AbstractThe essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Haralal Ray, juxtaposing it with differently accented commentaries on the play arising from the English-educated elites of 19th Bengal, and relating the play to the complex phenomenon of Hindu nationalism. This play remarkably translocates the mythos and ethos of Shakespeare’s original onto a Hindu field of signifiers, reformulating Shakespeare’s Witches as bhairavis (female hermits of a Tantric cult) who indulge unchallenged in ghastly rituals. It also tries to associate the gratuitous violence of the play with the fanciful yearning for a martial ideal of nation-building that formed a strand of the Hindu revivalist imaginary. If the depiction of the Witch-figures in Rudrapal undercuts the evocation of a monolithic and urbane Hindu sensibility that would be consistent with colonial modernity, the celebration of their violence may be read as an effort to emphasize the inclusivity (as well as autonomy) of the Hindu tradition and to defy the homogenizing expectations of Western enlightenment
My essay will examine how two Indian adaptations of Hamlet, separated by more than a century, engage with the canonical text and also rehearse codes of indigenous identity. The adaptations in question are (i) Hariraj, a Bengali play first staged in 1897 and (ii) Haider, a Hindi film released in 2014. These two adaptations operate within popular media: Hariraj was commercially the most successful stage adaptation of Shakespeare in 19th‐century Bengal, while Haider has been the highest grosser among all of director Vishal Bhardwaj's films. Coincidentally, both of these base the action in Kashmir. For Hariraj, the locale implies a pseudo‐medieval past suggestive of Hindu political autonomy, which would therefore appeal to the contemporary taste for Hindu revivalism in Bengal. As against this, Haider brings the elements of Shakespearean appropriation to a dialogue with the setting for its action – the militancy‐stricken and militarized (Indian) Kashmir of 1995, characterized by gross violation of human rights. If Haider explores the ideological and aesthetic limits of representing the Indian nation as a political construct, Hariraj may be seen as an exercise in imagining an exclusionary Hindu past imbued with the glamour of Shakespearean tragedy. More importantly, both of the adaptations show the Gertrude‐equivalent to be strong‐willed and transgressive, and in both the texts, the Gertrude‐figure's climactic revelation of maternal love coincides with a self‐punitive/redemptive suicide. These two adaptations are thus invested in re‐formulating the sub‐plot of Hamlet's mother in an attempt at testing the representational limits of femininity. In both the cases, the Shakespearean original acts as a catalyst for dramatizing cultural expectations and assessing the imbrications between the personal and the political.
George Eliot was read in select circles of the Englisheducated colonial Bengali intelligentsia but her popularity was never unqualified. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in an 1882 essay recalls with admiration the passage in Middlemarch about a squirrel's heartbeat, but in an 1892 essay he compares her novels to a jackfruit (a large tropical multiple fruit) and suggests that each of her novels can be helpfully divided into several smaller ones. In the Bengali novel Kahake ('Whom?'; 1898) by Tagore's elder sister Swarnakumari Debi Ghosal (1855-1932), later translated into English as An Unfinished Song (1913) by the author herself, four Bengali characters appear to be familiar with George Eliot's novels and one of these characters even claims George Eliot to be as great as Shakespeare in her own realm. But the enthusiasm shown by this fictional character was not necessarily replicated by real-life Bengali readers of English novels in the long nineteenth century. Standard histories of Bengali literature never register George Eliot to be a major influence on the Bengali novel. Besides, her novels were hardly adapted in Bengali. The case made by some critics that Tagore's epic novel Gora (1909-1910) was palpably influenced by Felix Holt, the Radical is not widely accepted. A 1909 article published in the monthly Prabasi calls Tagore the 'George Eliot of Bengal' because of the similarity between Tagore and George Eliot as regards the attention they give to the exploration of human psychology in their novels. The same article declares that George Eliot's novels are for the refined
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