I. Introduction:

Hindi cinema, popularly known today (and, sometimes deprecated by intellectuals) as Bollywood globally, has consistently used Shakespearean themes and plots in its own transgressive manner in order to add some weight to its banal stories of love and sacrifice. Being a colonial import to India initially, Shakespearean plays, particularly the romantic love tragedy of Romeo and Juliet has sustained to date in the popular imagination of the post-colonial nation through its diverse native adaptations. The Hindi film industry, however, has been perpetually criticized for papering over the regional and linguistic diversity of the Indian nation and for propagating Bollywood, with its Hindi hegemony, as the sole representative of Indian cinema on the global platform.

This paper offers an analysis of two indigenized adaptations of Romeo & Juliet in mainstream Hindi cinema that play out the tragedy of impassioned love on the foundations of post-colonial issues of the Indian nation-state, namely linguistic animosity and territorial power dynamics respectively. Ek Duuje Ke Liye (Made for Each Other, 1981) and Goliyon ki Raasleela: Ramleela (A Dance of Bullets: Ramleela, 2013) may be separated by more than three decades but are the most distant and eclectically treated cinematic works from the original Shakespearean text. While Ramleela was promoted as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Ek Duje Ke Liye (EDKL henceforth)was never acknowledged to have been adapted from or inspired by Shakespeare. Instead, these two film texts foreground with enthusiastic pride, their cultural rootedness in ‘regional’ embodiments as well as the propagation of a pan-Indian ‘regional identity’ (instead of national), despite being films made in the Hindi mainstream industry. They do this by setting the stories in unique spatial locations of the Indian imaginary and alterity of characterization. 

In this paper, I ask two significant questions: 1) What does transposing Shakespearean plays into an entirely foreign (or native) framework mean for a quintessentially market-driven culture industry like Hindi cinema?, and 2) What does such provincialization add to the ongoing field of Shakespearean adaptation studies?

I argue, that, by appropriating Shakespeare in a provincialized context, the Popular Hindi film industry aspires to contest the social insularity against itself, which is the belief that Bollywood endorses ‘cultural homogeneity’ in its depiction of India on the global platform, overlooking its regional diversity. Since the global and cultural outreach of Shakespeare and, particularly, Romeo & Juliet is so widespread across the Indian nation, reimagining the play within local-regional dynamics gives Hindi cinema the apt chance to redefine itself as the global representative of a new Indian modernity that thrives in its myriad diversities. The two films analyzed in this paper study the genealogical trace of Shakespeare’s journey of bearing witness to a young nation’s throes of national anxiety to the time of reproducing a new and indigenous brand of global Shakespeare.

It is important to note that Hindi mainstream cinema and Bollywood in particular, endorses a specific kind of ‘transnational’ identity of the Indian nation-state, centered in the post-colonial city of Bombay that is the home to Bollywood; an identity that is rooted in Indian culture and mythology, but also applies equally well to the nation’s cultural transition to embrace ‘alternative modernities’ owing to the boundless expanse of globalization (Ashcroft 6). While Bill Ashcroft appreciates the way Bollywood has transcended the boundaries of the nation-state to identify itself as pan-Indian, this analysis overlooks the consequences of this pan-Indian identification back home, that is, within the boundaries of the nation-state. In an attempt to embrace alternative modernities through urban cosmopolitanism - where the city space (mostly, Bombay) is the singular representative of the diverse population – Hindi popular cinema constantly lands itself in a dialectical tension with regional cinema that provincializes universal themes and stories within its rubric of cultural diversity. As opposed to this singularity of global representation, the films that I will analyze dismantle the hegemonic nature of Bombay mainstream cinema. The cultural currency of adapting Shakespearean stories, particularly the cult romantic tragedy of Romeo & Juliet, ensures a smooth execution of this endeavor.

II. Contextualizing Shakespeare in the history of Hindi popular cinema

Cinema in India, as in the rest of the world, is inextricably linked to a people’s culture ever since the advent of colonialism and has sustained its massive appeal throughout the post-colonial, liberal, and neo-liberal phases of India’s evolution as a modern nation-state. It would not be an overstatement to say that the cultural currency of Shakespeare has been one of the popular entities to have witnessed this historical transition and has undergone a major personal transformation within itself, in the process. Specifically, Hindi cinema in the 1970s and 80s witnessed a tectonic shift in reflecting a new India that was enmeshed in its current socio-political turmoil as well as opening itself up to external, foreign influences of the global market. (Mehta 55) The timeline of K. Balachander’s EDKL coincided with this turbulent socio-political transitioning phase of India, which was also the period of rampant filmic exchanges taking place between mainstream Hindi cinema and regional cinema1. This film likewise was among the spate of South Indian movies being re-made for the Hindi audience. But unlike the wave of social realism that had swept Indian cinema at that time, a film based on Shakespeare’s eternal love-tragedy was Balachander’s gift to the distressed audiences, which partly explains the film’s record box-office success despite being nowhere close to the dominant realist wave of the time2. The passionate love story of Vasu/Romeo and Sapna/Juliet amidst hurdles of socio-cultural differences and the colonial backdrop of coastal Goa, made EDKL akin to a sudden breath of fresh air amidst the socio-political turmoil; driven by a humanistic motive to foreclose provincial differences by propagating the universal language of love.

With the consolidation of the Indian film industry into the overarching phenomenon known as ‘Bollywood’ in the 1990s, Shakespearean adaptations started gaining cultural momentum, since the target audience of this new cosmopolitan culture industry at the cusp of the age of globalization was mainly the youth of the urban cities as well as the Indian diasporas of the USA and UK. Shakespeare easily assimilated into this dynamic of international cultural exchange because of his prior global popularity. To that extent, the effervescence of Shakespeare’s eternal romance has continued to mesmerize the Indian diaspora living abroad and the local urban population, so much so that the plot recycling has seldom been an issue for the Indian audience to witness. Most Bollywood adaptations of Romeo & Juliet cater either to the urban youth or the sensibilities of mofussil folks who aspire to shift to the urban city.  However, there is a significant drawback to this youthful chase of modernity portrayed on screen.  It creates a distorted consumerist brand of ‘Indianness’ on the global platform where the urban city signifies the entire nation or what Ravi Vasudevan calls, “…displacement of the nation as art form by nation as brand”. (3). As a result, the myriad diversities of language, culture, religion, and traditions, unique to India’s characteristics suffer from self-erasure when depicted through the lens of cultural homogeneity in the global market.

Ramleela tries to break this cultural stereotype, by being set in the relatively unfamiliar and mofussil parts of the Indian imaginary. Paromita Chakravorty reminds further that, this “ ‘brand of the local’ followed by Bollywood in the present times is constructed to produce an image of Bollywood’s cultural eclecticism: “It is a mode of producing and maintaining difference in an increasingly homogenizing market” (669). The director of Ramleela, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, is known overseas for the grandeur of his films’ aesthetics. He takes away the film from the predominantly urban, and cosmopolitan city of Mumbai into a quasi-small-town setting with no fixed time period, performing a commendable job of creating a temporal timelessness similar to Romeo and Juliet, while replicating scenes and dialogues from the original Shakespeare by his grandeur of sets and artistic vision.  In a way, if we consider EDKL as the outset of foregrounding the cultural heterogeneity of a diverse nation, Ramleela is the metaphoric stage of how it reaches its long-pending fruition.

In addition, EDKL and Ramleela do not explicitly nurture the ambition for global outreach and despite being products of mainstream Hindi cinema, try to challenge the dichotomies of commercialism and aestheticism, by appropriating Shakespeare in a way that proves not only the globality of the Bard’s cultural capital but also, the assimilative and innovative power of commercial Hindi cinema that has a stereotypical and sustained presence in national and international imagination. While neither of the films claim exceptionalism by drastically modifying their narratives or introducing contexts that are radical or life-altering, they are clearly different from the usual run-of-the-mill adaptations of Romeo & Juliet in that they attempt to rupture the dominant discourse of Bombay cinema. The inception of this rupture begins with the ‘indigenization’ of the plot by overall transportation of the geo-political location away from Bombay City.

III. Uniqueness of Spatiality in Ramleela and EDKL

While it has been made clear that the change in spatiality is crucial in re-inventing Shakespeare in mainstream Bollywood, is it the only crucial factor or are there other factors that determine the success of a formulaic plot like Romeo & Juliet to recurringly achieve commercial success with the Indian audience? In short, what kind of adaptation is encouraged in contemporary Hindi cinema? Does Bollywood follow a model that is different from its literary and cultural counterparts to ensure that Shakespearean adaptations fulfill the dual demands of depicting a revived Indian modernity on the global platform as well as catering to the commercial taste of the national audience?  Unlike the Indian educational curriculum which follows a puritanical approach to Shakespeare by deploying a lens of veneration for the decadent niceties of the text and the Indian theater where the verbal hegemony of authenticating ‘Shakespearean language’ still gains majoritarian favor, Indian cinema has mostly observed an experimental route to assimilate Shakespeare within national aspirations. (Chaudhuri 119)

This route taken by Indian films is similar to what Weber has defined as ‘transculturation’, “…the deconstruction of a text/code and its wrenching displacement to a historically and socially different situation” as opposed to Indian theater’s model of ‘acculturation’ that transports, “…a foreign code in a native structure, which implies that an ideology is inscribed with it” (35). The films that I analyze in this paper are top-notch examples of successful “transculturation” in terms of their displacement of the text’s diegetic world to a new geographical setting and temporality. It remains unrecorded whether the choice of uncommon locations for the films was conscious. I call the choice uncommon, for the locations in which Ramleela and Ek Duje Ke Liye are set because the unconventional choice of zeroing in on Goa and Gujarat is almost unprecedented in Hindi popular cinema.

Ramleela is set in the semi-urban, fictional town of Ranjaar, even though it is clearly apparent that Ranjaar is set in the Western Indian state of Gujarat. The time period of the film is obfuscating (with the presence of mobile phones and 1940s vintage cars simultaneously) and remains unmentioned throughout the film.  The film is doused head to toe in Gujarati folklore, intonation as well as Gujarati-inflected Hindi dialogues. The gigantic entrance gate of Ranjaar boasts Kathiawari architecture and is seen in the same frame as an ammunition shop (see Figure 1). The music of the film particularly invokes the flavor of Gujarat by incorporating folksongs as background for the lovers’ encounters. This is not to say that the plot commoditizes Shakespeare only for its international value. Whether this project of situating the story in a distant, non-western, and most importantly, surreal location, and withholding the temporality of the diegetic world, is a conscious assertion of Shakespeare’s timelessness or not, remains to be found. But it can be said with certainty that this obscurity of time and space, attributes a distinctive tinge of abstraction and suspense in the audience. One of the film reviews in Variety states, “Ram-Leela does accomplish one thing quite unusual: It manages to keep you in suspense about the outcome almost to the last frame, not a bad trick for a retelling of one of the most familiar narratives in world literature” (2013). That the magazine calls trickery can be read as the director’s earnest effort to locate the film on the global map of “Interculturalism” as well as procuring monetary gains by what Ashish Rajadhyaksha calls, “defining culture economically,” as is evident from his past film productions3.

Moreover, unlike EDKL, where the linguistic dispute between the warring families is frivolous in the beginning but later gains solid grounds due to Vasu and Sapna’s love affair, the feudal rivalry in Ramleela, between the Rajadis (Montagues) and Sanedas (Capulets) is historicized by tracing their animosity to 500 years back, which negates any kind of possible reconciliation between the families. Thus, Ranjaar is a town devoid of love and kindness, where hatred breeds and thrives in slaughtering random human lives (hence the title, “Dance of the Bullets”). The spatial location is insinuated within and progresses closely with the main storyline.  Ram/Romeo is a nonchalant Casanova of Ranjaar who falls head over heels in love with the feisty Leela/Juliet at one of the Holi gatherings, a Hindu festival of colors organized by the Sanedas/Capulets, that he trespasses. Ram and Leela’s love blooms against city backgrounds that are painted red and blue, imparting a vibrancy and freshness to the meeting of the lovers. Even though their innocent love blossoms inside the city, the cinematic peak of the film that portrays Ram’s hubris occurs in the seaport of Ranjaar – the port signifying the site of arrival and exodus, both of cargo and of people to and from Ranjaar. In one of his self-assured moments, Ram shoots Leela’s brother by mistake. Aware of the impossibility of their union now, the lovers decide to elope from town and get married.

This minor spatial digression from Ranjaar gives the impression as if Bhansali’s arid land of savagery is made exclusively for hatred and bloodshed and that something as sacred as marriage can only take place outside of it. The conjugality is short-lived since their relationship has to encounter several personal, emotional, and filial hurdles, and the lovers return to Ranjaar. Towards the end, the climactic event of Ram and Leela shooting each other dead to put an end to the inter-generational rivalry again takes place inside the town (see Figure 2).  However, in the end, the director radically changes the ominous connotations that Ranjaar evokes throughout the film. Through Ram and Leela, who died in the name of love, the loveless town achieves its final catharsis. Since the lovers’ death is symbolic of their eternal reunion and Ranjaar’s redemption from centuries of hatred, the imaginary town operates as a discursive space that unsettles, disturbs, and challenges the normative by creating a rupture.   

EDKL on the other hand uses a real but unconventional location to set its version of doomed love. Goa is a small port state in the southwestern part of India that was one of the flourishing Portuguese colonies in the late 18th century. Goa is an unusual choice to stage a North-South linguistic dispute because the town still retains its postcolonial hangover which is explicit in the distinct cultures of the people, a major portion of whom are Christians as opposed to the Hindu majority in other states. However, it is interesting that the film uses Christian legends as historical context to facilitate the love blossoming between the lead characters who are non-Christians. The statue of Dona Paula entombed on a mountaintop in Goa glorifies the myth of the Portuguese maiden’s immortal love, for which she drowned herself in the sea, unable to unite with her lover (see Figure 3). This story is referred to by Sapna as a token of her eternal love for Vasu, and it is not coincidental that, even though Vasu and Sapna commit suicide at the end, their love is immortalized by their names being enshrined on one of the rocks (see Figure 4). The director, K. Balachander has used multiple locations in the relatively unknown territory of Goa as spatial testimonies of Vasu and Sapna’s love story. Soon after, the lovers are challenged to prove their love by staying apart for a year, with zero correspondence, and with the condition of Vasu leaving Goa and learning Hindi. Both EDKL and Ramleela expend a considerable amount of focus on the spatiality aspect as a significant “indigenizing” tool of “transculturation” in order to facilitate the seamless assimilation of Shakespeare into the cultural milieu of modern India.

This concentration on spatiality by contemporary Indian filmmakers probably originates from the fact that although Verona and Mantua in the original text are of secondary importance, when Romeo is banished from Verona, he speaks of the city as a microcosm of the world, from where there is no escape: “There is no world outside Verona walls/But Purgatory, Torture, Hell itself” (Romeo & Juliet 3.3.9). As for the majoritarian publics of India, mostly acquainted with the central role of Bombay in Hindi films, both Ranjaar and Goa evoke feelings of Miranda’s exclamation, “O brave new world/That has such people in’t” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest4(5.1.217-18). They drift our attention away from the conventional worlds of Bombay and Northern India, both of which are Hindi- speaking majority states in India. The narrative of the films studied here is skillfully aligned with the historical specificities of the states where they unfold, which reminds one of the spatial significances that were bestowed upon the different parts of the city of New York in the American musical adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, West Side Story (1961).  This diegetic dislocation from the hub of Bombay films to regional locales provides a distinct other-worldliness to the films, quite similar to the fantastical world of Shakespeare’s Verona where conflicts of love and kinship define the demographics of the city.

IV. Alterity of Characterization

Linda Hutcheon, in her book on the theory of adaptation, suggests that often it is preferable and “easier to forge a relationship with an audience that is not overly burdened with affection or nostalgia for the adapted text” (121). Contrary to this, unlike commercial Bollywood directors who often draw inspiration from canonical literature rather than subjecting themselves to what hermeneutic theory calls, the audience’s “horizon of expectations”, both EDKL and Ramleela, as commercial productions, exert reasonable power in their respective cultural assimilations of Shakespearean (canonical) plots into the Indian hinterlands. This exertion of power is reminiscent of the perception of postcolonial translation as a cannibalistic tradition of devouring the original text and creating a revived autonomous position for itself. If the adaptation of theatrical Shakespeare on Indian celluloid is viewed through the lens of postcolonial translation, the cannibalistic tradition is replaced with a tradition of consumption. In other words, Shakespearean plots are devoured by adapters of Indian cinema in such a way that they create a demand for consumption by the local audience. Since Romeo and Juliet is almost over-consumed on the Indian screen, EDKL and Ramleela reinvent the tradition of consumption by disposing of certain crucial cultural stereotypes of mainstream Hindi cinema, while balancing them by retaining some other commercial tropes such as song-and-dance sequences, comic sub-plots, and multiple parallel narratives, marking Bollywood’s distinctive identity as an emergent global phenomenon. One such trope that is eliminated is the figure of the chivalrous, alpha male hero, who is the filmic Center in Hindi movies, around whom the plot revolves, and capitalizing the power of the woman protagonist that lends the old narrative a rather modern dimension. What we see these two films doing differently is approaching a pattern of inadvertently upending positions of authority, whether be it in the spirit of upgrading with time or modernizing the repetitive spectacle for the audience. This leads us to observe another tool of indigenizing Shakespeare in India: the alterity of characterization. 

Vasu/Romeo in EDKL is a Tamil-speaking boy who does not understand the Hindi language. Tamil is a South Indian language, whereas Hindi is widely spoken in North India, and often enjoys the hegemonic status of a national vernacular in the Hindi film industry. The conventional Hindi cinema hero in this film is thus subjected to an unconventional linguistic limitation. Right from the beginning of the film, the audience perceives this linguistic limitation growing into a hindrance for Vasu, almost to the point of impairment. Therefore, while we find the charming Casanova Romeo nurturing a broken heart at the onset of the original play, Vasu struggles with an alien language and is almost desperate to find a job in Tamil Nadu, where his lack of Hindi will not pose much of a problem. That is until the time he meets Sapna, who is a North Indian Hindi-speaking girl. It is interesting to see that the story never shows Vasu and Sapna’s incomprehensibility of each other’s language as a barrier in their blossoming romance, while their families engage in nothing short of a verbal war on the same issue. Further, unlike the hypermasculine heroes of 80s Hindi cinema, Vasu is innocent and is adherent to Sapna’s wishes, including her final decision of the lovers jumping off the cliff. Vasu cries to express his emotions and is even incapable of fighting the goons, the latter posing a huge crisis of masculinity for a Hindi film hero. Vasu reminds us of the submissive and despairing Romeo when he is asked to leave the town, which is figuratively akin to Romeo’s banishment from Verona. His agitated appeal on being separated from Sapna, when everyone else can see her, is a transliteration of Romeo’s grievous cry in Act 3 Scene 3: “Heaven is here/ Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog/ And little mouse, every unworthy thing, / Live here in heaven and may look on her, / But Romeo may not.”

While EDKL is a testament to doomed young love, Ramleela draws direct inspiration from Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation Romeo + Juliet particularly in terms of the erotic scenes as well as the explicit sexual tension between the leads, Ram and Leela. The portrayal of Ram/Romeo and Leela/Juliet’s first meeting at the Holi (a Hindu festival of colors) gathering is artistic and heavily sexualized through lustful gestures, animated by the extremely sensuous background song, Lahu Munh Lag Gaya (“my lips are smeared with blood”). In Bhansali’s adaptation, the passion of the lovers is not young and innocent, but mature and erotically charged. The trope of the chivalrous hero in Ramleela is almost subverted as the director transfers the “hero’s agency” to the heroine, Leela/Juliet. In the Holi gathering, it is Leela who kisses Ram openly and later, even sneaks away from her house to meet him. Ram, on the contrary, is presented as a flamboyant, romantic-at-heart, who is least interested in his violent family business and would rather pass his days in the company of women. The character of Ram can also be read as living up to the expectations of the Romeo figure used pejoratively in native Indian vocabulary, who is usually a roguish figure that wears his heart on his sleeves. Ram and Vasu are indeed portrayed as misfits in the world they reside in, the eternal Other who can never blend into the mainstream center. They also represent the image of the urban Indian youth, the progressive postcolonial subject citizen for whom his alterity is not an anomaly but an opportunity for merging polarized cultural differences.

While Ram and Vasu as Indian Romeos exhibit human-like characteristics of physical frailty and emotional affectivity, the Indian Juliets undergo a drastic character transformation. Unlike Shakespeare, who keeps Juliet’s fortitude quite subtle in the play, {“Back foolish tears; Back to your native spring,” (3.2.6) “If all else fails, myself have power to die” (3.5.248)} the heroines of EDKL and Ramleela are feisty firecrackers in their fearless proclamation of love and desire. Sapna in EDKL is the one who sets her eyes on Vasu, pursues him, and even makes the final decision to end their lives to make their love immortal. Similarly, Leela epitomizes the modern Indian woman who does not shy away from displaying her uninhibited sexuality. In fact, most of the kissing scenes in the movie are initiated by Leela.  In one of the song sequences, she is seen inviting Ram to bed on their first night as a married couple. Bhansali and his scriptwriters etch out Leela’s character very cautiously, carefully bordering her on the libidinal and righteous woman, where the former can make her an outright immoral woman in the eyes of the Indian audience. Even though the postmodern practice of foregrounding women’s free-spiritedness and sexuality as a symbol of women empowerment is pretty common now in Bollywood5, Varsha Panjwani shows that it is nevertheless a breakthrough moment in film history since Leela is based on a foreign woman figure Juliet but consistently exhibits shades of the native Indian mythological goddess Sita in the Ramayana. Panjwani asserts about Ramleela, “The film mines Shakespeare’s creation to merge the dichotomy of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ woman in the Ramayana and instead presents a layered, dialectical image of a woman on Bollywood screens” (116).

Extending this idea of adaptations opening up the space for women’s agency, Ramleela radically replaces the Capulet patriarchy with the Sanedas being headed by Leela’s mother, the violent matriarch Dhankor Baa. Dhankor’s character orientation as the “woman-mafia” is outlandish, to say the least. She is the ruthless chieftain of an army of men, barely showing any signs of maternal affection to her children and refusing to take no for an answer. Her brutal act of chopping off Leela’s finger as punishment for the latter’s defiance is a figurative materialization of Capulet’s words of admonition for Juliet in Act 3 Scene 5, “Speak not; reply not; do not answer me/ My fingers itch” (3.5.163-4). The indigenizing treatment of Shakespearean stories in India, as in the ambit of world cinema, involves altering significant characters, particularly women as part of transforming people’s outlook about Shakespearean heroines as meek damsels in distress. The parallel contrasts of Leela and Dhankor in the same film, as powerful figures of authoritative will, provoke a re-imagining of the Indian woman as well as Shakespearean heroines, in a new socio-cultural context. Poonam Trivedi argues that in Shakespeare’s tragedies, women are mostly subservient, silent victims of male aggression, or demonized for their non-femininity, but in contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare, women are cast in the role of instigators, avengers, and self-determined to put an end to male conflict. Many critics see this reversal in gender dynamics as the defining feature of an indigenous Shakespeare, for women in the Indian tradition are venerated for embodying several roles, both pacifying and destructive.

V. Conclusion

In the 1980s and 1990s post-colonial India, the cultural differences originating within the nation on the grounds of language and religion, compounded by the geopolitical issues that India was grappling with, found a popular and necessary aesthetic expression once again through Shakespeare. Postcolonial productions of Shakespeare on the Indian stage and screen also deployed interpretive and performative methods of various kinds, both Western and indigenous, giving a nod to the newly emerging concept of “hybridity.” Rustom Bharucha cites the egalitarian presence of Shakespeare in India as comparable to the Indian historical epic, The Mahabharata – refusing subscription to any one version as authentic, multiple appropriations and versions, and performances in different languages, cultural contexts, and used for diverse socio-political purposes (6). The emergence of Bollywood as the consolidated face of Indian cinema on an international platform further extended this cultural transposition into an eclectic and even more diverse path. Hindi film director Vishal Bharadwaj is credited globally for presenting some of the best Indian adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedies on celluloid. He takes the usual creative liberties with each of Shakespeare’s original stories such as transporting the foreign location into the native milieu, making alterations in characters, or re-inventing them altogether according to his contemporary vision, but what remains intact in this process of transfer is the centrality of human complexities that constitute the universal crux of the tragedies. Similarly, the culture of violence that is so inherent in the tragedies is retained even though the localized versions critique the cultures of systemic violence entrenched in modern India. The sub-genre of “Intercultural Shakespeare” has distinctively continued to spawn curiosity not just as a medium of cross-cultural exchanges of Shakespearean performances across the world, but also a highly marketable and profit-driven transactional initiative in the age of globalization. The two films analyzed in this paper study the genealogical trace of Shakespeare’s journey of bearing witness to a young nation’s throes of national anxiety to the time of reproducing a new and indigenous brand of global Shakespeare.

I want to go back to the beginning of the paper and discuss briefly the historical reception of Shakespeare in India as a signifier of cultural modernity. As the colonizer’s tool for “camouflaging a sordid history of colonialist expropriation, material exploitation, and class and race oppression,” English literary studies in India transformed gradually from a curricular discipline into an ideology that would shape the native’s mind according to the wishes of the empire (Viswanathan 20). In this imperial project, Shakespeare was particularly significant for imparting not just the Christian ideals of morality but referring to an entire gamut of social and cultural traditions in his works that centered around universal human complexities which were to become the bulwark of European enlightenment later in the 18th century. Like all other British colonies, India’s relationship to Shakespeare can be closely defined by the imperial normative structures of the empire and its hegemonizing project. However, Dipesh Chakrabarty has deftly argued in the introduction of his book Provincializing Europe that such Eurocentric strategies of defining Indian traditions and practices by means of the ideas of Western enlightenment always proved to be inadequate, both intellectually and factually. To that extent, it can be said that the indigenization of Shakespeare which we trace historically in different arenas of Indian theatre and films became the nemesis for colonial conditioning by opening up possibilities of a new tradition of cultural modernity that was native in existence. The aspects of spatiality and alterity of characterization, two postcolonial mechanisms of subverting the dominant frameworks of a narrative that I have discussed in this paper, can be read as tools for reclaiming the aporia left behind by the colonial legacy of Shakespeare and foregrounding a Shakespeare imbued with a renewed Indian modernity.