Women and Indian Shakespeares

Description

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. Cover Contents List of illustrations List of tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgements A note on references Introduction Thea Buckley, Mark Thornton Burnett, Sangeeta Datta and Rosa García-Periago Part One: Histories 1 The ‘woman’s part’: Recovering the contribution of women to the circulation of Shakespeare in India Poonam Trivedi 2 Framing femininities: Desdemona and Indian modernities Paromita Chakravarti Part Two: Translations 3 Indian Shakespeares in the British Library collections: Translation, indigeneity and representation Priyanka Basu and Arani Ilankuberan 4 Women translating Shakespeare in South India: Hemanta Katha or The Winter’s Tale Thea Buckley Part Three: Representations 5 ‘I dare do all that may become a man’: Martial desires and women as warriors in Veeram, a film adaptation of Macbeth Mark Thornton Burnett and Jyotsna G. Singh 6 ‘You should be women’: Bengali femininity and the supernatural in adaptations of Macbeth Taarini Mookherjee 7 Romeo and Juliet meets rural India: Sairat and the representation of women Nishi Pulugurtha 8 Dy(e)ing hands: The hennaed female agent in Vishal Bhardwaj’s tragedies Jennifer T. Birkett Part Four: Critics and creatives 9 Embattled bodies: Women, land and contemporary politics in Arshinagar, a film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet Rosa García-Periago 10 Where the wild things are: Shifting identities in Noblemen, a film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice Mark Thornton Burnett 11 Women punctuating Shakespeare: Campus theatrical experiment, the Shakespeare Society and the insider/outsider dialectic N. P. Ashley 12 Adapting Shakespeare: Directors and practitioners in conversation Bornila Chatterjee, Sangeeta Datta, Annette Leday, Sreedevi Nair and Preti Taneja Appendix A selection of Shakespeare translations/adaptations from the British Library North Indian Languages Collection Priyanka Basu and Arani Ilankuberan Index