Imperialistic Representations and Spectatorial Reception in Shakespeare Wallah

Imperialistic Representations and Spectatorial Reception in Shakespeare WallahI NANDI BHATIA Recent scholarship has sought to revise critical claims regarding the universal and transcendental status accorded to Shakespeare in India through an examination of three important aspects pertaining to the construction and representation of the bard: first, situating the history of Shakespeare in the context of colonial power relations, scholars have shown us the reasons for the literary and cultural authority attached to Shakespeare. Alternatively, scholars have discussed the anti-colonial responses as seen, for instance, in the drama of Vtpal DUll, and in Bharatendu Harishchandra's Durlabh Bandhu (based on The Merchant of Venice), which exemplify the unique local appropriations of Shakespeare (Loomba, Gender; lha; Trivedi; Bharucha; Singh; Green; Bhatia, "Codes of Empire"). Thirdly, critical work has focused on Shakespearean adaptations, which mayor may not be oppositional but reflect the inevitable process of cultural hybridization that confounds claims regarding strict segregation ofB.ritish and Indian cultural traditions. To this end, Ania Lomba's discussion of Kathakali Othello, Phillip Zarrilli's work on Kathakali King Lear, and Balwant Gargi's elaboration of King Lear as an Indian Maharaja remind us of the cultural flows and interactions resulting from Indian mediations of Shakespeare and demand that we understand that because of the historical interventions of British imperialism, both Western and Indian influences will exist on the global stage.' Taken together, such scholarship has facilitated an academic mode of understanding the relationship between Shakespearean drama and Indian culture. However, despite attempts to address the panicular dominant, alternative, and hybrid positions occupied by Shakespeare in colonial and postcolonial India, the universality accorded to Shakespeare continues to grow through popular, literary-critical, and performative discourses that reconstruct the authority of the bard in terms divested of colonial politics and naturalize his presence in India. This is best recorded in recent years by Christine Mangala Modern Drama, 45: I (Spring 2002) 62 NANDI BHATIA Frost, who, in an attempt to free critical discussions from what she calls "the charge of cultural imperialism as it relates to Shakespeare in India during the Raj" (92), asserts, The ready acceptance of Shakespeare during the Raj cannot be adequately accounted for either in tenns ofcultural crawling or ofimperialist coercion. Shakespeare, along with other British drama, reached India at a time when there was little by way of theatre except for folk-drama; and the fare the folk-theatre offered was a medley of alltoo -familiar didactic tales rehashed from the epics and the purallas, or, a crude potpourri of song, dance, mime and farce that hardly qualified as legitimate drama. Shakespeare answered to a desperate need for intellec~al and psychological stimulus [...] (93) Frost's attempt to rescue Shakespeare from the charge of imperialism leads her to conclude that ~'Shakespeare continues to exercise a fascination for the Indian mind of all types, not just the academic or the theatrical" (99). Not only does such critical appraisal overwhelmingly reiterate early imperialist discourses regarding Shakespeare in India and secure his place in the realm of the transcendental; such a charge also assumes a homogenously appreciative audience and a ready acceptance of Shakespeare by colonial subjects, overlooking, in the process, what Ella Shohat and Robert Starn call the "historically situated spectators" and their multifaceted nature, which varies across the differentiated levels of gender, class, and nationalist interests and affiliations (156).3 James Ivory and Ismael Merchant's film Shakespeare Wal/ah (1965) brings an important dimension to discussions of a postcolonial Shakespeare through its unravelling of the story of Shakespeare in post-independence India, a story that engages the politically fraught discourse of Euro-colonialism and its relationship to the iconic status imparted to Shakespeare.' Yet what is unique about the film is also its inclusion of an array of spectatorial responses that the Shakespearean productions (performed by the Buckingham Players) elicit when staged for culturally specific Indian audiences. The film's careful separation of the differentiated levels of spectatorial engagement with Shakespeare, framed through a variety of registers - textual, technical, institutional, and contextual- articulates the discrepancy between the reception of Shakespearean dmma as we see it and as claimed by critics and admirers of Shakespeare. Elsewhere I have discussed the role of...