Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators:
Changing Responses in India1
Nandi Bhatia
This essay examines audience responses and critical debates on productions/representations
of Othello in India at four key moments: the 1848
production of Othello in Calcutta, the fictionalized representation of
Othello in Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Othello produced in the Kathakali
style of dance-drama (1996) and the first Bollywood adaptation of
Othello, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara (2006). The changing, contradictory, and
contentious (fictionalized and real) reactions to these varied performances
demonstrate the mediations of racial, social, economic, linguistic,
class, caste and gendered differences that inform and shape the complex
relationship of spectators and critics to Shakespeare. Such multiple responses
disrupt the ongoing myth about the authority, “timelessness,”
and “universality” accorded to Shakespeare, a myth specially kept alive
through educational institutions and through an imaginary construction
of Indian audiences’ love for Shakespeare.
We were so sure . . . thought we always had our Indian audience.
. . . The Indian audience would always love us and
they did . . . they did . . . they always laughed at all the jokes.
Cried at the right places . . . the most wonderful audience
in the world. . . . They’ve changed . . . we’ve changed too.
Mr. Buckingham in Shakespeare Wallah
C
ritical work on Shakespeare in India has by now established the
bard’s far-reaching influence through transformation, translation,
circulation and production of his plays in multiple languages. From
the late nineteenth-century productions of Shakespearean plays by Bhara-
1. I would like to thank Jyotsna Singh and Tina Krontiris for their invaluable feedback
on this essay and gratefully acknowledge Nida Sajid for her help with relevant critical
materials.
tendu Harishchandra of Benaras and Girish Chandra Ghosh of Bengal, productions
by Parsi Theater companies from the 1870s until the 1940s, and
amateur college and private stage productions to post-independence political
appropriations by playwrights such as Utpal Dutt and ongoing performances
by the National School of drama, the Shakespeare industry in India continues
to flourish. Shakespearan plays have also experienced wide circulation
through Bollywood films such as Angoor (1982, based on The Comedy
of Errors), Maqbool (2003, based on Hamlet) and Omkara (2006, based on
Othello). Additionally, visits from traveling companies from Europe such as
Lewis’s theatrical troupe that toured between 1872 and 1876, Herr Bandmann’s
troupe that staged Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III
and Othello in Calcutta in 1882, troupes from London such as those of
Charles Allen (1909), Matheson Lang (1911 and 1912), Allan Weekly
(1912), Harding and Howitt (1918), and Geoffrey and Laura Kendal’s famous
Shakespearana group whose story has been recorded in the MerchantIvory
film Shakespeare Wallah (1965), have contributed to the dissemination
of Shakespeare. Overall, there exists now a massive archive that speaks
to the heterogeneous presence of Shakespeare in a variety of languages, genres,
and performative modes.2
What does this archive say about the relationship of Shakespeare’s
plays to audiences in India? This essay seeks to address this question with
reference to the performance of Othello in India at four specific moments
for more than a century: the 1848 production of Othello in Calcutta, the fictionalized
representation of Othello in Shakespeare Wallah, Othello produced
in the Kathakali style of dance-drama (1996) and the first Bollywood
adaptation of Othello, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara. While Othello, as records
show, has been staged numerous times, I pick up on these four moments because
they have invited controversy, attention, and debate and have complicated
“postcolonial” readings of Shakespeare in India. My intention is not
simply to trace a genealogy of Othello performance/production in India (my
essay inevitably does that) but to examine the ways in which changing reception
arises from and is reflective of the shifting politics of the moment.
The critical discussions and debates that pertain to these different renderings
of Othello suggest that audience responses were and continue to be segmented
along racial, social, economic, linguistic, class, and caste lines, and
demonstrate that the relationship of spectators to Shakespeare has been
156 Nandi Bhatia
2. For the most recent survey, see the collection of articles in India’s Shakespeare, ed.
Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz.
extremely complex and constructed. The varied colonialist, alternative, nationalist
and commercial investments in “doing” Shakespeare have positioned
his plays as suitable subject matter for spectators in order to generate
responses that simultaneously sustain, elevate, and deflate Shakespeare,
claim Shakespeare as “Indian,” a prized cultural possession, and an object
of viewing pleasure that signifies cultural modernity. The changing, contradictory
and contentious (fictionalized and real) responses to these particular
performances disrupt the ongoing myth about the authority of Shakespeare,
a myth specially kept alive through educational institutions in India and
abroad and through an imaginary construction of audiences’ singular love
for Shakespeare to support notions of “timelessness” and “universality”
accorded to Shakespeare. As well, the heterogeneity of responses undoes
and complicates the binary of colonizer and colonized that marks the initial
entry of Shakespeare in India, as evident in the 1848 performance of Othello
in Calcutta, to which I now return.
Othello in 1848
In “Moor or Less? The Surveillance of Othello,” Sudipto Chatterjee and
Jyotsna Singh examine the reception of James Barry’s 1848 sensational theatrical
production of Othello at the Sans Souci Theater in Calcutta against
the backdrop of nineteenth-century colonial relations. The sensation was
caused by the casting of a Bengali actor, Baishnava Charan Adhya, in the
role of Othello. Chatterjee and Singh analyze the reception of Othello in the
context of the “disciplining gaze of surveillance” of racialized spaces and attribute
the commotion it caused amongst colonial officials to their hidden
racial anxieties at a time when colonial relations were beginning to get
tense. The opening performance of Barry’s Othello, despite being well advertised
ahead of time, was “abruptly aborted due to the opposition of a local
military commanding officer, who refused permission for his men to
play extras in the production” (Chatterjee and Singh 75). Chatterjee and
Singh cite a letter published in the Calcutta Star on August 12 that describes
the crowd that had gathered before the Sans Souci that evening on Park
Street in white Calcutta: “At last we crept on inch by inch and people began
to wonder if their seats were kept for them. How full it must be―By Jove,
Barry and the Nigger will make a fortune” (qtd. in Chatterjee and Singh 76).
Chatterjee and Singh also argue that the event had serious political implications,
which ultimately involved the police upon “having received military
notice to arrest the well-known amateurs should they have attempted
Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India 157
to make their appearance” (76), and even surprised the public. A report from
the Bengal Harkaru and India Gazette throws light on the response of the
public to this theater of censorship before official censorship in the form of
the Dramatic Performances Censorship Act was legislated in 1876:
The friends of Young Bengal mustered in considerable numbers at the
place of recreation, on Thursday night, to witness the long looked for
debut of a native amateur in the character of Othello. Unfortunately,
they were doomed to disappointment―not indeed owing to any defection
on the part of the debutant or the Calcutta amateurs, but, solely,
because the parties who were severally to have played Iago, Brabantio
and Emilia, were prohibited from doing so by the peremptory
military order of the Brigadier of Dum Dum. A letter to that effect, we
understand, was forwarded to the stage manager by half past 6; moreover,
the police were in attendance, having received military notice to
arrest the well-known amateurs should they have attempted to make
their appearance. Many appeared to be greatly cut up at this untoward
event, but none more so than poor Mr. Barry who promised to use his
every effort to produce the play on Thursday next, and thus far solace
those who might surmise―“Othello’s occupation’s gone!” (qtd. in
Frost 97)
Not showing sympathy for the Brigadier’s action, when the show played the
following week, several notices appeared in support of Mr. Barry. And in a
bid to make amends for the show that had been cancelled, the Bengal
Harkaru and Indian Gazette assured the public that the tickets for the cancelled
performance would be valid for the reopening of Othello.
In an earlier article that disagrees with Chatterjee’s and Singh’s analysis,
Christina Mangala Frost argues that despite colonial surveillance, “As
far as theater audiences were concerned, Baishnavacharan Auddy’s debut as
Othello seems to have been a resounding success.” To support her argument,
Frost refers to the following remark made by a reviewer: “if the indulgent
applause of the audience is to be taken as a criterion of success, Baboo
Baishnavacharan Addy, can have no cause to complain” (97). Discrediting
colonialist assumptions and attitudes, Frost argues that Indian viewers loved
watching Shakespeare and were in fact willing to pay as much as 30 rupees
(a substantial amount) to watch a performance. Yet Frost, like other critics,
cannot help noticing that the reviewer who gave an act-by-act appraisal of
the play also called the delivery of Adhya “somewhat cramped” and claimed
that “under all circumstances, his pronunciation of English was for a native
158 Nandi Bhatia
remarkably good” (qtd. in Frost 97). Even though the popularity of the play
with the (English) audience is at odds with the imposition by the military
personnel and colonial lawmakers, the reviewer’s comment on Adhya’s
speech cannot be passed off as an exercise in what Frost calls “geniality” or
“constructive criticism” (97). Rather, it can be read as an extension of the
hidden anxieties of difference reflected in comments on the speech acts of
the native.
In order to grasp the meanings of such responses in all their complexity,
it is important to look at the conditions under which Othello was performed.
The Sans Souci theater where Othello was performed was founded
by an Englishwoman, Mrs Esther Leach, in August 1838. The audience and
patronage of the Sans Souci theater was largely European, as was the cast of
characters for this play, with Mrs Leach’s daughter herself playing the role
of Desdemona.3
While from 1839 onwards the Sans Souci produced The
Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, it is the production of
Othello that was considered a landmark―primarily because an Indian
played Othello for the first time with a group of European actors, a fact that
was used as part of the publicity campaign for attracting audiences. The conditions
under colonial relations that encouraged audiences to flock to a
Shakespearean performance included entertainment for the colonials away
from “home,” monetary profits through ticket sales and the benefit of closer
interaction with Indian middle-class spectators who could facilitate the
task of governance in a country where a multitude of languages and cultural
traditions posed a barrier. At the moment of expanding political and cultural
imperial sway over the colony, the responses of viewers, reviewers,
and officials to the 1848 Othello confirmed the tensions operating under
asymmetrical relations of power. Christina Mangala Frost’s claim that Indian
spectators were willing to pay 30 rupees for a performance of Shakespeare
has to be, therefore, located in the context of the growing theater culture
and economy and the socio-political changes that accompanied colonial
rule.
But aside from these recorded tensions, Adhya’s entry into the British
theater may not have been pointless, as it also enabled the native’s entry into
the world of colonial theater―a world that ultimately was to give rise to
Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India 159
3. The Sans Souci opened in 1839 as a small theater where many interested spectators
had to be turned away. During the performance of The Merchant of Venice in 1843,
Mrs Leach died as a result of her gown catching fire from the footlights. After facing
financial and administrative difficulties, the Sans Souci closed down in 1849.
an intercultural and transformed Shakespeare in the colony. The conditions
for such transformation had been set in motion through the performance of
amateur Shakespearean productions on college stages and the private homes
of wealthy Indians even before 1848 and through invitations issued to elite
Indians to exclusive British theaters. These theaters saw a gradual increase
in the rise of Indian spectators, substantial enough to be noticed by the India
Gazette in the following words: “It affords us pleasure to observe such a
number of respectable natives among the audience every play-night, it indicates
a growing taste for the English Drama which is an auspicious sign
of the progress of general literature among our native friends” (qtd. in Das
Gupta 277). Some of these theaters, such as the Hindu Theatre, which was
set up in 1831, the Native Theatre that was initiated in 1833, and colleges
such as Hindu College, Sanskrit College and the David Hare Academy routinely
began performing the plays of Shakespeare and generated for spectators
consisting of Hindus, Muslims, and Europeans the viewing pleasures
and “amusements” attached to the plays.
Ultimately, Adhya’s entry in the colonial theater as well as the gradual
absorption and integration of Shakespearean drama into the local ethos and
the social and material structuring of the local theater companies, which
among other plays, also included Othello in their repertoire, became moments
of transferring the English text to the native context. Once Shakespearean
plays came to be performed by local companies in Calcutta, on school and
college stages and by the commercial Parsi theaters in Urdu, Hindi, and Gujarati,
they neither retained the “purity” of the Shakespearean text, nor remained
the exclusive domain of the colonial populace. Rather, the rising attendance
of the middle-class public at Parsi theaters and other commercial
venues ensured the ongoing popularity of Shakespeare’s plays.
In consequence, along with actors, directors, and translators, Shakespeare’s
plays assumed many different meanings for the viewers. When
Parsi theater companies performed across South Asia, their audiences moved
beyond the confines of localities, comprising “British officials, the military,
and wealthy Parsi merchants, soon joined by the growing class of educated
professionals” (Hansen 130). By the end of the nineteenth century, low
prices for tickets attracted an even more heterogeneous viewing public that
included textile workers, small traders and artisans (Hansen 130). Some of
the productions by these companies seem to have generated various responses
that were to affect the image of the actor in popular life. For instance,
“A 1903 Gujarati Othello became so popular that the male actor
[Jayshankar] playing Desdemona adopted ‘Sundari,’ the heroine’s name in
160 Nandi Bhatia
this version, as his permanent stage name” (Chaudhuri 5). This transformation
of Jayshankar’s name is an instance of how spectators contributed to
the image of the actor impersonating the character by affixing the feminine
stage name of the characters to the identity of the actor. In subsequent
decades, according to available records, Sundari’s styles and fashions
were greatly emulated by women.4
Between 1867 and 1915, “The neighbouring
language of Marathi saw about 65 versions of Shakespeare―
chiefly free adaptations . . . starting with a popular version of Othello composed
by Mahadevshastri Kolhatkar and acted by the Aryaddharak Natak
Mandali” (Chaudhuri 5). And while many “Marathi versions of Shakespeare
became classics in their own right . . . The most lasting success was Zunzarrao,
G.B. Deval’s 1890 adaptation of Othello,” which was revived in the
1950s (5).
Othello in Shakespeare Wallah
It is clear that over time Shakespeare came to be complicated by the ideological
structures of middle-class Indian audiences, college students, dramatists
and theater groups. These groups continued to produce Shakespearean
plays well into the post-independence period for primarily urban theater
attendees and sought to create in turn a specific kind of audience. For example,
in the 1940s the Theatre Group set up in Bombay by Bobby
Padamsee, who produced Macbeth and Othello as part of the repertoire, did
so with the following purpose, as described by its President, Deryck Jeffries:
I think that the main function that the Group was performing and is
still performing, is to assimilate what is going on in the west and present
it to our own people here in this town . . . acting, delivery, every
single aspect of theatre is being assimilated by us and presented as far
as possible to Indian audiences, who we think, we hope and we have
seen being influenced, and being able to, not recreate, but to absorb
those influences. (qtd. in Gokhale 207)
From the 1950s onwards, Utpal Dutt, who trained under Geoffrey and Laura
Kendal, organized through his Little Theatre Group the plays of Shakespeare
for primarily urban audiences. It is to Dutt’s credit that he recognized
the futility of playing for “Bengo-Anglians” (Dutt 12) and turned to folk
techniques of the Jatra to perform plays such as Macbeth for village audiDifferent
Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India 161
4. See Hansen. For more on Jayshankar Sundari, also see Kapur.
11
ences, which broke out of the proscenium arch conventions and transposed
the Shakespearean language into a form of incantation that was familiar to
village audiences. According to Dutt, the villagers appreciated the demonic
portrayal of Lady Macbeth, which resonated with Indira Gandhi during the
1975 Emergency, and applauded the supernatural elements of the play (Dutt
17-18).
Yet Dutt’s easy separation between village and urban audiences has led
to an uncomplicated construction of urban audiences on the part of some
critics, who present this audience’s interest in Shakespeare primarily as an
outcome of hegemonic conditioning under colonization. A layered film
based on Geoffrey Kendal’s memoirs about the experiences of his troupe
Shakespeareana in India, Shakespeare Wallah (1965) shatters such assumptions
by showing the declining interest in Shakespeare among largely urban
spectators: schoolchildren, royalty, and army personnel. On one level, the
receivers of the Shakespearean text are those ostensibly familiar with
Shakespeare and whose knowledge of Shakespeare may be located in the
legacy of colonial education and theater that had become prevalent in India
by this time.5
Yet, in order to make a comment on the dying influence of the
Raj with the onset of India’s independence from British rule in 1947, the
film makers resort to showing an audience for whom interest in Shakespeare
is declining, contradicting Geoffrey Kendal’s narrative regarding Indian
audiences in his autobiography, The Shakespeare Wallah. In a nostalgic
moment in the film, Mr. Buckingham laments the declining interest in
his troupe by recalling to his wife Carla that Indian audiences, who laughed
and cried at appropriate places, were the best in the world. To a certain degree,
Mr. Buckingham’s claim may not be completely off the mark. Central
to the process of disseminating Shakespeare through education, memorization
and routine performances by traveling companies was the position of
the spectator, who was being honed to appreciate Shakespeare in a bid to retain
the bard’s “timeless” and “universal” appeal. The following comment
by Norman Marshall, who toured India in 1948 to perform Shakespeare,
attests to this position:
The Indian has an exceptional gift for memorizing. On the one or two
occasions when an actor hesitated for a word he was instantly prompt-
162 Nandi Bhatia
5. This argument builds on earlier readings of Shakespeare Wallah in my Acts of
Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial
India and in my “Imperialistic Representations and Spectatorial Reception in Shakespeare
Wallah.”
ed by several members of the audience. In the past many Indians began
reading Shakespeare merely for practical reasons, because during
British rule in India a knowledge of the English language was essential
for the young man with ambitions. But a great many Indians who
at first studied Shakespeare merely to improve their knowledge of the
English language eventually developed a very real appreciation of
him as a poet and dramatist. (103)
So, if the Kendals performed for elite audiences, they were probably doing
so for a select body of spectators not only familiar or conversant with the
Shakespearean text but also conditioned to appreciate the bard as “universal”
and “timeless.”
Mr. Buckingham’s construction of the Indian audience in the film is
based on the memoirs of Geoffrey Kendal (The Shakespeare Wallah), in
which Kendal provides a triumphant account of the appeal of Shakespearean
drama through a scripting of the audience. He presents an overpowering
sense of the popularity of Shakespearean plays performed by his troupe, a
claim he supports through statistical data and letters received from locals.6
One such letter received from a local theater group in Trivandrum, the “Forward
Bloc,” is cited as follows: “We thank you all for having given us so
much knowledge about Shakespeare and his plays. . . . Somehow or other a
bond has linked the ‘Forward Bloc’ and the ‘Shakespeareana’ together. We
pray to God to help us in keeping this tie strong forever. Let Shakespeare
keep India and Britain united” (Kendal 89). This letter presents the Shakespeareana
troupe as central to the transmission of Shakespeare to Indian audiences
who ostensibly become happy recipients of the Shakespearean text.
And while it is important not to dismiss the letter he cites or to minimize the
viewing pleasures of some spectators, such representation serves to reinforce
the pervasive ethos of colonialist representations that imagined the
Indian audience’s love of Shakespeare. Here I would like to cite a critical
voice, writing about the position of Shakespeare in Bengal in the nineteenth
century:
While the English playhouses by their production in English, specially
Shakespeare’s plays, created an appetite for theatrical performances,
the foundation of the Hindu College in 1816, and the teaching of
Shakespeare by eminent teachers like Richardson [who was also a
Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India 163
6. Between June 1953 and December 1956 Kendal’s company gave 879 performances
to audiences that included royalty and schoolchildren.
founder of the Chowringhee theater] created in the minds of the students―the
intelligentsia of modern Bengal―a literary taste for drama
as such, and taught them, not only how to appreciate Shakespeare
criticism, but also to recite and act scenes from his plays. This fashion
spread to every academic institution. (Bhattacharya 29)
Jyotsna Singh’s comments on this quote aptly point out the “blithe” identification
by this critic regarding natives’ appreciation of Shakespeare as
“spontaneous” and “fashionable” (“Different Shakespeares” 450). If the notion
that Indians loved Shakespeare was indeed a colonialist legacy, as
Singh agues, then the contents of the letter that Kendal cites as evidence of
Indian spectators’ proclaimed love for Shakespeare are to be located in this
legacy. In Mr. Buckingham’s claim can be detected a lamentation for the
loss of empire and its text and an attempt to reconstruct the idealized authority
of Shakespearean drama imagined by critics and routinely claimed
by teachers, travelers and theater troupes.
Recognizing this culturally and educationally conditioned love for
Shakespeare, Ivory and Merchant convey this through the highly appreciative
reactions of the Maharajah of Betawar, who is conversant with Shakespeare
and can comfortably quote lines from his plays. Yet it is to negate the
falsifying claims of such a legacy that they show an audience response that
is fraught with tensions and even contradictory. The staging of the murder
scene from Othello in the film becomes an important moment that traces an
understanding of the spectators’ interactive dynamics with Shakespeare. As
the scene begins, Manjula, the glamorous Hindi cinema actress in the film,
enters the auditorium to watch the play and within a few seconds creates a
stir as spectators rise from their seats to look at her, causing a disturbance in
the performance. To make matters worse, a photographer rises from amidst
the audience in the lower arena and takes a picture of Manjula, ignoring the
performance. This alternate response is made visible to the film’s audience
not just through a snapshot of Manjula (and the subsequent disturbance) but
is highlighted through the reaction of Mr. Buckingham (playing Othello),
who stops his enactment and directly addresses the audience to become quiet,
thus causing a disruption in the staging of the play. The cinematic angles
enabled by the camera further play up the disinterest of the spectators in the
performance and refuse a valorization of the Shakespearean play. The camera
also attempts to destroy the proscenium arch (that keeps spectacle and
spectators apart) through its focus on the stage, the proscenium arch, and
the spectators in the same shot. The longest space in this shot is, however,
164 Nandi Bhatia
provided to the viewers of the play and to Manjula, who after drawing the
spectators’attention and signing a few autographs, leaves the auditorium out
of boredom and disgust as Desdemona is murdered on stage. Both the film’s
spectators and the camera ensure that this particular staging of Othello cannot
go on.
Aside from this disruption, the Othello scene in the film is also interesting
for highlighting the representation of race, especially through its focus
on Mr. Buckingham’s painted face as he plays the role of Othello. On
one level, this follows the practice of a White actor playing Othello, who
in this case also happens to be the leader of the troupe and therefore the one
to play the lead character. Yet it is a moment that is highlighted through
camera work which focuses on Mr. Buckingham’s painted face in several
different shots and which is further enhanced through a double-image as he
sits in front of the mirror offstage, after the performance, to remove his
makeup. One can only speculate as to whether or not Ivory and Merchant
were aware of the 1848 Othello in Calcutta where the native actor Adhya’s
performance as Othello in an English production had sent the colonial world
of Calcutta “agog.” Yet from the critic’s perspective, it allows for a juxtaposition
of this scene with the 1848 performance, whose reception amongst
English viewers and reviewers reflected “anxiety about the possible cultural
and racial contamination of the English stage and society in Calcutta”
(Singh, “Different Shakespeares” 446). And while the nineteenth-century
performance exposed the racial anxieties of the colonial populace of Calcutta
a decade before India was to officially come under the British Crown
in 1858, this reversal of the role at the moment of British departure (the film
being set in 1947) highlights for the film’s audience the racial underpinnings
of the ideology that the natives cannot represent themselves. It reinforces
the dominant dictum that the natives “need to be represented.”
Whether it is the presence of Manjula, Mr. Buckingham’s appearance as
Othello, or the violence enacted in the murder scene that distracts spectators
is not made completely clear. Yet the frenetic energy in the auditorium and
the spectators’ lack of engagement with the stage performance casts doubts
for the film’s audience regarding the popularity of a “pure” Shakespeare as
imagined by Mr. Buckingham and as propagated by critics. Additionally, the
antiquated costumes of the performers (suggestive of the fossilized version
of Shakespeare that the Buckinghams want to preserve) stand in stark contrast
to Manjula’s glamorous clothes and makeup and further highlight the
outdatedness of the particular performances given by the Buckinghams.
Given Kendal’s enthusiasm for his troupe, for Shakespeare and for Indian
Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India 165
audiences, it is not surprising that Merchant and Ivory’s Shakespeare
Wallah made him rather unhappy. Yet the contentious response that the film
foregrounds becomes an exercise in what Ralph Yarrow identifies as reception
theory that “tries to grapple with how the text is received” and raises
our understanding of “what receivers bring with them and what happens to
them through interaction with the performance event” (97).
Shakespeare Wallah’s representation of spectators’ disinterest in the
particular version of Othello staged in the film was clearly intended to function
as a “metaphor” for the end of the British Raj and the nationalistic
ideal on the eve of independence, as recalled by Merchant himself, who believed
that “the British must leave” (qtd. in Pym 14). In the world of Indian
theater, however, Shakespearean plays, including Othello, continue to be
performed and applauded. Some famous productions include the 1969 Urdu
version by Ebrahim Alkazi, a celebrated director of the National School of
Drama in Delhi, and Roysten Abel’s 1990s Othello, A Play in Black and
White. Produced by the United Players Guild, a Delhi-based theater company
that Abel and Lushin Dubey set up in 1995 and that became known for
its experimental Shakespearean plays, Abel’s play was performed in different
parts of the country, and won the Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Theater
Festival in 1999. Unlike the Othello we view in Shakespeare Wallah, which
faithfully follows the storyline, Abel’s play, which shows an Indian troupe
rehearsing Othello under an Italian director, appealed to audiences because
it was “only partly about the Black Moor and his jealous, doomed love for
Desdemona” and was not “black and white” either. Rather, as its director
claimed, it was “about hierarchies that operate at various levels in India, of
race, society, and regions” (Sharma). Part of its appeal also emerged from
its trilingual dialogues in Hindi, Assamese, and English and its combination
of diverse styles ranging from kathakali “to expressionism and schoolShakespeare
productions” (Sharma).
Kathakali Othello
Other experiments with Othello have shown up in Arjun Raina’s adaptation of
the South Indian dance-drama form Kathakali in a “fusion piece” combining
Othello and the Dream (Delhi, 2001) and notably by the Delhi-based exponent
Sadanam Balakrishnan, who produced a Kathakali Othello in 1996. The
fiercest critique for Balakrishnan’s Othello came fromAnia Loomba who finds
a silence on the issue of race, even though it “speaks eloquently about the dynamics
of the post-colonial evolution of Kathakali” (155). Says Loomba:
166 Nandi Bhatia
The Kathakali Othello inflects the Moor’s agonies in a different direction
and erases the schisms central . . . to Shakespeare’s play. . . . It
flamboyantly reshapes Othello’s tragedy in the language of a four
hundred year-old form first devised to perform stories from the Hindu
epic Ramayana. Its Othello is neither a black nor a moor, but takes
the form of a Hindu warrior. (155)
In her article “Folk Shakespeare,” Poonam Trivedi rejects Loomba’s critique
that Balakrishnan’s Kathakali Othello fails “to account for the presence
of racism in the text and for its stereotyping of ‘blackness’” (186). She
argues instead that most “audiences in Delhi, where it has had several stagings,
have responded warmly to this experimentation” (186). Trivedi contends
that while the “casting of Iago as a typical katti, that is, black-bearded,
red-nosed, vicious character robed in black, was, for some, a loaded stereotyping”
(187), the color black does not “signify evil so singularly in a culture
of predominantly dark-skinned people whose major deities and demons
are both dark-colored. The issue of Othello’s blackness, therefore, becomes
more than a mere black/white evil/good dichotomy” (187).
Trivedi’s critique of Loomba arises from a larger vision that demands a
“greater critical negotiation” of various Shakespearean forms: folk, desi,
videshi, adapted, and translated (172). She argues that certain kinds of “transculturation,
interculturalism, and even indigenization, far from polluting,
are in fact, pollinating, enforcing new energy in moribund performative traditions,
both Eastern and Western, and generating protean forms of Shakespeare”
(172). Trivedi thus complicates “postcolonial” readings of Othello
that are derived from an examination of racially inflected asymmetrical relations
of power to one that accounts for caste and communal politics. To
this end, she gives the example of Kaliyattam, Jayaraaj’s 1998 film based on
Othello, which she finds as “the most acute postcolonial reworking of
Shakespeare into folk theater forms,” but one where the transposition of
Othello into caste and communal politics and discriminations “more pernicious
in Indian society, form a more apt equivalent of Othello’s ‘blackness’
than an imported notion of race, which remains largely a Western postcolonial
dilemma” (187). Emerging at the crossroads of race, caste and gender
politics, such points of entry reflect different locational urgencies.
But the Kathakali Othello can also be seen as an example of the experimental
mode that intensified during this phase which, under the influence of
the “theater of roots” movement, was marked by intense experimentation
and led to playwrights and directors drawing upon the repertoire of the
Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India 167
regional, the local and the folk, which they combined with urban settings.
Such emphasis was specially reflected in the Sahitya Akademy’s Nehru
Centenary Festival of 1989 where Suresh Awasthi, general secretary of the
Sangeet Natak Akademy from 1965-1975, strongly propagated a return to
the “theater of roots.” The “theater of roots” movement was promoted following
India’s independence by playwrights and directors who felt the need
to break away from colonial models that had influenced theater and sought
an autonomous identity for India’s drama in the traditional, the folk, and
the classical. According to Erin Mee, the “roots” movement can best be
understood as “a way of decolonizing the theater, as a politically driven
search for an indigenous aesthetic and dramaturgy” (2). Becoming the
“most influential theater movement in the fifty years since independence”
and officially backed by the Sangeet Natak Akademy (Mee 2), it found its
support amongst playwrights such as Girish Karnad, Kavalam Narayan
Pannikar and Habib Tanvir. The movement itself, however, invited controversy
with some criticizing it as a regressive invention of an “authentic”
Indian identity and others praising it for preserving and bringing decaying
forms into the urban theater and simultaneously putting urban artists in
touch with their “roots” and the realities of indigenous theater. At their best,
according to Samik Bandyopadhyay, “the directors interacting with the traditional
and/or folk theaters sought to go to the core of these forms, to catch
their rhythms or motivating energies, gestural idioms, occasionally formal
conventions or devices, and use them to convey a modern sensibility at
work” (427). Trivedi’s appreciation of the Kathakali Othello can also be situated
in this moment: “The Kathakali Othello is the total immersion variance
of folk Shakespeare. It does not consciously seek to reinterpret or retell, but
instead provides a powerful alternative experience of Shakespeare’s Play.
Shakespeare’s poetry is enacted by the rhythms and gesture of a dancedrama”
(186).
In the return to traditional theatrical forms that marked the “theater of
roots” movement can be detected a sense of cultural nationalism, which in
decolonized societies foregrounds questions of identity as central to the nation.
Yet Fanon also points to the pitfalls of “nationalistic moorings,” that
can be marked by blindness to internal fissures and result in an erasure of
the contradictions of postcolonial nation states through a reinvention of cultural
forms and identities in static and cohesive terms. Is the Kathakali
Othello then a way to evoke a sense of cultural nationalism that sought its
energy in the revival of traditional theater forms? To find an explanation, we
may return to Ania Loomba’s brief description of the Kathakali form and of
168 Nandi Bhatia
the International Center of Kathakali founded in 1960. According to Loomba,
the Center “marks the attempt to forge traditional, regional traditions
into a national (and perhaps nationalist) conception of the Indian Arts. It
is one of the many similar institutions conceived within the Nehruvian
ideal of a multicultural yet united India” (15). Amidst the political tensions
of the 1990s, seen for instance in Hindu-Muslim discord following the
demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists, the Kathakali
Othello, according to Loomba, seeks to erase the fissures within the nation by
re-presenting theater in terms of its aesthetics rather than politics. As Loomba
argues, “The appropriate context for the Kathakali adaptation of Shakespeare
is thus within indigenous performative and intellectual histories rather than in
simply the colonial heritage of English literary texts in India” (159).
In this context, the audience’s “warm” response to the Delhi production
can be read as being, on the one hand, supportive of the “theater of roots”
ideal that rejected, especially during the 1989 Nehru Centenary Festival, the
Western presence in urban Indian theater as a slavish imitation of a colonial
mindset. On the other hand, given India’s longstanding engagement with
European culture, the Kathakali Othello, with its accommodation and fusion
of the traditional with the Western, can be seen as reinforcing and recognizing
the two streams as mutually influencing and inseparable, undoing in the
process the binaries of rural and urban, traditional and modern, and colonial
and indigenous. In any case, despite Trivedi’s disagreement with Loomba’s
reading, their analyses reveal the transformative power of this “local” form
of Othello both at the level of aesthetics and of a politics that brings questions
of colonialism, nationalism and modernity into its fold.
Othello as Omkara
Trivedi’s insistence on the relevance of caste, clan and communal politics as
opposed to race provides an important explanation for the popular reception
of Omkara. Unlike Shakespeare Wallah and the 1848 productions, Omkara
does not speak to racial politics. With Shakespeare’s play providing the
master-plot for the film, Omkara readjusts the story of Othello by locating
it in the interiors of Uttar Pradesh in order to speak to clan rivalries and contests
over caste and gender. In this film we find Othello completely transmuted
into the local and made accessible to a public whose daily lives are
surrounded by conflicts, local rivalries and power-play in the interiors of
contemporary India. To this end, Omkara neither fits the paradigm of imperialism
nor liberation agendas that may have marked other radical stage inDifferent
Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India 169
terpretations. Displaying little awareness of empire or imperial and racial
politics as in the other productions of Othello, Bhardwaj transforms its
main protagonist Omkara into a godfather type character belonging to the
crime genre that now dominates the Bollywood scenario. The popularity of
the film lies primarily in its cinematic quality, the particularity of language,
its music and all the fare of Hindi masala film it can offer its audience. For
example, Raja Sen calls it a “superlative-exhausting work of passion and
tribute, skill and style” and then goes on to identify five reasons for this
“Spellbinding stuff”: “language,” “loyalty,” “players” (actors), “sights and
sounds” and “creativity.”7
In advertising Omkara as the story of Othello, however, the film does
use its association with Shakespeare to accumulate cultural capital and relies
upon the prior familiarity of spectators with the Shakespearean text for
its global success, visibility and marketability. To an extent, one can see the
results of such efforts in the global reception of the film. According to reports,
“Omkara opened with an excellent box office response during the release
weekend the world over including major international markets like
UK, US, UAE, and Australia.”8
In the reviews it received in leading newspapers
in the UK, critics framed the discussion mainly in terms of Shakespeare
and Othello. For instance, Peter Bradshaw wrote the following in The
Guardian: “Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara is a flawed but worthwhile attempt
to transfer Othello to the modern setting of Uttar Pradesh in India and to render
the story in a Bollywood style.” Bradshaw also found the adaptation of
Othello appropriate, because Bollywood, he added, “with its liking for ingenious
fantasy and romance, has often seemed to me to resemble in style,
nothing so much as a late Shakespearean play.”9
The film also received high
accolades from Philip French in The Observer, who called the adaptation
“ingenious” and wrote the following: “Mobile phones are used where
Shakespeare employed eaves dropping; an erotic, bejeweled waistband replaces
the handkerchief as a compromising device.”10
If these reviews are
an indication, then one notices that while Shakespeare becomes the refer-
170 Nandi Bhatia
7. Quoted in “Why Omkara blew my mind,” 18 Feb. 2007. <http://www.rediff.com/
movies/2006/aug/02rs.htm>.
8. See www.erosentertainment.com/boxoffice_reports for omkara_worldwide.html for
detailed figures and reviews.
9. Quoted in “Foreign audiences flock to Omkara,” Arthur J Pais in New York,
August 02, 2006, 11:15 IST. 6 Mar. 2007. <http://www.rediff.com/movies/2006/ aug/
02ajp.htm>.
10. Quoted in “Foreign audiences flock to Omkara,” as cited above.
ence point as these critics locate Omkara in the global reach of Bollywood
cinema and its technologies, any reference to racial power-play, that is central
to the original text, disappears. Perhaps the reference to Shakespeare
constitutes one of the reasons for Omkara’s popularity in the West. Yet the
absence of any reference to race-relations in the post 9/11 milieu that is
marked by racial tensions in the West, along with Asians’ (carefully documented)
history of race-relations in Britain, appears to be a major gloss in
the critical reception of the film. One can argue that Bhardwaj’s refusal to
place race at the heart of his adaptation of Othello is to bring attention to
other kinds of urgencies that mark the contemporary postcolonial milieu in
India: problems and crime related to caste warfare and the violence against
women that remains at the center of these crimes, along with lawlessness,
clan rivalry and political deceit. To this end, Omkara’s achievement lies in
establishing, for a global audience, the ability of the Shakespearean play to
speak to India’s local ethos.
Conclusion
The reception of these varied representations of Othello by audiences and
critics, as discussed above, highlights the complexities attached to the
meanings of Shakespearean drama for Indian audiences and critics. The articles
in India’s Shakespeare show the varying degrees of influence of
Shakespeare across languages, regions, localities and genres, and attribute
the reasons for the multiple reworkings of his plays to a number of factors
ranging from fascination for the storylines to the need for increasing commercial
appeal for audiences. Rajiva Verma, in tracing the presence of
Shakespeare in popular mainstream Bombay cinema from its early phase to
the present, argues that Shakespeare’s presence is “not as a cultural icon but
as a resource to be exploited for characters and situations, often with our
acknowledgement. They point to a greater complexity in the relationship
between metropolis and periphery than postcolonial theory would seem to
allow” (270). According to Verma, “an audience brought up on a diet of
Bombay films would find Shakespeare’s plays, if it could read them, full of
echoes from the films” (287). For the Parsi theater too, which was the
source for Shakespeare’s entry into the world of Bombay cinema, performing
Shakespeare was “less a matter of taking over a world-view or moral
vision and more of one professional playwright borrowing plots and situations
and other tricks from another” (Verma 272). Instead of sticking to
“faithful” versions of plays, playwrights such as Agha Hashr Kashmiri
Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India 171
(1879-1935) and Mehdi Hasan “Ahsan” rejected Shakespeare’s “tragic
vision” and “poetic imagination,” which, in their view, did not sit well with
Indian audiences.11
Numerous examples of such shifts can be found in adaptations, performances
and translations of Shakespeare’s plays in India. This, however,
does not mean that readings that emphasize the links between Shakespeare
in India and colonialism and its “civilizing mission” are to be dismissed.
Even Poonam Trivedi (her critique of Loomba notwithstanding) admits:
“it cannot be denied that it is with the development of postcolonial theory
in the west that the postcolony as a whole has found a space and a voice
with which to interrogate and debate its own cultural history” (22). And if
we pay close attention to the 1848 Othello and its critical reception, the
fictional representation of the audience response to Othello in Shakespeare
Wallah, the meanings of the Kathakali Othello, and also to Omkara, what
we find is a critical negotiation with the original text that promotes what
Trivedi identifies as an enabling interculturalism and “pollination.” Such
transformations, however, cannot dismiss the colonial connection to
Shakespeare. Rather, what we find is that the performances of “Shakespeare,”
as opposed to the dissemination of his work to reading audiences
through schools, colleges, and universities, are accompanied by different
sets of assumptions and investments. Unlike the educational curriculum
that constructed Shakespeare as a harbinger of cultural authority, a trend
that continues in the academy,12
the deviation from the “original” through
varied performative modes and practices seeks to forge an interpretive relationship
with audiences that complicates the binaries of colonizer and
colonized.
University of Western Ontario
Canada
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