Essays Collected In This Anthology Offer Glimpses Of Indian Response To Shakespeare, The Myriad Minded Genius Of The World. Shakespeare Has Influenced The Indian Readers, Researchers, Translators, Directors And Actors Very Deeply. The Indian Scholars With Various Cultural And Linguistic Backgrounds Have Tried To Appropriate The Beauty And Meaning Of Shakespeareana In Their Own Way Like The Five Blind Men In The Buddha'S Story Trying To Understand The Elephant And Shown The Way To The Future Scholars Of India To Pursue Fruitfully.Among The Contributors To This Volume Are Both The Senior And The Younger Scholars Of India Like R.S. Pathak, Mohit K. Ray, Shweta Khanna, Basavaraj Naikar, Rama Kundu, O.P. Budholia, Sudhir Dixit, Sahdeo Chougule, B.G. Tandon, Nivedita Mukerjee, Shabiba Khan And Narasimha Ramayya, Who Have Dealt With Various Aspects Of Shakespearean Drama In The Indian Context.

Shakespeare Studies in Colonial Bengal: The Early Phase represents an important direction in the area of historical research on the role of English education in India, particularly with regards to Shakespeare studies at the Hindu College, the first native college of European education in Calcutta, the capital city of British India during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the developments that led to the introduction of English education in India, Dr Dahiya’s book highlights the pioneering role that the eminent Shakespeare teachers at Hindu College, namely Henry Derozio, D.L. Richardson and H.M. Percival, played in accelerating the movement of the Bengal Renaissance. Drawing on available information about colonial Bengal, the book exposes both the angular interpretations of Shakespeare by fanatical scholars on both sides of the cultural divide, and the serious limitations of the present-day reductive theory of postcolonialism, emphasizing how in both cases such interpretations led to distorted readings of Shakespeare. Offering a comprehensive account of how English education in India came to be introduced in an atmosphere of clashing ideas and conflicting interests emanating from various forces at work in the early nineteenth century, Shakespeare Studies in Colonial Bengal places, in a normative perspective, the part played by each major actor in this highly-contested historical context, including the Christian missionaries, British orientalists, Macaulay’s Minute, the secular duo of Rammohan Roy and David Hare, and, above all, the Shakespeare teachers at Hindu College, the first native institution of European education in India.

Shakespeare and Indian Nationalism aims to articulate the reception of Shakespeare by the 19th-century Indian intelligentsia from Bengal and their ambivalent approach to the Indian Renaissance and consequent nationalist project. Showcasing the cultural politics of British imperialism, this volume focuses on six early nationalist writers and their engagement with Shakespeare: Hemchandra Bandopadhay (1838–1903), Girishchandra Ghosh (1844–1912), Purnachandra Basu (1844–unknown), Iswarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891), Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya(1838–1894), and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and a host of prominent writers of cultural politics, nationalism and Indian history, this interdisciplinary approach combines postcolonial studies and Shakespeare studies in an attempt to reconcile the existence of an unbridled admiration for an English cultural icon in India alongside the rise of nationalism and a fierce resistance to British rule. The book, finally, moves to re-explore Shakespeare's position in academic, political and popular nationalist discourses in postcolonial India.

This book looks at adaptations, translations and performance of Shakespeare's productions in India from the mid-18th century, when British officers in India staged Shakespeare's plays along with other English playwrights for entertainment, through various Indian adaptations of his plays during the colonial period to post-Independence period. It studies Shakespeare in Bengali and Parsi theatre at length. Other theatre traditions, such as Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi, have been included. The book dwells on the fascinating story of the languages of India that have absorbed Shakespeare's work and have transformed the original educated Indian's Shakespeare into the popular Shakespeare practice of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the unique urban-folkish tradition in postcolonial India.

In this book an attempt has been made to compare the two legendary writers by comparing the eastern way of thinking with the western way. Shakespeare is amongst the writers Sri Aurobindo holds in high esteem. Sri Aurobindo’s admiration for the great dramatist resulted in obvious Shakespearean influences on him. He adopts for his plays Elizabethan model of drama perfected by Shakespeare’s genius. Shakespeare’s influence is traceable also in Sri Aurobindo’s sonnets. It is said that Sri Aurobindo had Shakespearean literature on his bed-side when he left his mortal remains. Both the great writers were not satisfied by merely holding mirror to the nature but due to their greater and deeper life power, they recreated the human life in its beauty and completeness. Therefore, there is an obvious need to compare and contrast Shakeapeare and Sri Aurobindo so as to bring out affinities that may be there between their creative ideal and vision as well as their poetic and dramatic art, along with the former’s influence on the later. In this book an attempt has been made to fulfill the need and to contribute, in some measure to the appreciation of Sri Aurobindo’s poetry and plays. It also briefly touches upon Indian response to Shakespeare. It focuses mainly on Sri Aurobindo’s numerous insights and critical observations on him. To sum up writings of the two such outstanding writers, who represent two very different ways of thinking. On one hand Shakespeare potrays lot of blood shed, gory tales and a wild kind of poetic justice in his writings, but on the other hand Sri Aurobindo truely follows Indian ethos of non violence or ‘Ahimsa’. The author underlines the stark similarities and differences in both the writer’s exploring their plays and sonnets. The structure of plays and sonnets may be same of both the greatest minds but ethos and personna ingrained in their writings is quite different.

This book is envisaged as an intervention in the ongoing explorations in social and cultural history, into questions of what constitutes Indianness for the colonial and the postcolonial subject and the role that Shakespeare plays in this identity formation. Performing Shakespeare in India presents studies of Indian Shakespeare adaptations on stage, on screen, on OTT platforms, in translation, in visual culture and in digital humanities and examines the ways in which these construct Indianness. Shakespeare in India has had multiple local interpretations in different media and equally wide-ranging responses, be it the celebration of Shakespeare as a bishwokobi (world poet) in 19th-century Bengal, be it in the elusive adaptation of Shakespeare in Meitei and Tangkhul tribal art forms in Manipur, or be it in the clamour of a boisterous Bollywood musical. In the response of diasporic theatre professionals, or in Telugu and Kannada translations, whether resisted or accepted with open arms, Shakespeare in India has had multiple local interpretations in different media. All the essays are connected by the common thread of extraordinary negotiations of postcolonial identity formation in language, in politics, in social and cultural practices, or in art forms.

Women and Indian Shakespeares explores the multiple ways in which women, and those identifying as women, are, and have been, engaged with Shakespeare in India. Women's engagements encompass the full range of media, from translation to cinematic adaptation and from early colonial performance to contemporary theatrical experiment. Simultaneously, Women and Indian Shakespeares makes visible the ways in which women are figured in various representational registers as resistant agents, martial seductresses, redemptive daughters, victims of caste discrimination, conflicted spaces and global citizens. In so doing, the collection reorients existing lines of investigation, extends the disciplinary field, brings into visibility still occluded subjects and opens up radical readings. More broadly, the collection identifies how, in Indian Shakespeares on page, stage and screen, women increasingly possess the ability to shape alternative futures across patriarchal and societal barriers of race, caste, religion and class. In repeated iterations, the collection turns our attention to localized modes of adaptation that enable opportunities for women while celebrating Shakespeare's gendered interactions in India's rapidly changing, and increasingly globalized, cultural, economic and political environment. In the contributions, we see a transformed Shakespeare, a playwright who appears differently when seen through the gendered eyes of a new Indian, diasporic and global generation of critics, historians, archivists, practitioners and directors. Radically imagining Indian Shakespeares with women at the centre, Women and Indian Shakespeares interweaves history, regional geography/regionality, language and the present day to establish a record of women as creators and adapters of Shakespeare in Indian contexts.

A concise guide to global performances of Shakespeare, this volume combines methodologies of dramaturgy, film and performance studies, critical race and gender studies and anthropological thick description. This companion guides students from critical methodologies through big pictures of global Shakespeare to case studies that employ these methodologies. It uses a site-specific lens to examine global performances of Shakespeare on stage, on radio and on screen. As well as featuring methodological chapters on modernist adaptations, global cinema, multilingual productions and Shakespeare in translation, the volume includes short histories of adaptations of Shakespeare in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Arab world, India, the Slavic world, Iran, Afghanistan and the Farsi-speaking diaspora. It uses these micro-historical narratives to demonstrate the value of local knowledge by analysing the relationships between Shakespeare and his modern interlocutors. Finally, thematically organized case studies apply the methodologies to analyse key productions in Brazil, Korea, Yemen, Kuwait, China and elsewhere. The final chapter considers pedagogical strategies in a global setting. These chapters showcase the how of global Shakespeare studies: how do minoritized artists and audiences engage with Shakespeare? And how do we analyse the diverse and polyphonic performances with an eye towards equity and social justice?

This book is the first to explore the rich archive of Shakespeare in Indian cinemas, including less familiar, Indian language cinemas to contribute to the assessment of the expanding repertoire of Shakespeare films worldwide. Essays cover mainstream and regional Indian cinemas such as the better known Tamil and Kannada, as well as the less familiar regions of the North Eastern states. The volume visits diverse filmic genres, starting from the earliest silent cinema, to diasporic films made for global audiences, television films, independent films, and documentaries, thus expanding the very notion of ‘Indian cinema’ while also looking at the different modalities of deploying Shakespeare specific to these genres. Shakespeareans and film scholars provide an alternative history of the development of Indian cinemas through its negotiations with Shakespeare focusing on the inter-textualities between Shakespearean theatre, regional cinema, performative traditions, and literary histories in India. The purpose is not to catalog examples of Shakespearean influence but to analyze the interplay of the aesthetic, historical, socio-political, and theoretical contexts in which Indian language films have turned to Shakespeare and to what purpose. The discussion extends from the content of the plays to the modes of their cinematic and intermedial translations. It thus tracks the intra–Indian flows and cross-currents between the various film industries, and intervenes in the politics of multiculturalism and inter/intraculturalism built up around Shakespearean appropriations. Contributing to current studies in global Shakespeare, this book marks a discursive shift in the way Shakespeare on screen is predominantly theorized, as well as how Indian cinema, particularly ‘Shakespeare in Indian cinema’ is understood.

The creation of the new Globe Theatre in London has heightened interest in Shakespeare performance studies in recent years. The essays in this volume testify to this burgeoning research into issues surrounding contemporary performances of plays by Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists, as well as modern trends and developments in stage and media presentations of these works. Truly international in coverage, the discussion here ranges across the performance and reception of Shakespeare in Japan, India, Germany, Italy, Denmark and the United States as well as in Britain. Dennis Kennedy's introductory essay places the new Globe Theatre in the context of Shakespearean cultural tourism generally. This is followed by five sections of essays covering aspects of Shakespeare on film, the stage history of his plays, Renaissance contexts, the movement of the text from page to stage, and female roles. Exploring many of current issues in Shakespeare studies, this volume provides a global perspective on Renaissance performance and the wide variety of ways in which it has been translated by today's media. About the Editor: Edward J. Esche is a Senior Lecturer in English and Head of Drama at Anglia Polytechnic University. He has published on renaissance drama and twentieth-century modern British and American drama. His most recent publication is an edition of Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris for the Clarendon Press The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe.