Worlds Elsewhere (40 page)

Surrounded by such imprecations, it seemed churlish to resist. But I'd read so many conflicting accounts of early Indian cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare that I hardly knew where to begin. There was cautious consent that a version of
The Merchant of Venice
called
Dil Farosh
(a punning title that means ‘The Seller of Hearts'/‘One who Has Sold His Heart'), produced in 1927 and based on Syed Mehdi Hasan Ahsan's wildly popular adaptation from 1900, was the first full version of Shakespeare to be seen on the Indian screen. Thereafter, though, the historians splintered into vehement disagreement.

Khoon-e-Nahaq
(‘Unjustified Killing/Blood'), a rendering of
Hamlet
from 1928 again based on Ahsan's earlier Parsi script, might have come next; unless it was a silent version of
Cymbeline
drawn from Betab,
Meetha Zehar
(‘Sweet Poison'). Some rejected this sequence entirely, insisting that
Savkari Pash
(‘Moneylender's Clutches', also known as ‘The Indian Shylock') from 1925 by the Marathi-Hindi director Baburao Painter was in fact the earliest
Merchant of Venice
because of its central theme.

I didn't much care who was first across the line, but how could one not adore the titles?
Zan Mureed
(‘Henpecked Love'), an
Antony and Cleopatra
released in 1936;
Hathili Dulhan
(‘The Stubborn Bride'), a Parsi-influenced
Taming of the Shrew
from 1932. None of these pictures had appeared in any of the British- or American-published filmographies of Shakespearian cinema I'd consulted; in fact most of them contained barely a single non-white director. Shakespeare film studies, so modish in the western academy, had done its utmost to ignore Indian cinema's rich seam of adaptations.

Were any of these movies still extant? Could one watch them? I ransacked every shop and street stall I passed. DVD boxes accumulated in my hotel room, a colourful jumble of remastered classics with eye-searing period covers, cheap pirated copies, and sleek modern releases.
Chori Chori
(roughly translatable as ‘With Utmost Stealth'), a warmly admired comedy from 1956, starred Nargis – the immortal star of
Mother India,
whose portrayal of a saintly village woman battling for the sake of her sons helped the movie become one of the most famous in Indian cinematic history. Her love interest in
Chori Chori
was the suave lothario Raj Kapoor; technically the film was an unofficial remake of Frank Capra's
It Happened One Night,
but it was also reputed to borrow from
The Taming of the Shrew.
It went on the pile.

Raj was the elder brother of Shashi Kapoor, who'd begun in
Shakespeareana with the Kendals; though he'd never performed with the troupe himself, Raj had obviously been bitten by the Shakespearian bug: a later film he directed,
Bobby
(1973), was supposedly a version of
Romeo and Juliet.
Teasing out the Kendal connection, I also managed to find
36 Chowringhee Lane,
a film from 1981 starring Jennifer Kendal (sister of Felicity), about an Anglo-Indian teacher living in Kolkata and teaching Shakespeare. These went on the pile too.

Anything earlier than
Chori Chori
was a definite no-go, I was told: best to ask at the National Film Archive in Pune a hundred miles south-west. I was still trying to get someone there to answer my calls, but I booked a train ticket anyway.

I was luckier with modern films, ones that bore little relation to classic Bollywood. The Malayali
auteur
Jayaraj Rajasekharan Nair had produced two well-regarded adaptations,
Kaliyattam
(1997), which places a version of
Othello
around a performance of the incantatory Keralan dance form theyyam; and
Kannaki
(2002), which has heavy echoes of
Antony and Cleopatra.

I chased down ever-more tangential titles.
The Last Lear
(2007), a creaky vehicle for the actor Amitabh Bachchan about a retired thespian who knows all the plays by heart. Sangeeta Datta's
Life Goes On
(2009), another
King Lear,
this time set in the British Bengali community. As I watched shop assistants scurrying from store cupboards to stock computers and back again, I asked myself if there existed Indian films that weren't based in some way on Shakespeare.

Wondering whether it would be possible to find traces of anything earlier, I took myself off to the Chor Bazaar flea market. I'd heard of a stall called Bollywood Bazaar, a famous centre for the secondary market in movie-related items. I might not be able to buy the films, but perhaps there'd be a Shakespearian gleam or two in the dust. A poster for
Sweet Poison
? A publicity still for
Henpecked Love
?

When I arrived, the place looked promising. It was a joyous clutter, a cross between a junk shop and a shrine, barely roomier than the taxi in which I'd got there. So many items dangled above the door – three Indonesian masks, a sombrero, an electric guitar, a bronze fire bucket – that it was perilous to duck in.

The owner started on the patter even as I was adjusting to the gloom. I was interested in posters, artefacts, props, all original, all super-good quality? Right place, no question.

There was the sweet scent of mothballs and damp paper. In the back of the shop was what appeared to be a full set of Roman armour.

The owner rapped it smartly with a knuckle:
ding!
‘Bollywood, 1960s! Excellent price!'

I stressed that I was researching the history of Shakespeare in Indian cinema, a big book, very serious project. He didn't skip a beat. Nodding gravely, he scanned my list with cool professionalism.

He clicked his tongue. ‘Some, some. But these very rare films.'

After about ten minutes, working in tandem, we had turned up a few posters, but they were titles I'd already come across: interesting to see, but hardly the cinematic rarities I was after.

I spotted a pile of photographs in a corner. He walked me over sadly. ‘Very minor movies, sir …'

I flipped through: head shots. The faces were seductive, coy, noble, stern, gazing full of long-lost meaning into a permanent middle distance. I was no expert, but I didn't recognise a single one.

Then I came across a face I
did
recognise: that of Raj Kapoor. Here he was, looking terribly young, being cradled by an actress I didn't know. The gesture was of – what? Exhaustion? Forgiveness? Consolation? It was maternal, somehow, and I thought immediately of Gertrude and Hamlet. There were many versions of
Hamlet
in Indian film, but none starring Kapoor that I knew of (a pity: he had a damaged grace that might have suited the role).

The actress was unbearably beautiful: a swan-like neck, dark almond eyes, with the hint of something remote in her looks – Tibet? Nepal? She wore an expression of sadness and forbearance.

The owner ran a fingernail along the text at the bottom:
Main Nashe Mein Hoon.

‘Late fifties, I am thinking. Title means, “I am drunk”.' He tipped his thumb towards his teeth. ‘Raj Kapoor often drunk!'

Who was the woman?

‘Ah, Mala Sinha! Very beautiful. Many movies, big, big star.'

The name stirred something – had
she
been in a Shakespeare? Which one?

But the shopkeeper had already moved on. With a conjuror's flourish he pulled out an A5-sized copy of a poster. In the centre was the title, huge and bold, white-on-black on a curlicued frame:
Romeo and Juliet.

This was more like it. I remembered reading about the movie: another Nargis film, it was meant to be based on the Hollywood
version of 1936 with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. It was filmed during 1947, the year of independence and partition – an interesting time, to say the least, to make a film about love across the barricades.

At the top of the poster Nargis looked adoringly up at D. K. Sapru's Romeo, who wore a European-style jerkin with a gold chain. The text proclaimed,
‘NARGIS ART CONCERN
presents the world's greatest love story … Romance supreme against a background of clashing swords, brought to thrilling reality.' Below was an inset panel:
‘THE FAMED BALCONY SCENE:
Moments of rapturous bliss stolen while danger awaits …' The address of the studio was in tiny type: 335 Grant Road. I must have walked past it the other day.

I was determined to watch Nargis's
Romeo and Juliet
at the National Film Archive, and finding a poster – particularly a poster I had never seen reproduced – was a step closer. This was definitely coming with me back to England, along with the photo and a couple of other posters.

‘All together … four thousand rupees.'

At Indian prices, it was a shockingly high amount: £40. The photo looked authentic, but the posters were only copies, for all that they had been aged with what looked suspiciously like tea. I'd fondly imagined I might have been able to get originals for that.

The owner looked at me in genuine pity. ‘Originals much, much more expensive.' He steepled his fingers together. ‘Sir – sorry – I would not sell original if you give me … one thousand dollars!'

We settled on R2,000. ‘I am not making business with you, sir,' he said as we concluded. ‘This is
pleasure
for me.'

I was surprised that he had such intimate knowledge of the history of Shakespeare in Indian cinema. He looked gratified, and lowered his voice.

‘BBC call me,' he said. ‘Man from BBC. They make TV programme about Shakespeare. They come here to Bollywood Bazaar. They film right here!'

I remembered. There had been a documentary, presented by Felicity Kendal, telling part of the story of Shakespeareana and her early years in India. Bhardwaj had briefly been interviewed; was there also a scene in a shop? Possibly.

I felt suddenly deflated: bruising to have been beaten to the scene by a British television crew. Indian cinema's lack of originality was catching.

As I made a fuss of gathering up my photocopies, I noticed a small bust, a couple of inches high, leaning against a snuff box decorated with a Mughal miniature. Shakespeare.

‘From Goa,' the owner said. ‘Very, very old.'

It seemed unlikely; I suspected a canny piece of TV set dressing. This was Bollywood, after all.

In spare hours between interviews, in the cool of the morning or the thick, treacly heat of evening, I hunkered in my hotel room, feeding my laptop with DVD after DVD and searching for corner-of-the-eye glimpses of Shakespeare in Hindi cinema.

The first film I watched was
Bobby,
Raj Kapoor's 1973 classic. Regarded as taboo-breaking for having introduced illicit teenage romance to mainstream Bollywood, it did so with extensive debts to other, older stories. Depicting the tortured romance between the plutocratic son of a Mumbai businessman (played by Raj's son Rishi) and Bobby, the daughter of an impoverished Goan fisherman, its basic plot device owed plenty to
Romeo and Juliet
– most obviously in its portrayal of a love affair against the odds, but more interestingly (I thought) in the way it addressed some of the polarities that divided Indian society: rich versus poor, young versus old, Hindu versus Christian, modernising/westernised versus conservative/traditional.

When Kapoor senior shot the film in the early seventies – licking his wounds after a failed affair with Nargis – India was going through one of numerous bouts of abrupt change. A headstrong young generation demanded much greater freedoms than their parents felt able to offer; there were deep worries about the pernicious influence of the west. It struck me as not unlike Elizabethan England, likewise riven by tensions between social classes and debates about the ethics of arranged marriage – even if
Bobby'
s denouement, in which the renegade lovers are kidnapped by hoodlums, was an undeniable swerve from Shakespeare's play.

Farhan Akhtar's
Dil Chahta Hai
(‘The Heart Desires', 2001) was the product of a different kind of Indian film industry – globalised, street-smart – but just as revealing of its era, as laden with BMWs and Sony laptops as
Bobby
had been with migrainously patterned miniskirts and over-coiffed hair. The film was lavish in length (three-plus hours,
divided by the traditional interval), scale (shot in Mumbai, Goa and Sydney) and ambition, narrating the coming-of-age tale of three male schoolfriends as they journey bumpily towards love and self-knowledge.

Akhtar paid numerous tributes to Bollywood's own history, but the obvious reference was
Much Ado About Nothing,
which furnished the movie's central section with a Beatrice-and-Benedick-style romance between Shalini and Akash, the warring, wisecracking leads, who find romance after disastrous beginnings.

There were deeper Shakespearian themes, too. Shalini and Akash discover their feelings for each other while watching an opera called
Troilus and Cressida
(not William Walton's, but a Bollywood knock-off). And the framework story of Akash and his two pals had affinities with
Love's Labour's Lost,
itself the story of a group of young men and their faulty attempts to balance their own friendship with the demands of real romantic love. Was I being over-ingenious? Apparently not: Akhtar included a cheeky shot in which Shalini stands on Sydney Harbour in front of a yacht named
Much Ado.

On and on the Shakespearian trail went – through
Chori Chori
(whose debts to
The Taming of the Shrew
were fairly incidental, I thought) to a contemporarised, indie version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
called
10ml Love
released in 2010, whose director, a young film-maker called Sharat Katariya, was kind enough to invite me to his apartment for a screening. (His title, he explained, referred to Puck's magic juice, placed on the eyes of the competing lovers.)