Worlds Elsewhere (47 page)

It would be easy to argue that Tagore misunderstood, that the object of
The Tempest
is not the ‘isle' it is set on but the power-plays of the humans stranded there. Still, I felt that his argument was persuasive, particularly when it came to the troubled relationship between master and servants in the play. Contrary to the best efforts of British Victorian critics, who fell over themselves to argue that Prospero was a benign foreign ruler bringing enlightened civilisation to the island and its natives, Tagore identified a bleaker truth about the relationship between coloniser and colonised: ‘[Ariel] wishes to be free, but, bound and oppressed by human force, he is made to work like a slave. He has no love in his heart, no tears in his eyes.'

In
Shakuntala,
he wrote, there was ‘love, peace and fellowship'.
The Tempest,
meanwhile, offered ‘oppression, rule, rigour'. It would take western scholars decades to reach similar conclusions.

My final day in Kolkata flew past in a blur – dinner at the house of a theatre critic, followed by a surreal evening in the company of Amitava Roy, who gamely offered to take me to the last night of a
jatra
festival. Together he and I crammed into a dusty auditorium in a run-down district of Kolkata, overflowing with stout middle-aged couples, and watched an hour of wild and indecipherable melodrama: a cross (as far as I could construe) between
Dallas,
the Hindu epics and the more tumultuous sections of a revivalist prayer meeting, all to the raucous accompaniment of electric guitar, keyboard and drums. The show's title was
Anurager Chhoya
(‘The Touch of Love').

Over ten million tickets are said to be sold for
jatra
performances each year in West Bengal, and perhaps a hundred companies are active, touring far-flung villages in the poor rural parts of the state. This is one of the few corners of the world where theatre remains more popular than cinema. Despite their mythological origins,
jatra
shows now draw on everything from news events to Bollywood movies and American
television shows; there is even reputed to have been a
jatra
based on James Cameron's film
Titanic.

It wasn't just the dry ice, strobe lights and chest-thumping acting that made me wonder if this was what Parsi theatre would have been like to watch:
jatra,
yet another Indian melting pot of cultural influences, was surely one of its offspring. And it suddenly occurred to me that this, too, was what it might have been like to watch theatre in the California Gold Rush – except here in India the tradition was vigorously, full-bloodedly alive. Utpal Dutt had described this kind of folk theatre as ‘tempestuous incantation'. Having seen it live, I felt I understood exactly what he was trying to summon.

I had one place remaining on my itinerary: Delhi, where I was due at a conference being held by the Shakespeare Society of India (no relation to the Shakespeare Society of Eastern India, it appeared: yet another Indian doubling). I'd wangled an invitation by offering to speak about the World Shakespeare Festival. I also hoped that, after two and a half weeks of hectic travel, the conference might offer a pause for reflection – a way of putting into focus the many colliding Shakespearian images I had accumulated in India, America and Germany. Many of India's leading Shakespeare scholars were due to be in attendance. At least some of them might be able to tell me what was really going on in global Shakespeare.

A little after 4.30 p.m., I boarded the Rajdhani Express, pushing through the hooting crowds of red-turbaned porters on the platform. Only one other passenger was in my compartment: a small, neat man in his late fifties, with bulldog jowls and a tidy grey moustache. He was buried in the
Times of India
crossword; we gave each other absent nods, like seasoned commuters.

Twenty-five minutes later, right on time, we slid out of Howrah station. The sun, fierce orange, was sinking into the west, burnishing the marshy streams and lakes as we slipped out of the city. Every so often there was a glimpse of the darkening River Hugli. As we gained speed, the shuddering and creaking of the train settling into a ponderous, bottom-heavy sway, I experienced a sensation that had evaded me since arriving in India: something approaching peace.

FOR MY LAST THREE DAYS IN INDIA,
I played at knowing what I was doing. I rose early in my spartan student quarters at the University of Delhi guesthouse, attempting not to electrocute myself on the power socket placed inexplicably beneath the shower. I walked for twenty-five minutes through the morning haze to Indraprastha College, bought a glass of freshly pressed orange juice from the juice-wallah by the gates. I attended lectures and seminars, asked questions, filled most of another notebook with neat lines of ink. On manicured lawns, I sipped sweet chai and made small talk with students and professors. I gave my paper. It was mediocre.

Whatever clear ideas I possessed about Shakespeare in India, I sensed them slipping away. It wasn't the organisers' fault: the sessions were insightful on everything from differing translations of
Macbeth
to the relationship between Shakespeare and Kalidasa (yet another Shakespeare of India: the subcontinent was groaning with them).

No – it was me who was to blame. Whatever story I was trying to tell, I was losing track of it. Tamil Shakespeare, Kannada Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Hindu philosophy, Shakespeare and Tagore, Shakespeare and Gandhi, postcolonial Shakespeare, post-postcolonial Shakespeare, remakes of Shakespeare, re-remakes, re-re-remakes, re-re-re-remakes: too many Shakespeares, for my cluttered brain at least. Too many Indias.

One elderly academic, white-haired, shrunken inside his overlarge suit, kept trying to show me his magnum opus, a titanic compendium of Indian writings in praise of Shakespeare. The book was nearly a thousand pages long. Had I known about its existence when I arrived, it might have been a useful companion, if somewhat bulky. Now, though, it was the last thing I wanted to read. It seemed an all-too-pointed reminder of how little I knew about India – and, for that matter, about Shakespeare.

Back in Mumbai I'd spent a morning with a playwright, Ramu Ramanathan. He told me about a project he'd done with students in which he'd asked them to go out on the streets and imagine Shakespeare's plays happening right there in the city: Shylock spotted on the concourse at Masjid Bunder station, Cleopatra sunning herself on Versova beach. I'd loved the idea of a cast of Shakespearian characters on the loose – a glimpse of Ophelia here, a half-caught Coriolanus there. But one could spend a lifetime searching for their faces, and never quite succeed. It struck me as not so different from the journey I was on.

It wasn't just India; I felt all the different Shakespeares I'd encountered juddering and blurring into each other. Grey concrete and green ice and biting Baltic air; King Lear amidst the grain elevators of the Midwest; Richard III in a saloon bar in Malakoff Diggins; a smirking Romantic statue in Weimar; a punk singer yelling out Shakespearian couplets in a basement in Washington DC. And this was before one even got to Shakespeare's myriad Indian faces: Gulzar's elderly actor in beard and ruff, winking knowingly over the credits to
Angoor
; that
Star Wars-
style
Macbeth
in West Bengal in the shadow of the government; the girlish figure of Mala Sinha, sinking beneath the water's surface …

Perhaps it had been unwise to commence a journey with
The Comedy of Errors
: the metaphor seemed rather too obvious. What was it that Antipholus said – ‘in quest of them, unhappy, lose myself …'? I had long since lost myself. At the end of the summer I was due in South Africa, to chase down a whole new set of Shakespeares. The thought made me dizzy.

During a break late one morning, I sat on a chair on the grass, putting off returning to the overheated lecture hall. In a few days, the forecast said, the
loo
winds would start to blow, and Delhi would surrender to high summer. By then, I would be above them, in a plane bound for London. High over the Himalayas, angled towards Turkmenistan and the Caspian Sea.

Everyone had gone back in. Or nearly everyone: a few chairs away was a professor I had met the previous day. His research on Hindi cinema I had found hugely useful when planning my journey; I had been glad to make his acquaintance.

‘Bunking class?' he said, fanning himself with his programme. ‘Me also. After a few days at these things I begin to switch off.' He tapped his temple. ‘The old brain, you know.'

A white-jacketed waiter was carrying tiffin boxes across the lawn. We watched the shadows shifting and shimmering in the hot breeze.

‘How's your trip? Getting what you need?'

I admitted I was finding it difficult to join the dots. So many theories about Shakespeare, about India, about Germany and the US, so many cultures, interpretations, languages – I was having trouble working out if any of them combined. Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata had left my head in even more of a scramble than usual. All these different adaptations … It felt as though one could go on for ever, and never reach the end.

I sensed he was stifling a smile.

‘Old chap,' he said softly, ‘isn't that rather the point?'

On my penultimate evening in Delhi, I took the metro south. It was a long journey, over an hour, but the carriage was quiet and I was glad of the air conditioning and the chance to be alone with my thoughts. The train rocked softly as we ticked through the stations: Green Park, Malviya Nagar, Saket, Qutub Minar. As we came above ground, I watched the city flickering past, bulky silhouettes of office buildings and a clutter of low-rise apartment blocks shrinking into the haze. When the carriage doors hissed open at each stop, I caught the scent of the city: dust and drying earth, grass, burning rubbish, diesel fumes, woodsmoke from the fires of nightwatchmen huddled over braziers. The sun was slowly making its way down through the sky, tinting everything the colour of weak tea.

Down the steps at Ghitorni station, a party was readying itself for the off. Bulbous light fittings in crimson and gold were being lugged off a truck, and a small band of musicians was crouching by the side of the road next to their instruments. In their scarlet jackets and pressed white trousers, they looked as if they were about to be planted on top of a cake. Behind them were the gates of a large hotel. A wedding, I guessed. As I went past, a young man in the band grinned and raised his cap in mock-salute. Its pom-pom bobbed crazily on his head.

I had come out here for an old Indian favourite:
The Winter's Tale.
The play was being staged by the young Delhi company Tadpole. The setting was outdoors, and the performance would be promenade-style. I had heard good things at the conference; anyway, it was an excuse to sneak away.

They had done well with the location, at least, I thought. The venue was a yoga-retreat-cum-arts-centre near the city limits, down a winding lane just off a main road. As I came through the gate I saw a low, pretty collection of buildings draped across the grass around a small and shadowy lake. Lanterns had been lit, white orbs floating in the tree branches.

I was directed up through thickets of bamboo towards the playing space: a sand-covered drum on top of a small mound, perhaps the radius of a baseball infield, with a large tent-like canopy in bamboo and wicker, open on all sides, draped with pieces of white fabric that
stirred slightly in the cool evening breeze. I grinned as I came close: it wasn't dissimilar from the outdoor auditorium Harold Littledale had seen while watching
Cymbeline
in Vadodara in 1880. Would there be anti-British jokes? I hoped there would.

The audience were sitting in cane chairs and benches and on rugs spread around. There was a scattering of Europeans and Delhiites, neat young men in chinos and Nehru waistcoats, women wearing bright scarves in lemon and sea-green. Beyond the buzz of pre-show conversation the evening was noisy with the clucking of crickets and frogs and the keening of peacocks. I inserted myself on the ground next to a man in a Puma T-shirt and Birkenstocks and waited for the performance to begin.

It did so with a tableau: a woman, heavily pregnant, stepping into the light. She looked around at us sadly, as if in foreknowledge: a young wife, Hermione, about to have her world wrenched apart. Gradually a cast assembled itself, twelve actors in all, one of them playing Hermione's young son, Mamillius. With two servants gossiping about the state of affairs between Sicily and Bohemia, we were pitched into the world of the play.

I had seen more highly polished versions of
The Winter's Tale,
but rarely performed with such grace and deftness. It was alive with Indian and African drums, singing and dance. The actors were barefoot, clad in long, elegantly tailored tunics. A parlour game became deadly serious when Leontes invited Polixenes, whom he suspects of being unfaithful with Hermione, to play for his life. The stage was bare – by turns a dance floor, Mamillius's sandpit, and, when jealousy took hold of Leontes, the arena for a predator on the loose. When Hermione was eventually summoned to answer for herself, she was dragged across the sand with such violence that the woman opposite me flinched.