Deepa Mehta and Shakespeare

Deepa Mehta: Shakespearean allusions in intercultural contexts

Video Clip from Bollywood Hollywood excerpt 1: "Et tu, Brutus"

Video Clip from Bollywood Hollywood excerpt 2

Video Clip from Bollywood Hollywood excerpt 3

CASP gratefully acknowledges Mongrel Media's permission to post these video clips.

Deepa Mehta is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. She was born in Amritsar, India in 1950 and attended the University of New Delhi, graduating with a Master’s degree in Philosophy before immigrating to Canada in 1973. Mehta has received international renown for her films, which have been called “personal,” “provocative,” and “powerful” (The Canadian Encyclopedia). She is best known for her cinematic “elements” trilogy: Fire, Earth, and Water. The three films do not follow a linear plot but rather are connected through their dealings with controversial situations in modern day India. In doing so, Mehta challenges cultural traditions and attempts to break down stereotypes and archaic social practices and prejudices. Her chosen themes––homosexuality, the treatment of widows, the imbalance of power between husbands and wives, and inter-faith marriages––have been treated with hostility and her films have been ostracized by many in conservative and fundamentalist parts of India. During the filing of Water, the final film in the trilogy Mehta and her crew faced protests, attacks, and death threats and as a result of this, filming was shut down and the production was later made in Sri Lanka with a different cast.

Two of Deepa Mehta’s films utilize plots, scenes, allusions, and citations from William Shakespeare’s plays. These occur in Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), which spoofs the traditional modes of Bollywood filmmaking, and her controversial film, Water (2006), which loosely follows a Romeo and Juliet plot, as a Western-educated scholar and young widow begin to fall in love in spite of social conventions that prohibit that love. Interestingly, these films’ Shakespearean allusions stem from a long tradition of Shakespeare in India that is often underplayed and unaccredited.

Deepa Mehta's film Bollywood Hollywood (2002)

India has an extensive colonial history, which accounts for “a Shakespearean presence in India … older and more complex than any other country outside the West” (Shakespeare in India). Colonial and imperial strategies of domination extended to culture, with the imposition of Western thought, art, and technology on traditional Indian formations. This spurred the predominance of English education and culture in India over an extended period, with, in the case of Shakespeare, for instance, Shakespearean performances evident in India by English troupes dating from 1770. The colonial education system in India was filled with Westernized influences, including Shakespeare––the nominal greatest writer of the English language. Shakespeare was used not only as the exemplary figure of literary and artistic greatness but his works were also used to demonstrate the core values of Western tradition (Shakespeare in India). Through this “so-called Indian Renaissance” many facets of Western culture were absorbed into the cultural mainstream of India. After Indian Independence from the British Empire in 1947, the large-scale teaching of Shakespeare declined in favor of native writers. By this point, however, Shakespeare had been translated, adapted, and assimilated into many Indian languages, and writers and performances in the general Indian cultural landscape were contributing to sustaining his presence.

In India, indigenous languages and traditions have reincarnated Shakespeare’s works, in a remarkable display of intercultural adaptation. Yet, the Bard is often left unacknowledged in this practice of adaptation, even in the most famous sector of Indian popular culture, Bollywood. The celebrated and nationalistic film industry of the Indian sub-continent that Bollywood represents has become increasingly popular on a global scale. These films are often formulaic and Shakespearean-esque; featuring song and dance, love triangles, comedy, melodrama, star-crossed lovers, angry parents, conniving villains, convenient coincidences, and mistaken identity (Bollywood). Recent Bollywood productions have departed from the “blatant plagiarism” of their predecessors and listed Shakespeare as the source or inspiration (Bollywood––now starring Shakespeare), such as recent productions of Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello) by Indian director Vishal Bharadwaj.

This inspiration and Shakespearean influence, largely due to colonial influence of the period dating from 1757-1947, is now being used, somewhat paradoxically, as an educational tool to reclaim Indian identity and tradition, and as a means of healing after colonial oppression. Shakespeare has been recognized as both a harbinger of colonial influence but also as a way of writing back against that colonial influence through his re-appropriation, and has thus been cultivated and adapted to a new independent Indian culture. The process in which Shakespearean adaptation is used by colonized, marginalized, and often persecuted groups has become increasingly popular in the last century, as evinced in work by First Nations peoples and African Americans and Canadians.

Corresponding with the growing success of Bollywood in the West, and the interest in Post-Colonial India as a centre of diverse historical, cultural, and spiritual influences are the many Western adaptations of Shakespeare that are situated or reference India. Most notable is the Stratford Festival’s 2006 production of Twelfth Night, which was adapted in production, costumes and music to a Raj setting. Such a production capitalizes on the currency of inter- and multicultural realities in Canada and inevitably plays to the orientalism of colonial culture as well as to the trends that see intercultural exchange as becoming the new global norm.

Deepa Mehta’s 2002 film, Bollywood/Hollywood, is set in Toronto and deals with cultural miscegenation, and the generation gap of young immigrants and their conservative colonial era parents and grandparents. The plot centres around Rahul (Rahul Khanna), a young, rich Canadian who is forced to appease his staunch mother and grandmother by marrying an Indian girl after his white fiancé dies. Throughout the film, Rahul’s grandmother, Grandma Ji (Dina Pathak); a stereotypical image of a colonized Indian woman who is an immigrant to boot, situates the plot with Shakespearean anecdotes and references that define her characterization. These quotes revolve primarily along the central issues facing the family, as they struggle to find their place in the more liberal West. Thus, the Grandma Ji states, “Et tu, Brutus” when she is faced with the prospect of her grandson marrying a white Canadian, or “there’s the smell of blood, still all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” as the Grandmother deals with her family’s hypocrisy and guilt regarding Rahul’s marriage choices. Near the end of the film the Grandmother explains to Rahul after she quotes, “I’m not here to bury Caesar but to praise him” that “the meaning is clear, bury the past and praise the future.” This loose form of allusion and adaptation, meant to be both a parody of the Bollywood genre’s dependency on stereotypical Shakespearean sentiment and a statement on Indian immigrants makes a significant comment on the expressive ability of Shakespeare to continually adapt to audiences and to act as an intercultural signifier.

Deepa Mehta’s film Water (2005)

Alternatively, Deepa Mehta’s film Water is set in 1938 in India. The film is situated in a historical moment when colonialism was still present, but being challenged by a young academic generation under the influence of Mahatma Ghandi. The film deals with controversial subjects, such as the social, economic, and cultural oppression of widows, prostitution, and the growing divisions between East (native Indians) and West (Colonial British). Within the film a contrast is also made between the wealthy ‘Westernized’ class, who fashion their lives around the British model, and the impoverished class, who subscribe to the extremely conservative religious life as taught in the 2000 year old Bhagvad Gita.

The film makes many connections to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Narayan (John Abraham), a young upper-class academic, falls in love with Kalyani (Lisa Ray), a widow who has been forced into prostitution. Narayan discusses his love with his friend, Rabindra (Vinay Pathak), who states “stand beneath her balcony, but don’t quote Romeo. People here don’t know Shakespeare.” To which Narayan indignantly retorts, “you really are a brown Englishman.” This situates the two opposing political and cultural ideologies of the time: Rabindra, represents a putatively superior Western ideology, in which Shakespeare is viewed as the epitome of literary greatness, one that the lower classes could not possibly fathom, while Narayan, believes in freedom, Indian culture and the power of change. Narayan’s point of view is compounded when he meets with Kalyani and confesses his love with quotes from an Indian poet, rather than Shakespeare. Mehta uses Shakespeare in a crucial scene in the film to establish this contrast between advocates of a colonial India and those Indians set to forge a post-colonial independent India.

Mehta’s controversial and highly successful film makes a poignant comment on the dialectic between cultural change and stagnation. Her use of Shakespeare as a signifier exemplifies how the language of literary works is embedded within political and ideological movements––especially so when they permeate and travel across national borders and are used as instruments of cultural domination and are then transformed into tools by which that domination is critiqued.

Danielle Van Wagner (with Daniel Fischlin)

Video Clip from Bollywood Hollywood excerpt 1

Video Clip from Bollywood Hollywood excerpt 2

Video Clip from Bollywood Hollywood excerpt 3

Video Clip from Water

CASP gratefully acknowledges Mongrel Media's permission to post these video clips.

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Fischlin, Daniel. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. University of Guelph. 2004. <http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca>.