make them budge. The Indians they had been sent out to rule had no chance. In the honeyed afternoon light I wandered among cenotaphs and urns and obelisks and columns, overgrown with lichen and mould but still standing proud after two hundred years.

Kolkata was where the story of the British in India properly began. The East India Company had been on the subcontinent for the best part of a century by the time its agent Job Charnock, sent east to establish a new trading post, selected a village called Kalikata on the river Hugli in 1690. By the end of the eighteenth century, the village had expanded into a defensive encampment known as Fort William. In time it became the seat of the so-called Bengal Presidency, a trading post that allowed the Company to consolidate its influence into an unbreakable military-politico-industrial complex. After the military strongman Robert Clive reclaimed the city for the British at Plassey in 1757, Warren Hastings, India's first governor general, began moving the colonial administration to Kolkata in 1772. When crown rule was established in 1858, bringing an end to the era of Company
government, the city – with its regal palaces and its stately esplanades, its mansions and its gardens – was the natural choice for capital of the Raj.

Even before this, drama had formed an important fulcrum for colonial life in Kolkata, earlier and more thoroughly than it had elsewhere in India. The first English theatre here dated from 1753, twenty-odd years before its equivalent in Mumbai. A new space, the Calcutta theatre, followed in 1775; none other than David Garrick back in England lent his support by sending out one of his assistants, copies of playbooks and rolls of scenery. (The grateful gentlemen of Kolkata shipped him chintz fabric and Madeira wine for his trouble.)

Other playhouses followed, with casts and audiences drawn from the cream of Kolkata society. One of the most renowned was a private theatre built by the society hostess Emma Bristow inside her house in 1789, described as a ‘perfect theatre differing only from a public one in its dimensions'. That same year, scenes from
Julius Caesar
were staged, with Mrs Bristow herself playing Brutus's servant Lucius.

While Kolkata's British-born, high-tea brigade seem otherwise to have contented themselves with light skits and farces, Shakespeare was a major presence on the bills at the Calcutta theatre, alongside heavyweights such as Philip Massinger, a later playwright for the King's Men; famous Restoration dramatists Thomas Otway and William Congreve; and the eighteenth-century comedian of manners Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In 1784,
The Merchant of Venice
was staged; according to one report, ‘Shylock never appeared to greater advantage.'
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet
and
Richard III
were all acted in the closing years of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth.

Such was the zeal for theatre in Kolkata that when the Calcutta theatre closed its doors in 1808, a new playhouse sprang up almost immediately afterwards: the Chowringhee, set up in a fashionable area of the city by a consortium of backers including the pioneering Shakespearian critic D. L. Richardson and Dwarkanath Tagore, grandfather of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore.

The Chowringhee played host to a remarkable string of Shakespeare performances from 1814 onwards. Despite the apprehensions of the
Calcutta Gazette
that a
Macbeth
that April would be ‘murdered by a body of amateurs', the production was widely acclaimed, and other plays including
Coriolanus, Richard III
and Garrick's adaptation of
The Taming of the Shrew
were successfully done. Ties to the motherland remained
strong: a performance of
Henry V
was staged in 1816 to benefit families of soldiers ‘killed or maimed' at Waterloo. Armies of English actors trooped out to Kolkata, bringing with them the latest European tastes and trends.

Perhaps the greatest of these visitors was Mrs Esther Leach: acclaimed as the ‘Mrs Siddons of Bengal' after Sarah Siddons, the tragic muse of the London stage, she died in the service of her art in 1843 after oil lamps set fire to her gown during
The Merchant of Venice.
(Terribly burned, she expired two weeks later.) The Chowringhee itself had already gone up in smoke a few years before, but the theatre that replaced it, a splendid edifice in the Grecian style known as the Sans Souci, attracted stars by the boatload from London and Australia.

The early cantonment theatres were strictly whites only: no ‘natives' allowed. But Shakespeare began to percolate more widely. As in Mumbai, educators were largely responsible. In 1831, a group of Bengali school students founded what is thought to be the first indigenous-owned professional playhouse anywhere in India, the Hindu theatre, specifically intended for the performance of Shakespeare. Their opening show included scenes from
Julius Caesar,
staged alongside an English translation of the seven-act play
Uttararamacharita
(‘The Later Deeds of Rama') by the classical Sanskrit playwright Bhavabhuti. According to the faintly dismissive account in the
Calcutta Courier,
‘Some young Hindoo gentlemen admirably schooled in the Histrionic art exercise their talents for the amusement of their native and European friends.'

A few years earlier, in 1822, a thirteen-year-old Anglo-Indian boy called Henry Louis Vivian Derozio acted Shylock in a school production of
The Merchant of Venice
– perhaps the first Indian in history to do so. Derozio would go on to found the free-thinking Young Bengal movement, which, inspired by ideas gleaned from the French Revolution, rebelled against the strictures of conservative Hindu society. With Derozio's death in 1831 at the age of just twenty-two, Young Bengal foundered, but it helped inspire what became known as the Bengali Renaissance, the great flowering of Bengali literature and thought that swept through Kolkata in the nineteenth century, many of whose leading lights received a thorough grounding in Shakespeare as part of a western-style education.

More explosive cultural minglings were to occur. In August 1848, a performance of
Othello
opened at the Sans Souci. White actors had blacked up to play non-white characters for years in Kolkata,
but in order to drum up business, the theatre manager decided to try something novel: a young Indian actor called Baishnava Charan Adhya in the lead. The
Calcutta Star
ran an advert promoting ‘a novel evening's entertainment … Shakespeare's Tragedy of
Othello
… By a Native Gentleman'. More sensationally still, Esther Leach's daughter, acting under her stage name Mrs Anderson, would play Desdemona, joined by a similarly white cast.

Kolkata was agog: an Indian appearing on stage with white people! Seducing an Englishwoman! Crowds built up outside the theatre and the police were summoned. Fearing the worst, the garrison commander intervened and ordered the soldiers in the cast not to perform, meaning that opening night had to be moved back by a week.

Once the show had finally opened, the press damned Adhya with thin, sneering praise. The
Englishman
proclaimed that ‘scarcely a line was intelligible', before adding that ‘the performance was wonderful for a Native'. A month later, it sent a correspondent back to have another go: ‘tame, languid, affected, tedious and imperfect, and a cruel infliction, undeservedly imposed upon a kind-hearted and indulgent public'.

Another paper,
Bengal Harkaru,
strove to be more generous but still declared Adhya's delivery ‘cramped'. The general tone seems to have been that of Samuel Johnson on the similarity between female preachers and dogs walking on their hind legs: not done well, but surprising to find it done at all. An English correspondent wrote to the
Calcutta Star
chortling over his attempts to witness what he referred to as ‘the real unpainted nigger Othello'.

The inference was clear: Indian people could take exams, study poetry, become obedient colonial administrators, even read Shakespeare if they wished. But for them to think of performing him in English – least of all in a white theatre for white audiences – was quite different. It was a joke.

While I had managed to spend ten days in Mumbai and see barely half an hour of live drama, in Kolkata it was all I could do to avoid the stuff. The afternoon after I arrived I interviewed Professor Ananda Lal, an expert on the history of Shakespeare in Bengal, who promptly invited me to join him at a contemporary retelling of the ancient Sanskrit play
Shakuntala,
a roaring hit for Prithviraj Kapoor in the 1940s. The British Council were petitioning me to come to several events. Someone else was keen to show me Bengali folk theatre, if I could spare a few hours …

There was one performance I was kicking myself for not having seen. It had opened six months earlier, and – while not quite on a par with Adhya's
Othello
– had caused a major stir in the tight-knit, fervently politicised world of Kolkatan theatre. It was a version of
Macbeth
by a young theatre company named Swapnasandhani, and it had, unlikely as it sounded, run into trouble with the state government.

The trouble was this: the translation they had used, by the playwright Ujjwal Chattopadhyay, had made unflattering references to Mamata Banerjee's populist Trinamool Congress party (TMC), which had recently swept to power in West Bengal after thirty-four years of Left Front rule. Banerjee had been a trusted lieutenant in the Indian National Congress before launching her own party on a wave of anti-Left Front feeling. Into a speech of Malcolm's near the end of the play, Chattopadhyay had slyly inserted a quote from one of Banerjee's speeches. In TMC circles there was outrage; the playwright, a state employee, came under pressure to recant. The next time
Macbeth
went on stage, the quote had mysteriously vanished.

Censorship? Political pressure? Publicity stunt? Theories were legion, and
The Times of India
had picked up the story. Even by the fissiparous standards of Bengali politics – ‘No matter how long you live here,' someone told me, ‘you never really understand them' – this was a diverting turn of events.

When I called him, the director, Koushik Sen, was happy to talk. Could I come to a venue near the cathedral? He would corral some colleagues and we could discuss all things Shakespeare and Bengal, perhaps show me a little of their work.

When I stepped inside the Academy of Fine Arts, the atmosphere was febrile. Technicians were hurrying around backstage. A man strode past towards the dressing rooms, three bright blonde wigs slung over his arm. An assistant guided me through to the auditorium – Sen was busy right now, she said, but he could talk afterwards.

After what, though? I'd arrived expecting an interview-cum-group-discussion. Apparently I'd walked into a full-scale
Macbeth.

Full-scale was the phrase: the setting was urgently contemporary, with the shock troops of Macbeth (who was played by Sen himself) in
camouflage fatigues and glistening knee-high boots that put me in mind of
Star Wars.
A voluptuous Lady Macbeth shimmered malevolently in ballgown and tiara; the Witches, spitting and seething like caged snakes, were extravagantly cross-dressed (this was where the blonde wigs had ended up). When the Macbeths finally ascended to power, it was to a throne of human bones.

The Bengali translation was beyond me, and I'd left my complete works behind at the guesthouse. But I comprehended the metaphors clearly enough: power was corrupt and corrupting. Direful ambition lay at every turn. Even the good were not immune: Macduff was a shrewd politician, and it looked only too likely that Duncan's son, Malcolm, would likely be a chip off the old tyrant. (There was a small cheer from the audience as he finished one speech; the Banerjee quote had evidently been reinserted.)