TURNING SHAKESPEARE DESI IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM WITH

THE FILMS OF VISHAL BHARDWAJ

Prantik Banerjee

Associate Professor

Hislop College

Nagpur

When Shakespeare becomes the source and inspiration of a Bollywood director and when the
film in turn is used as a teaching aid in a literature classroom, several factors make the
process complex and dynamic. First, transposing Shakespeare into Hindi film becomes not
just another cinematic adaptation but a postcolonial move of appropriation. And then, the
enunciation of text as film in a classroom makes the interpretive act one of delightful
subversion. It is the work of Vishal Bhardwaj, specifically his two films, ‘Maqbool’ and
‘Omkara’ that can help the English teacher reposition himself and his students from one of
postcolonial alterity to that of postmodern individuation.

My contention is this that the project of reading Shakespeare with the aid of Bollywood films
makes the text and its subtexts more accessible to the Indian student in a literature classroom.
The contrapuntal reading of Shakespeare through Vishal Bhardwaj’s films enables the reader
to uncover the ideological underpinnings of a period text and to situate it within the cultural
politics of his local reality. Such an approach frees the text from being tethered to a well-
worn liberal humanist reading and opens it up to the exciting possibility of not just ‘the
Empire writing back’ but ‘writing back to the Empire’.

The purpose of my paper is to examine how (con) textual, cultural and ideological elements
get changed and transposed in the adaptation of a canonical literary text to a Bollywood
‘masala’ movie and how it affects its reception, assimilation and interpretation in a typical
academic setup. What are the political, cultural and psychological affiliations that get
imbricated in the reworking of a colonial text, first, as a cinematic experience, and second, as
an academic discourse. How popular culture and mass media can play a crucial role in
mediating between an authoritative text with its grand ‘humanizing’ narrative and its two
desi interlocutors, an Indian director and an Indian teacher, who must read the text through
his respective medium in such a way that he succeeds in connecting with the target audience.
And how, such kind of creative interface between cinema and literature in an Indian
classroom on Shakespeare can be a liberating and empowering process for the student learner
by facilitating a critical, dialogic engagement at several levels.