Shakespeare, "Macbeth" and the Hindu Nationalism of Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of <jats:italic>Macbeth</jats:italic>, namely <jats:italic>Rudrapal Natak</jats:italic> (published 1874) by Haralal Ray, juxtaposing it with differently accented commentaries on the play arising from the English-educated elites of 19<jats:sup>th</jats:sup> Bengal, and relating the play to the complex phenomenon of Hindu nationalism. This play remarkably translocates the <jats:italic>mythos</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>ethos</jats:italic> of Shakespeare’s original onto a Hindu field of signifiers, reformulating Shakespeare’s Witches as <jats:italic>bhairavi</jats:italic>s (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 <jats:italic>Rudrapal</jats:italic> 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</jats:p>

Performing Calibanesque Baptisms: Shakespearean Fractals of British Indian History

“…The theatre of Bengali Renaissance derived immensely from Shakespeare's plays as theatre exponents like Michael Madhusudhan Dutta, Girish Chandra Ghosh, Haralal Ray Ardhendu Shekar Mustafi, Amar Datta, Sisir Kumar Bhaduri and Ahindra Chaudh went on adapting Shakespeare into Bengali. Indian Shakespeareanism was a deeply heterogeneous and mimetic phenomenon, reflecting larger discourses of British imperialism and bourgeois Indian nationalism in Victorian and Edwardian times (Bhattacharyya, 1964;Chatterjee, 1995;Sarkar, 2016;Marcus, 2017). Although Shakespeareanism began as a colonising and civilising mission in India, Shakespearean hybridity fostered a new Bengali sense of cultural and national identity which could muzzle the hegemony of British aesthetic sensibilities, the binary of tradition versus modernity, and the colonial falsehood of India's cultural inferiority .…”