Worlds Elsewhere (39 page)

Here
copia
comes perilously close to outright copying. Despite being renowned as an example of Shakespeare's surging late style, Enobarbus's speech is largely in the voice of Plutarch filtered through Thomas North. Only a few deft poetical touches lift it from workmanlike historianese into scintillating brilliance: ‘beaten gold' for the poop; ‘tune of flutes kept stroke' rather than ‘kept stroke in rowing after the sound of music of flutes'.

Shakespeare may have sometimes borrowed too much, even by broad Jacobethan standards. In 1592, when the Warwickshireman was emerging as a dramatist in London, the playwright Robert Greene accused Shakespeare of plagiarism, calling him ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers' – a young pretender who stole from his older, better-educated betters. Shakespeare perhaps remembered the slight, and got his own back. Nearly two decades later, his rival long since dead, he filched a story from Greene's novella
Pandosto
of a king who becomes convinced that his wife has slept with his best friend. The play became
The Winter's Tale.

‘Translation, not invention': I thought of Bollywood, and what the
film critic Tejaswini Ganti has theorised as the process of ‘Indianising' pre-existing cinematic material, either films from the west or older Indian classics – not quite remakes, exactly, more a subtle process of ingestion and digestion that went back to Indian cinema's origins in Parsi theatre and its own extravagant amalgam of sources. Gulzar's description of Indian copyright as the ‘right to copy' was glib (and, for that matter, second-hand – I heard the line in India at least twice), but it wasn't a million miles from the truth. The Indian Copyright Act, amended in 1999, has an unusually wide conception of what exists in the public domain, and vests originality in how an idea is
expressed
rather than the idea itself. In the UK and US, the law focuses on the idea's intrinsic originality, which results in something much more restrictive.

Shakespeare, who worked in a world where intellectual property was at best an uncertain and emerging concept, would surely have fitted into this environment with ease. It was sometimes said that if he were alive now, he would be working as a Hollywood screenwriter. I wondered whether he mightn't have been happier right here in Mumbai.

Needless to say, the British had intended none of this. Determined to impose their own brand of education upon their subject populations, they had brought Shakespeare to the newly founded schools of India and other colonies partly as an instrument of political control. It was in the classroom that the colonial master could be obediently copied, a new class of Indians forged.

Though English had been taught in missionary schools from the early eighteenth century, it wasn't until the beginning of the nineteenth that the project became systematised. After the signing of the Charter Act of 1813, which brought the Indian territories controlled by the almighty East India Company under the direct control of the British crown, western-style academic institutions began to flourish. The first, the Hindu College in Kolkata, was founded in 1817; similar colleges followed in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and elsewhere. But a thorny issue arose: what should these new colleges teach? A curriculum that reflected local conditions, languages and customs, or one imported from England? The question raged between so-called ‘Anglicists' and ‘Orientalists'. In the
end, the Anglicists won: if India was to be dragged out of backwardness and barbarity, then it needed the guiding light of European education.

One man who certainly believed so was Thomas Babington Macaulay, who in 1834, still many years away from completing his epic
History of England,
travelled to India and returned to Britain flushed with reforming pedagogical zeal. Macaulay's ‘Minute' on the subject, based on a speech he gave to parliament in February 1835 during the debates about Indian education, has become justly notorious. ‘I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic,' the Honourable Member for Leeds announced:

That single damning sentence – a solitary shelf of a ‘good' European library worth more than the output of several different languages stretching back thousands of years – proved momentous. When the English Education Act was passed later in 1835, it allocated funds to western-style educational projects only. Sanskrit and Arabic, so nonchalantly dismissed by Macaulay, were out; Shakespeare and his language – the language of government, administration, literature, empire – were in.

To get the tenor of this debate, the way it recast shabby commercial and political self-interest as an act of selfless intellectual endeavour, one need only look up the January 1850 edition of the
Edinburgh Review,
which published an account of a select committee report on the subject of ‘Colonisation' given to the House of Lords in 1847. It contains the following passage:

‘Yet nobler …' In this account, the imposition of Shakespeare is quite literally God's work.

Macaulay's Minute explicitly stated that his reforms were aimed at creating ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect'. This, too, became reality. In 1844, the governor general, Henry Hardinge, passed a resolution ‘assuring preference in selection for public office to Indians who had distinguished themselves in European literature'. In doing so, he ensured that generations of aspiring Indian civil servants would experience the night terror recorded in this anonymous mandarin's ditty, of not having revised the doyen of late-Victorian Shakespeare critics, A. C. Bradley:

Mountstuart Elphinstone, the man whose name bespatters so much of Mumbai, was firmly on the other side of this debate. He had been a passionate Orientalist, a knowledgeable admirer of traditional government in the Maratha states and a respectful proponent of Maratha culture, and as governor of Mumbai had resisted the introduction of English. It was one of many gloomy ironies that the college founded in his name in the city in 1856 – and at which, sixty years later, C. J. Sisson would get a job teaching Shakespeare – became a bastion of the new learning.

I FOUND MUMBAI A MAZE,
quite apart from the traffic and the people (20 million of them, someone said, though there were so many informal settlements no one was really sure). The city's drive to decolonise had
rendered the street plan a tangle of double meanings that would have taxed the most ingenious of semioticians. Most people still used the old names. There seemed to be a cheerful acceptance that none of us could say with certainty where we were.

What did one even call the city? The change from ‘Bombay' to ‘Mumbai' had happened in 1995 at the behest of a hard-line right-wing state government. The government argued that ‘Bombay' was a corruption of the name for the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi, and that the city should be renamed accordingly. Others utterly rejected this theory on combined etymological and political grounds, arguing that in fact ‘Bombay' derived from the Portuguese
bom bahia
(‘good bay') after the old European settlement, and that to deny the city's colonial inheritance was both ignorant and ideologically dangerous. Which side one was on revealed much about one's attitude to life and politics. Wary about causing offence, I took to mumbling the name of the city until the person I was speaking to had declared their hand.

I was also trying to navigate past a number of investigative dead ends. None of the researchers I'd spoken to had been able to help me get access to Parsi theatre scripts – difficult to find, almost never translated back into English. (‘I would love to get a PhD student to work on the archive,' a professor told me, ‘but no one wants to do it. It's so unfashionable now, and there isn't the funding.')

A morning trip to Elphinstone College itself – a teetering nineteenth-century pile that had the morbid whimsy of a Victorian sanatorium – also turned up little. In a dank classroom deep inside the building, staff and students had listened politely as I prattled on about the nocturnal activities of C. J. Sisson. But there were no marks of his presence, or of the university dramatic societies that had given birth to the first Parsi companies in the 1850s. Shakespeare
was
still taught, one academic sighed as we patrolled the Gormenghastian corridors, but kids these days wanted ‘business English': more useful on the job market. It was hard to dispute the logic.

One afternoon I walked through the crowds down Grant Road (now Maulana Shaukat Ali Road) in search of the theatres that had once clustered there. Nearly all had gone, and the early cinemas that had replaced them in the 1920s and 1930s were shuttered and forlorn, victims of multiplexes and cheap DVDs. The area known as Pila House – a corruption of ‘playhouse' – had reverted to a previous incarnation: it was now the name of a famous brothel, part of the red-light district
of Falkland Road/Patthe Bapurao Marg. Some forms of entertainment never went out of fashion.

At the junction of Grant and Falkland Roads, amid a jostling flow of pedestrians, yellow-and-black taxis, motorbikes and peanut-wallahs, I stood in front of the famous Alfred Talkies. It was one of the few remaining survivors, having begun life as the Ripon theatre in the 1880s, home to many Parsi plays, before converting to a picture house in 1932.

The Alfred was still an impressive sight: recently painted a daring shade of peach, it had a resplendent three-storey facade boasting a trio of Corinthian pilasters and an irregular arrangement of windows that gave it a raffish, gap-toothed appearance. A hand-painted marquee stretched the length of the first floor, advertising a battalion of macho, gun-toting Bollywood heroes. Just behind, partially obscured, I could see the older sign in blocky black letters:
RIPON THEATRE.
It was said that behind the screen there was still a functioning stage.

Dashing through a gap in the traffic, trying to shut out the roaring din all around me, I scrutinised the bill. The Alfred appeared to specialise in so-called ‘morning shows', softcore porn spliced into old action movies or romances. An academic paper had declared these yet another example of hybridising
masala
culture, multiple ingredients stirred together to create a uniquely Indian fusion. Did I have the courage to find out? I felt my nerve failing me. I wasn't sure I could stomach a morning show, especially one seen at 4 p.m. on a Sunday.

Movies, movies, movies. Every spare millimetre of wall was covered with posters, twenty or thirty at a time. Explosions, helicopters, the smouldering eyes of lovers, pendulous bosoms, striding men in sunglasses packing heat: the requirements seemed as severe and unyielding as the Petrarchan sonnet.
SUPERHIT, MEGAHIT, BLOCKBUSTER, TOP GROSSER,
they yelled.

The hornet-striped rickshaws buzzing around town were emblazoned with home-made tributes: Salman Khan in the new
Ek Tha Tiger,
a stencil of Big B in the old movie
The Great Gambler.
Songs from the movies warbled from every roadside barber's stall, keening, seductive women's voices enveloped by swooning strings. One day I passed a Christian church. The sign read, ‘The Oscar for Best Supporting Actor Goes to … God Almighty.'