Worlds Elsewhere (34 page)

At one time Shakespeareana boasted Countess Mountbatten as a patron, but by the time Ivory met the Kendals things were considerably less exalted. Interest in their brand of touring, English-language Shakespeare was dimming. Felicity had already left to make her name in England; Geoffrey and Laura would follow in the 1970s. If not quite on their uppers, they were perilously close.

Ivory sensed that there was a film here, one that touched large themes: the turmoil of India as it fought to find a post-independence identity; the changing face of Indian entertainment; colonial and postcolonial loss. Above all, the film could describe the paradoxical position of the Anglo-Indians, a class who had once ruled India but were now stranded between a country that no longer wanted them and a British ‘home' many had never even visited. Perhaps this could be the movie that explained – as
The Householder
had singularly failed to – the contradictions of India to the west.

Ivory himself, a Californian, would direct, with the renowned Bengali director-composer Satyajit Ray writing the music. Ismail Merchant, born into a Muslim family in Mumbai, produced. A German-born Jewish emigrant who had spent many years in India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, would write the script. The Kendals and Kapoor could play themselves, thinly disguised as a troupe called the Buckinghams.

The film this wobbly-legged multinational conglomerate made – the earliest success of their remarkable forty-year partnership – was called
Shakespeare Wallah.
It was a hit.

By the time I came to watch Merchant Ivory films as a teenager in the 1990s, they were well on their way to being despised. They were written off in the cleverer newspapers (the ones I tried to read) as heritage porn:
Reader's Digest
on 35 millimetre, classic novels seen through the soft-focus lens of Laura Ashley or Ralph Lauren. Film buffs scorned them; even fans grew weary of their morbid period detail and blue-blood casting. The perspective on England and Englishness offered by
A Room With a View
(1985) or
Howards End
(1992) was more National Trust than National Front. But still: not serious cinema, even though I quietly had a soft spot for them.

Thus it was with some trepidation that, years later, I sat down to watch
Shakespeare Wallah.
Conditioned by late-period Merchant Ivory to expect something in the mould of the plushly upholstered
The Jewel in the Crown
television adaptations or David Lean's
A Passage to India,
I was disconcerted to find myself watching what appeared to be experimental postmodern cinema.

The film's opening is startling, a surreal silent tableau in which the Kendal/Buckingham family, strangely clad in periwigs and breeches, perform in front of what seems to be a French chateau beside a lake. The period locations are present and correct, but (with the exception of that chateau, a folly near Lucknow) they are dingy expat digs, not stately homes. Instead of over-saturated period colour, the film is in austere black-and-white, the hot glare of the subtropical sun fraying the corners of the frame. There is Ray's music, deft and sprightly, performed on flute and tabla with the occasional vivacious flurry of strings. And of course India, not England, is the movie's subject as well as its location – a society both complex and tantalisingly elusive, a place where the film-makers' interest in postcolonial tensions can bubble and simmer.

One thing is consistent with the Merchant Ivory brand, though:
Shakespeare Wallah
's unrepentant nostalgia. Ivory and Jhabvala shift the timeframe from the late 1940s (the period Shakespeareana had been in their pomp) to the early 1960s, fifteen years after independence, making the Kendals seem more hopelessly out of date than they had ever been in reality.
Shakespeare Wallah
translates as ‘Shakespeare seller', Geoffrey Kendal's real-life nickname, but it becomes mournfully clear that India is no longer in the market for what the Buckinghams have to offer. Their vehicles repeatedly break down, a heavy hint that their travelling days are done. An elderly cast member abruptly dies. A performance of
Romeo and Juliet
collapses into a fist fight. Tony Buckingham's response to this sea of troubles chimes with everything being felt in painfully post-imperial, about-to-become-postcolonial Britain: ‘It's a rejection of everything I am.'

Shakespeare's name is inscribed deep into this narrative of loss – lost ground, lost culture, lost empire. Just as India has shaken off the British yoke, so it is attempting to shrug off Britain's National Poet. ‘I've been to see
Hamlet,'
Shashi Kapoor's playboy Sanju announces to his girlfriend Manjula, played with delicious archness by Madhur Jaffrey. ‘Who?' she asks.

In the wings of
Shakespeare Wallah
looms a bogeyman, the Indian film industry – a creature that also seems to be out for Shakespeare's blood. As well as being involved with the
filmi
star Manjula, Sanju has also become disastrously entangled with the strolling player Lizzie, and this becomes a metaphor for the movement of the movie. As well as a love rivalry, it is also a contest between theatre (educated, highbrow, old, English) and cinema (jejune, populist, new, Indian). Sanju talks Manjula into attending the Buckinghams' version of
Othello,
but when she arrives in the auditorium it causes such a stir among the movie-mad audience that the show is held up.

The conclusion drawn by
Shakespeare Wallah
is stark: Shakespeare is all but finished in India, and Bollywood is almost entirely to blame. One might even adopt the title of another Merchant Ivory film (one I also secretly liked): these are the remains of the day.

I spent months trying to work out where truth ended in
Shakespeare Wallah
and fiction began. I dug out Geoffrey Kendal's diaries, published in 1986, and read them cover to cover. They were enjoyably garrulous, retelling Kendal's first glimpse of Mumbai with the Entertainments National Service Association, sent out to perform for British troops during the second world war, and his return with the troupe that became Shakespeareana in 1947. Though full of colourful tales and hair's-breadth escapes – the earthquake that hits halfway through a show; the actor who drives across the Himalayas in a 1935 Wolseley ambulance – the diaries nonetheless seemed remarkably incurious about India or Indians, other than as (generally) polite witnesses to the Kendals' English-language performances. Despite the film's many fictions, its downbeat mood seemed accurate enough: it was with tangible bitterness that Kendal recorded a Shakespeareana performance in 1962, where the locally produced poster advertised the presence of Shashi Kapoor – then beginning to make a name for himself in films – but omitted the name of Shakespeare.

Yet this wasn't the whole story. On a rushed three-day trip to India in 2012, researching a newspaper piece on two acting companies preparing to come to the Globe in London, I'd managed to glean enough about contemporary Indian theatre to realise that Kendal's gloom (like much else in an extravagantly contoured life) had been excessive.
Shakespeare hadn't evaporated when the British slipped away on liners bound for foggy Tilbury: on the contrary, there were plentiful modern adaptations of the plays. Indeed, an entire festival near Chennai was dedicated to Shakespeare translated into Indian languages – proof of the vibrant life of Shakespeare on the subcontinent.

What I was struggling with were linkages. I was missing a sense of how this contemporary theatre connected with the kind of Shakespeare that Kendal and his colleagues were acting – if it connected at all. Were the traditions entirely separate? Was there any traffic between the blood-and-thunder, English-language Shakespeare being done by Shakespeareana and the Indian traditions of translation and adaptation? And what of Indian movies, where Shakespeare has a continued and vivacious presence?

It wasn't until I stumbled across a slim pamphlet that the pieces began to slot into place. It was entitled
Shakespeare in India
and it was by the British academic Charles Jasper Sisson. I dimly remembered Sisson's name from the dusty corners of an MPhil reading list – a don at University College London, he'd written a book on Shakespeare's lost plays and another on an Elizabethan inn-yard in east London. I wasn't expecting to see him here, rubbing shoulders with theory-heavy monographs on Indian Shakespeare, their titles stiff with words like ‘postcolonial' and ‘diasporic'.

The pamphlet's subtitle was ‘Popular Adaptations on the Bombay Stage'. It was the date that really caught my eye: 1926. This was far earlier than anything else I'd been reading – the height of the Raj, or very nearly. Why had a British specialist in Jacobethan stage practice written a book on Shakespeare in Mumbai? And what on earth did he mean by ‘popular'?

Based on his experiences teaching at Elphinstone College, part of the university of Mumbai, Sisson's account had all the exuberant, pent-up enthusiasm of a man who has stepped outside himself, perhaps for the first time. It began by declaring its lack of interest in ‘the influence of Shakespeare upon the cultured classes in India'. What Sisson wanted to address was a Shakespeare who had become increasingly remote in Britain (as by now in America), a Shakespeare who was still down-and-dirty popular entertainment. He wrote:

These theatres were spread around Grant Road in Mumbai; the plays weren't performed in English, but in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu. Tickets cost a handful of rupees. Aside from himself, the only Europeans who had been inside these places, Sisson thought, were policemen on the prowl for pickpockets.

Warming to his theme, he went on:

The liberty-taking shows Sisson discovered, working with M. R. Shah, an assistant professor at the university of Mumbai, stretched back to the 1890s, perhaps earlier. They were a vigorous and remarkable series of Shakespeare adaptations in the Parsi theatre of Mumbai, named for its inventors in the Parsi community.

Sisson and I were alike in one respect at least: these adaptations were unlike anything either of us had encountered before. They included
Vasundhara,
an adaptation of
Macbeth
from 1910 that retold Shakespeare's story not from the hero's perspective, but from Lady M's, for whom it was renamed. There was also
Bazm-e-Fani
(‘Mortal Gathering'), an Urdu version of
Romeo and Juliet
in which the balcony scene was, Sisson gleefully remarked, ‘pretty completely rewritten' (he included a translation). He was particularly entranced by the Mumbai taste for shoehorning comic subplots into even the soberest of tragedies, particularly plots poking fun at Indians excessively devoted to British manners.

Lest anyone think he had gone dotty in the subtropical sun, Sisson included photographs: fey-looking male students from the New High
School in Mumbai in doublets and hose; a mysterious shot of an extravagantly moustachioed man apparently about to behead another with a scimitar (captioned ‘typical costumes', but providing no clue as to which play they were typical of).

As Sisson described with wonderment the ‘frequent songs and dances', the socially varied audiences, the pell-mell competition for tickets, the elaborate staging techniques and lust for theatrical novelty in Parsi theatre, one sensed him eyeing sceptics at the back of the lecture hall. What about authenticity and scholarship, old chap? What does any of it have to do with
our
Shakespeare, the British Bard we know and love?

To that, Sisson had a triumphant answer:

Things that are still alive and in process of becoming new things …
Here was another, more enlightening perspective on how Shakespeare's work might operate in India, ways that were largely alien to the English-speaking Geoffrey Kendal and his ilk; ways many British people would still struggle to recognise as ‘Shakespeare' at all.

More, in the twenty-first century, the tradition is very much alive. No one seems sure of current numbers, but there are now estimated to be several hundred adaptations of Shakespeare plays into nearly all of India's twenty-plus official languages, and more versions of Shakespeare in Indian cinema than anywhere else on the globe.

Film I found an especially enticing subject, and not only because of
Shakespeare Wallah
: the world's oldest synchronised-sound version of
Hamlet
turned out to be Indian, from 1935, and Shakespeare has been cited as the most-adapted writer in Bollywood history. There were echoes of the plays – so I read – in even the most unlikely Indian films, if one knew where to look: action thrillers, rom-coms, gangster movies, farces.

There was surely something here. Even by the time Kendal arrived in India in 1944, three years before independence, Shakespeareana was already past its sell-by date, but not because Shakespeare had lost India or India had discarded Shakespeare. If Sisson was correct, Indian
urban culture had absorbed Shakespeare – translated him, adapted him, localised him, remade him, and by the time Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala were shooting their film, had been doing so for the best part of seven decades. What
Shakespeare Wallah
figured as something made waste was, viewed another way, the creation of something else new. It's just that Kendal and co. didn't realise it. Perhaps they didn't want to.