"Mak[ing] . . . Strange / Even to the disposition that I owe"

Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool

Authors

Poonam Trivedi University of Delhi, India

Abstract

Cluster: Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective

Edited by Alexa Huang

Shakespeare forms a kind of a benchmark in Indian culture; local responses to his works determine their distance from our own past. On stage, there have been several successful adaptations of Macbeth performed in indigenous Indian styles. But with Maqbool, we have hit another level of appropriation. Here, it is neither ethnicity nor authenticity that is aimed at, but rather, a postcolonial maturity in contemporizing the universality of Shakespeare according to our own current concerns. Maqbool has unfixed Shakespeare from the grip of the English medium school and made him a free-floating signifier available for anyone with the nous to take him on.

Author Biography

Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India

Poonam Trivedi is Reader in English, Indraprastha College, University of Delhi. She received her doctorate from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, U.K. She has co-edited India's Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance (2005) and Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (2009), and authored a CD-ROM on King Lear in India.