The re-birth of Shakespeare in India: Celebrating and Indianizing the Bard in 1964

Abstract

While the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death (1916) was hardly celebrated in India and marked the beginning of a period in which Shakespeare was hidden, the Quartercentenary of his birth (1964) spawned a large number of collections, theatre performances and even exhibitions to pay homage to the Bard. Although a special issue of the journal Indian Literature published in 1964 contributed to the re-emergence of Shakespeare, the most revolutionary projects in the making of a vernacular Shakespeare occurred on the Indian stage via Utpal Dutt’s Shakespearean productions in Bengali. Following Arjun Appadurai, this paper argues that Utpal Dutt’s Bengali theatre productions in 1964 participate in a “decolonization” of Shakespeare, consisting in liberating Shakespeare “the text” and Shakespeare “the author” from the bonds of the empire, from restrictive colonial associations. Two out of his three theatre performances produced in 1964 – Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar – are symptomatic of the effects of “glocalizing” the Shakespearean texts since the original place names and names of the characters are combined with the Bengali language and unavoidable localization.