Thursday, January 14th, 2010 Adaptive Subversions: Rethinking Shakespeare Reception in Nineteenth-Century India

Description

The reception of Shakespeare’s plays in continental Europe from the nineteenth century onwards is assumed to be very different from that in a place like India, where the teaching of Shakespeare in classrooms was part of a larger attempt by British administrators at legitimising the colonial project by cultural means. While the imbrications of Shakespeare and British colonialism have been examined in detail by postcolonial critics, the role played by Indian translators, dramatists, and adapters in making available an indigenised Shakespeare to local audiences has not been adequately theorised. The Indian encounter with Shakespearean drama in the nineteenth century resulted in complex levels of engagement with the plays, which were transformed by translators and performers through various adaptive strategies. My presentation, therefore, examines the cross-cultural encounter between India and Britain from a hitherto-neglected perspective, one that gives greater agency to Indian cultural figures than accorded by postcolonial studies that often tend to focus only on the coercive role of British imperialism. Furthermore, I argue that processes of transculturation through performance – or what I term “performative transculturation” – occurred both in India and Europe ever since Shakespeare started to be performed outside of the British Isles. Hence, despite the different cultural and political histories of Europe and India, Shakespeare’s plays reached out to local audiences only when they were modified in order to make them relevant to the cultural and ideological concerns of the new audiences that were far removed from Shakespeare’s own.

Suddhaseel Sen completed his PhD on cross-cultural adaptations of Shakespeare into Opera and Film at the University of Toronto. His
academic interests include European and Indian literature from the nineteenth century onwards, adaptation studies, and the interrelations between literature, music and film. His publications include a book chapter on Richard Wagner and T.S. Eliot, and articles on Satyajit Ray (Intersections) and song settings of Rabindranath Tagore by Western composers (University of Toronto Quarterly). His forthcoming articles are on Vishal Bhardwaj’s cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare, Maqbool, Ambroise Thomas’ operatic adaptation of Hamlet, and on Wagner and German Orientalism. His arrangements of the music of Rabindranath Tagore for voices and western instruments have been performed by professional ensembles in India and Canada.