Indigenizing Macbeth

Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool

Authors

Suddhaseel Sen University of Toronto

Abstract

Cluster: Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective

Edited by Alexa Huang

Vishal Bhardwaj, a filmmaker and composer of Bollywood scores, has achieved considerable popular and critical success worldwide with his two adaptations of Shakespeare, Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello). Both films are very different from those postcolonial adaptations that tend to "talk back" to Shakespeare; instead, Bhardwaj represents the strain of a transcultural adaptation of Shakespeare whose beginnings lay in the nineteenth-century Parsi theater's first forays into indigenizing Shakespearean plays for local audiences. With Maqbool, Bhardwaj creates a film that is unique among those few global cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare that have successfully indigenized Macbeth at the level of setting, plot, language, and generic conventions without diluting the complex issues raised by Shakespeare's play.

Author Biography

Suddhaseel Sen, University of Toronto

Suddhaseel Sen is completing his doctoral dissertation on cross-cultural adaptations of Shakespeare into opera and film at the University of Toronto. His research interests include European and Indian literature from the nineteenth century onwards, adaptation studies, and the interrelations among literature, music, and film. He has published on Richard Wagner and T. S. Eliot, and on song settings of Rabindranath Tagore by Western composers. His arrangements of the music of Rabindranath Tagore for voices and western instruments have been performed by professional ensembles in India and Canada.