India's Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance (review)

One of the highlights of India's Shakespeare is a compelling essay on "Shakespeare's India." In it, Sukanta Chaudhuri points out the statistics that make the premise of this book initially unpromising: "Bartlett's Shakespeare Concordance lists seven references to 'India,' two to 'Ind,' five to 'Indies,' and nine to 'Indian(s).' The references are varied and, at first sight, unmemorable. There is the further problem of determining what is [geographically] meant by 'India'" (158). These statistical odds notwithstanding, India's Shakespeare does an excellent job of foregrounding the questions of what India means in Shakespeare and what Shakespeare means in India, and it does this, for the most part, by going beyond statistics. Thus, the volume's title forces us to wonder, not how often Shakespeare mentioned India in his texts, but rather what it might mean for India to take possession of Shakespeare. How can Shakespeare belong to and in India? How and under what conditions can the Swan of Avon become the Savant of Asia?

There is, of course, a historical answer to this question: Shakespeare was arguably the most successful component of the British colonial mission, widely used to inculcate a sense of British superiority. This colonial history has given rise to a slew of related battles—between the colonizer's language of English and the various regional languages; between the educated elite and the uneducated majority; between the perfect imitation of an English accent onstage and a reveling in Indian inflections. All these battles highlight what Poonam Trivedi would term desi, or folk, Shakespeare, which even when it attempts to mimic the English author reveals a peculiarly Indian strain. This desi Shakespeare is interesting because it offers insights into questions about plagiarism and temporality that have been highlighted by theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty but which urgently need more attention in studies of postcolonial literature and performance. It also throws into disarray the assumptions behind what is or is not the "'real' India" (28).

Although at times the introduction seeks to police the border between authentic and inauthentic Indianness, India's Shakespeare by and large suspends such judgmental thinking to revel instead in border crossings of class, caste, language, region, and gender. Its focus on plagiarism alone ensures its irreverence in relation to a concept deemed morally bankrupt in the West. Rather than focusing on the morality or immorality of plagiarism, this volume notes the link between plagiarism and power in a colonial context. Stating that a "plagiarized Shakespeare coincided with the period of the consolidation of the empire," the editors argue that "plagiarized" texts may be "seen as acts of cultural resistance" (16). What Sisir Kumar Das calls "'cannibalization'" (52) is further described in Javed Malick's excellent contribution "Appropriating Shakespeare Freely: Parsi Theater's First Urdu Play Khurshid" as the "remarkable ease and freedom with which the great colonial icon was appropriated and made to serve the taste and temper of Indian audiences" (103). What the West understands as "plagiarism," then, becomes something else for India's Shakespeare. The concept of intellectual ownership, so absent in Shakespeare's own time, continues to mark India's relation to the Bard who was once meant to colonize them, but who turns out to have himself been colonized.

This incommensurate relationship is also highlighted in specific translations and adaptations of Shakespeare into Indian languages. According to Sisir Kumar Das, The Merchant of Venice is the most frequently translated Shakespeare play (more than fifty times), even though the conflict between Christians and Jews does not fit Indian contexts. Instead, Bharatendu Harishchandra's 1880 Hindi translation makes the Christian a Hindu, and the Jew a Jain; the latter two share nothing other than the first letter of their respective religions. This is a startling and poignant reminder that even late into the nineteenth century, Hindu-Muslim relations were so lacking in animosity that they did not provide a template for religious conflict in...