Schedule / Horaire
Tuesday 22 April 2014, 9h-10h30.
Room: V106B.
Leaders / Organisateurs
Dr. Poonam Trivedi, Associate Professor, Department of English, Indraprastha College, University of Delhi, Delhi (India) poonamtrivedi2@gmail.com
Dr. Sarbani Chaudhury, Professor, Department of English, University of Kalyani, Kalyani, India sarbanich@gmail.com
Participants
- Sarbani Chaudhury, University of Kalyani (India)
Fun, Frolic and Shakespeare: Kalyani Ishtyle - Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi (India)
Rhapsode of Shakespeare: V Sambasivan’s popular kathaprasangam / storytelling - Paromita Chakravarti, Jadavpur University, Kolkata (India)
Taming of the Bard, Bengali ishtyle: Domesticating farce in Srimati Bhayankari - Preti Taneja, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
Who is the wise man and who is the Fool? The importance of buffoonery in Indian Shakespeare
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Sarbani Chaudhury, University of Kalyani (India)
Fun, Frolic and Shakespeare: Kalyani Ishtyle
Radix, the annual reunion of the Department of English, University of Kalyani, regularly showcases the insidious seepage of high voltage Indi-pop, Bolly/Holly dance numbers into the ‘culturally admissible’ recitals of classical dance, music, and Tagore songs. From 2008 to 2012, the highpoint of the day’s festivities has been the staging of a raunchy, risqué and impudently abridged version of a Shakespearean play. This paper proposes to investigate the developing tenor of these translations and with special focus on the last production, the ‘comedy’ of Macbeth, which cannibalizes, digests and regurgitates a diametrically split Shakespeare for local consumption.
2. Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi (India)
Rhapsode of Shakespeare: V Sambasivan’s popular kathaprasangam / storytelling
This is a particularly telling tale of the myriad and mingled modes in which Shakespeare circulates in modern Indian culture challenging notions of him as a high-brow poet. It is about his popularization in the southern state of Kerala through a variant of a devotional story-telling form, kathaprasangam. V Sambasivan (1929-1997), a foremost exponent, secularized the form bringing in Shakespeare alongside stories from epic, folk and contemporary literature. His act, like the rhapsodes / itinerant minstrels of old, was a solo narration interspersed with singing and commentary stitching up stories (Gk. rhapto = stitch ode). Thousands flocked to his sessions.
3. Paromita Chakravarti, Jadavpur University, Kolkata (India)
Taming of the Bard, Bengali ishtyle: Domesticating farce in Srimati Bhayankari
The proposed paper will read Srimati Bhayankari (Mistress Terror), an extremely successful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew on the 1970’s Bangla commercial stage which in 2001 was made into film, a sentimental bourgeois melodrama, celebrating “family values” and docile femininity. The paper will examine the implications of deploying Shakespeare, merely as a plot resource, divorced from the complexity of his language, contexts and generic negotiations, not as an icon of Bengali modernity, but as a currency of commercial mass culture, upholding populist and regressive sexual politics, Bengali ishtyle.
4. Preti Taneja, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
Who is the wise man and who is the Fool? The importance of buffoonery in Indian Shakespeare
This paper proposes that postcolonial Indian Shakespeares act as Fool, simultaneously obedient while ‘speaking back’ to centres of power. I discuss the identity of the Fool in Shakespeare and in Indian literature, highlighting a particular kind of buffoonery now less popular in Western culture but very much alive in India. I focus on the work of Indian actor/director Atul Kumar, including 2013’s Nothing Like Lear, and 2012’s Twelfth Night performed for the Globe-to-Globe ‘World Shakespeare Festival,’ in Hindi for a multilingual audience to show how, through their very presence, these productions are bufooning, subversive reminders of the hybrid postcolonial condition.