Theorizing the Neighbor
Arshinagar and Romeo and Juliet
Abstract
Aparna Sen's 2015 film Arshinagar (Town of Mirrors) sets Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in a fictional town in contemporary India, establishing the primary bond between the young lovers as that of neighbors. In privileging place over character, the eponymous town over the protagonists, the film approaches Romeo and Juliet within the alternative framework of the neighborhood and the neighborly. I argue that the core characteristics of proximity and difference that define the conceptual categories of the neighbor and, by extension, the neighborhood, play out in the film at multiple levels, from its experimental blending of the proximate techniques of cinema and theater to its multilingual rhymed verse to its reevaluation of the political stakes of the nation. Arshinagar thus consistently plays with audience's expectations, walking a fine line between proximity and remoteness, between familiarity and strangeness — between the self and the other in the mirror. More broadly, I argue that the film's theorization of the neighbor/hood provides a productive springboard for the reconceptualization of the status of an adaptation, particularly within the field of Global Shakespeare, that moves beyond the individual genealogical relationship between "original" and "copy."