Shakespeare’s
Macbeth has traveled a long way from its original milieu. This paper takes three major 21st-century Indian adaptions of
Macbeth as its primary texts. The city of Mumbai in the west in
Maqbool, an imaginary coastal Bengal village in the east
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Shakespeare’s
Macbeth has traveled a long way from its original milieu. This paper takes three major 21st-century Indian adaptions of
Macbeth as its primary texts. The city of Mumbai in the west in
Maqbool, an imaginary coastal Bengal village in the east in
Mandaar, and the suburbs of Kerala in
Joji in the south of the subcontinent become sites of “creative mistranslations” of the play. In this paper, we take the ambiguity that Shakespeare’s witches evoke in the early 17th-century Scottish world as a point of entry and consider how that ambiguity is translated in its 21st-century Indian on-screen adaptations. Cutting across spaciotemporal boundaries, the witches remain a source of utmost significance through their presence/absence in the adaptations discussed. In
Maqbool, Shakespeare’s heath-hags become male upper-caste law-keepers, representing the tyrannies of state machinery.
Mandaar’s witches become direct agents of Mandaar’s annihilation at the end after occupying a deceptively marginal position in the sleazy world of Gailpur. In an apparent departure, Joji’s world is shorn of witches, making him appear as the sole perpetrator of the destruction in a fiercely patriarchal family. A closer reading, however, reveals the ominous presence of some insidious power that defies the control of any individual. The compass that directs
Macbeth and its adaptations, from the West to the East, from 1606 to date, is the fatalism that the witches weave, in their seeming absence as well as in their portentous presence. We cannot help but consider them as yardsticks in any tragedy that deals with the age-old dilemma of predestination and free will.
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