Ishaqzaade dir. by Habib Faisal, and: Issaq dir. by Manish Tiwary, and: Goliyon Ki Raasleela: Ram-Leela dir. by Sanjay Leela Bhansali (review)

In February 2015, Hypokrit Theatre Company launched an Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in “Bollywood style.” In an interview for the website Arts in Color, the company’s co-founder, Arpita Mukherjee, remarked, “I’ve always wanted to work on Romeo and Juliet with a Bollywood aesthetic. I’ve read the play many times and it always reminded me of a Bollywood movie—it’s got romance, fights, high drama, familial conflicts and of course song and dance” (February 20, 2015).

This perception of an underlying affinity between Shakespearean themes and Bollywood cinema’s performative modes is continuously reinforced by the growing number of films based on the Bard’s plays coming out of India’s Bombay-based film industry. While much critical focus remains on Vishal Bhardwaj’s tragedy trilogy (Maqbool, Omkara, and Haider), there has been less discussion of the three Bollywood versions of Romeo and Juliet that were released between 2012 and 2013: Ishaqzaade (dir. Habib Faisal, 2012); Issaq (dir. Manish Tiwary, 2013); and Goliyon Ki Raasleela: Ram-Leela (dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2013). Interestingly, the release of this cluster of films coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Qayamat se Qayamat tak (dir. Mansoor Khan, 1988), a film that closely and declaredly followed Shakespeare’s tragedy of young love. Although most Bollywood romances are about ill-fated lovers divided by asymmetries of class or community who have to struggle against intransigent fathers and vengeful social elders to assert their love, what sets Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak apart is the tragic ending, which the director borrowed from Shakespeare’s play and its commercially popular cinematic adaptations such as West Side Story (1961). Despite apprehensions that the film would disappoint an audience accustomed to happy reconciliations between the lovers and the clan in the final shot, the film was a box office success. It also set a template for Romeo and Juliet adaptations within the Bollywood idiom.

The recent Romeo and Juliet films all end in the death of the lovers—while in Ishaqzaade and Ram-Leela the lovers shoot each other, Issaq is the only one of the three that introduces the Friar Lawrence character as a levitating Hindu sadhu and relentlessly pursues the logic of Shakespeare’s contrived ending. Issaq also provides Ram-Leela with the motifs of “Holi” (the festival of colours associated with the romantic Hindu deities, Radha and Krishna) and “Ramleelaa” (a festival that celebrates the triumph of good over evil by burning the effigy of Ravana, the villain of the Hindu epic, Ramayana). In Ram-Leela, the young protagonists, Ram and Leela, see each other for the first time in a blinding flash of Holi colours and go out in a blaze of gunfire, shooting each other dead even as the straw Ravanas burn through the night. Framed by these two festivals in a tense play of eros and thanatos, the lovers’ deaths seem less a tragedy of fate and more a consummation devoutly to be wished. Not misled into hasty suicides through ill-timed plot twists, in Ishaqzaade and Ram-Leela the lovers choose a heroic exit by consciously deciding to take each others’ lives. While in Ishaqzaade, Zoya/Juliet says that she would rather die by love than live in hate, Ram and Leela feel that the carnival of killing unleashed by their love can only end through their willed deaths.

By dispensing with the Friar Lawrence plot, the narratives of Ishaqzaade and Ram-Leela put much of the onus of the tragedy on the protagonists, who emerge as larger-than-life figures: much older than Shakespeare’s lovers, less innocent, more embedded in the politics of the family feud, and much more able to shape their own lives (and deaths), even though hemmed in by...