DOMESTICATING SHAKESPEARE: A STUDY OF INDIAN ADAPTATION OF SHAKESPEARE IN POPULAR CULTURE

Abstract

Shakespeare plays are illustration of the success and failures of human responses to order. These illustrations are very well captivated and displayed on silver screen. This paper is an attempt to study the Indian adaptation of Shakespeare in Popular Culture. It scrutinizes how Shakespeare has been utterly absorbed into the Indian imagination. The work mainly deals with recent four Shakespearean adaptations in Indian cinema : the bollywood director Vishal Bhardwaj’s movie Maqbool (released in 2004; based on Shakespeare’s adaptation of Macbeth), Omkara (released in 2006; based on Shakespeare’s adaptation of Othello) , director Manish Tiwari’s Issaq (released in 2012; based on Shakespeare’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet) , the Malyalam film director VK Prakash’s Karamyogi (released in 2012; based on Shakespeare’s adaptation of Hamlet). These movies achieved great success in India and domesticate Shakespeare like never before. The paper makes a foray into the strategies through which cinematic representation functions to ratify the existing social order. The paper analyses the ideology that governs the production of the film and the meanings that are transmitted through it