TS5212 Asian International Cinema

The “Bollywoodization” of Shakespeare in Vishal Bhardwaj’s

Maqbool and Omkara

Written by Shriya Mohan

Submitted on April 4, 2012

Abstract: Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool and Omkara are post-colonial “retextualizations” of

Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello. Bhardwaj appropriates the plots by making

“intercultural revisions” using familiar Bollywood strings – The underworld landscapes of

Mumbai; Communal and caste tensions in Indian society; and finally, using Bollywood

song and dance sequences as a bridge to bring Shakespeare to the masses.

The Question of Appropriation

Theseus: [A]s imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and give to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.14-7) (Foakes 1984)

Original Shakespeare plays were both for a high browed and low browed audience - the

kings, queens and the commoners could equally be transported into the stories of love,

envy, revenge and myriad human emotions. Bill Ferris, Chairman of the National

Endowment for the Humanities, writes: "We understand the human condition better in our

own time because he wrote about it so penetratingly in his” (Trasiter 1999). But today, in

the 21st century, Shakespeare has become exclusive to the elite, the so called “Shakespeare

Scholars”, who attend high walled universities and are taught to appreciate his work in their

academic pursuits of cultivating a fine understanding of English literature. There are a few

noteworthy attempts to bring Shakespeare back to the masses and this paper deals with

one such body of work in India.

India, an erstwhile colony of the British Empire, has a surprisingly rich history of drawing

from Shakesperean themes in a wide array of theatre performances, works of literature and

most recently, the world of Indian Cinema. The use of Shakespeare in Indian performance

art and films spans over 200 years, making him the most performed western author in India

(Poonam Trivedi 2005). Dr Poonam Trivedi, Film critic and Reader in English at the University

of Delhi, writes:

The recent naming of Shakespeare as the Writer of the Millennium is not just the public confirmation of his 'global' status but a long-awaited recognition of the fact that Shakespeare belongs to the whole world, and that the diverse incursions of his work into virtually every culture are as much a part of his essence as is the English Shakespeare of Stratford (Poonam Trivedi 2005).

The Bard in Bollywood

The earliest engagement of Indian Cinema with Shakespeare goes back to the silent era of

1920s Dil Farosh in 1927 based on a popular stage adaptation of Merchant of Venice. Trivedi

writes: Like the stage versions, these films were as much about “using Shakespeare” as

“abusing” him. In the 1940s and 50s, the rise of a new breed of Indians “schooled” into

Shakespeare provided a new market for a more authentic Shakespeare space in Indian

Cinema. Kishore Sahu’s Hamlet in 1954 is a perfect representation which modelled the

visualizations of Lawrence Olivier’s film Hamlet made in 1948. Sahu contextualized it by

filling in the key moments of dialogue using couplets from classical Urdu poems, thereby, in

Trivedi’s words “recoding and improvising Shakespeare!” Trivedi writes: “The Indian

intelligentsia, however, still under a colonial hangover, could only accept Shakespeare as

either, pure and pristine, or bowdlerized and indigenized.”

The next level of engagement, with Gulzaar’s 1981 film Angoor, was a turning point, since it

was a complete “indianization” of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of errors. Trivedi writes: “The

only way of being “faithful” to Shakespeare, in the intercultural context, it seems, is to

relocate him fully. It led to a Shakespeare transformed, expropriated, localized, but one that

was paradoxically true.”

As far as Bollywood is concerned, it is Bhardwaj’s Maqbool and Omkara which take

Bollywood to its next level of engagement with Shakespeare. Trivedi writes:

This kind of re-visioning that adds to and expands the canonical texts leads to the fourth and current stage in the engagement with, by now, a globalized bard, which is of a post colonial confidence to “play around” with and deconstruct Shakespeare for our own needs (Trivedi 2007).

An introduction to Vishal Bhardwaj

When Indian Filmmaker, Vishal Bhardwaj, first watched Akiro Kurasawa’s thrown of blood

(1957) little did he know that it was based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He fell in love with

the plot and immediately saw it being played out on the complex fabric of Mumbai’s

underworld. Drawing on Macbeth, with overtones of Coppola’s Godfather, in 2003, he made

Maqbool (meaning acceptance in Urdu). Bharadwaj not only directed it, but also co-

produced it, wrote the script, screenplay, dialogues and importantly composed the music

for the film. Bhardwaj, had started his career as a harmonium player for local Ghazal singers

and was known as a popular music composer in the industry until before got into film

making in 2000. Maqbool was Bhardwaj’s second film as a filmmaker released in 2003.

While it was not a box office hit, it was the recipient of the International Indian Film

Academy award and Bangkok International Film Festival award with positive reviews in

western media.

Drawn to Shakespeare, he made Omkara (Othello) in 2006, based in rural Central India,

Uttar Pradesh. The film explores the greed for power, jealousy, passion and betrayal,

emotions in Shakespeare’s plays that Bhardwaj terms “universal” and “applicable to any

culture and society”. The film was a box office hit and internationally well received. It was

showcased at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and was selected to be screened at the Cairo

International Film Festival, where Bhardwaj was awarded for Best Artistic Contribution in

Cinema of a Director. The film also won three awards at the Kara Film Festival, an award at

the Asian Festival of First Films, three National Film Awards, and seven Filmfare Awards in

India.

Research Questions

This paper answers the following research questions in order to make the above stated

abstract:

1. In what way and to what extent does Bhardwaj appropriate Shakespeare’s original

text into Maqbool? What are the points of departure?

2. What sort of Bollywood tropes does Bhardwaj use to convey a Shakespearean plot to

an Indian audience?

3. Does Bhardwaj’s work count as a cross over, international or transnational cinema?

An analysis of Maqbool – Departures from the original text and “Bollywoodization”

In Poonam Trivedi’s paper “Filmi” Shakespeare published in 2007 she writes that Bhardwaj

was keen to sell Maqbool as a commercial entity and shied away from marketing its

affiliation to Shakespeare, instead he only referred to it as “a loose adaptation” of

Shakespeare’s Macbeth (which don’t appear in the official movie posters), in order to not

make it too daunting for an audience ignorant of Shakespeare’s plays (Trivedi 2007).

Bhardwaj himself explains his appropriation:

But my interpretation of Shakespeare is not textbookish. When put in a school’s context even the most exciting story seems sterile... Macbeth is such a melodramatic play! I have tried to be true to the play’s spirit rather than the original text. The play’s essence is guilt and its denial (Jha 2004).

This paper analyses three important ways that Bhardwaj has Bollywoodized the original text

in Maqbool. First, by setting it in Mumbai’s underworld, an exciting terrain with Bollywood

audiences (with contemporary gangster films like Ram Gopal Verma’s Satya and Company);

Second, by weaving in communal tensions faced by the Muslim identity, which is a very real

and sensitive issue in India; and Third, by incorporating Bollywood music sequences as a

sound bridge to draw and Indian audience to watch Shakespeare.

Maqbool is set in the underworld of Mumbai, notorious for its high yielding power in

politics, business and law and order of the city. The underworld in Maqbool has a stake in

everything – from the Bollywood film industry to a range of illegal businesses. At the outset,

you are made to feel that you are entering a world that functions on a different code of

ethics. As Moinik Biswas writes:

The significant moral shift for Maqbool is that one is no longer lamenting the degeneration of a legitimate order, but an order within the underworld. The Mumbai Macbeth violates the law of the criminal regime itself; there is no moral ground above ground, the outside only sends punishment, retribution in the form of the police. The country, the way of life mourned in Maqbool is one that has fallen from this fallen state (M. Biswas n.d.).

The underworld family, in which the story is set, belongs to a Muslim minority in India,

exercising its authority on a Hindu majority in Mumbai. The 1992 riots between the Hindus

and Muslims in Mumbai led to the death of 900 people in that year (S. Biswas 2011). The

popular sentiment that was said to be used by the Hindus used to instigate Muslims was

that Mumbai didn’t really belong to them. In one of the striking scenes, the lead character,

Abbaji, a Muslim don, is being requested by a weapons dealer to accept a smuggling deal

that would afford him the luxury of settling down anywhere in the world. Abbaji says, “But

Mumbai is my Mashauka (my beloved) and it cannot be traded for any amount of money”.

Through this perhaps Bhardwaj is trying to make a larger point about who belongs to

Mumbai.

In Maqbool, the characters Abbaji (Duncan), Maqbool (Macbeth), Nimmi (Lady Macbeth),

Kaka (Banquo), Guddu (Fleance) and the avenger Boti (Macduff) appear to be at first, the

familiar characters of Macbeth. But Bhardwaj gives some interesting twists to their roles,

departing from the text of Macbeth. For instance, right at the first scene of the film, the

weird sisters or the witches are incorporated as two corrupt policemen, Pandit and Purohit,

who are prophesying the bloody future of Mumbai by drawing the city’s horoscope on a

fogged window. This brilliant imagery is something that all Indians can identify with, for

there is almost always, in every family, an uncle or relative who practices astrology as a

hobby and charts horoscopes for family members, guiding them on impending dooms.

These predictions, at first laughed at by Maqbool, start coming true. Towards the end, just

like the weird sisters in Macbeth, it is these policemen, who in their seemingly playful

predictions drive Maqbool to actually murder Abbaji.

Bhardwaj changes several aspects of the original text to justify the plot in the Indian

context. For instance, Nimmi (Lady Macbeth) is actually Lady Duncan, since she is Abbaji’s

mistress. Abbaji is given a daughter, Sameera, unlike the original text in which Duncan has

two sons, making for some very crucial roles played by the women. The motivations for

killing Abbaji in both Nimmi and Maqbool are different from each others’. For Nimmi, who is

the age of Abbaji’s daughter, falling in love with Maqbool is not just an act of love. It is more

a desperate last attempt to find release from a life she feels trapped in. If Maqbool kills

Abbaji, she would at last, be free. Maqbool’s own motivations to kill Abbaji are instigated by

Nimmi. She makes him realise that Guddu, Abbaji’s to be son-in-law, might be the new heir

to the throne of Abbaji, threatening Maqbool’s rightful inheritance. Nimmi’s forbidden love

affair with Maqbool is a departure from Macbeth’s text, making his reasons for killing Abbaji

more complext and compelling than Shakespeare’s own motivations penned down for

Macbeth, which was solely the pursuit of power. In Maqbool, the question remains with us

till the end, about which was the bigger reason for Maqbool to kill Abbaji – The love for

Nimmi or the chance to become the don of Mumbai. We also see Maqbool through the

film, slowly being ensnared by Nimmi, undergoes a transformative change. What originally

starts with a confused Maqbool not knowing how to respond to Nimmi’s meaningful glances

and out rightly flirtatious remarks (In one scene she says: I have 12 moles in my body.

Would you like to see where they appear?), eventually becomes a man who can do just

about anything for her. At the last second before Maqbool fires the gunshot at Abbaji, there

is a moment of hesitation, which passes, when he thinks of old Abbaji making love to

Nimmi, and overpowered by disgust and anger he pulls the trigger.

Maqbool’s relationship with Nimmi changes even more after murdering Abbaji. Their guilt

draws them closer to each other. In one scene Maqbool gets a call in the middle of the night

from his men who inform him that all hell as broken loose. Maqbool is about to leave to go

fix matters, until he finds Nimmi crying and talking to her pregnant womb like a mad

woman. Maqbool, incapacitated by Nimmi, tells his men he cannot come and hangs up to go

console Nimmi and ease her pain. At that point, it is clear that Maqbool’s priorities have

changed and all he wants is a happy life with her.

Bhardwaj gives Nimmi and Maqbool a child unlike the original text, but the father of the

child is left ambiguous until the end, leaving you wondering if it is Abbaji or Maqbool. After

Nimmi dies of post delivery complications, Maqbool goes back to the hospital to fetch his

child. He has one last card left, and that is to flee the country with his baby. Just as he is

about to enter the glass door, with a gun in one hand, he finds Guddu and Sameera already

there to pick up the baby. His gun is ready to shoot as he watches the nurse hand the baby

to them and how their faces glow with joy while adoring the child. At that point Maqbool

has a change of heart. His eyes fill up, staining the glass door he was resting his head on with

his sweat and tears, and he drops his shawl and his gun on the floor. Maqbool walks out

slowly, without a reason to run any longer. The game is over. Outside the hospital, he is shot

by Boti (Mcduff) and he falls, in slow motion, without any resistance, almost grateful for the

release. The film ends with the camera panning from Maqbool’s face to the endless blue sky

he now faces.

Bhardwaj’s Macbeth is much more complex in terms of the human relationships between

the characters and fleshes out these multiple layers far more evocatively than the original

text.

Song and dance sequences

Bhardwaj who started his career as a music composer before becoming a film director, has

made the music for Maqbool while Gulzar, India’s most famous lyricist penned the lyrics for

the album. Out of a total of eleven songs, seven songs have vocals with lyrics and the rest

are instrumental scores that play in the background, enhancing crucial shifts in the moods of

the film. The song that received the most acclaim was Jhin min Jhini, which is a wedding

dance number performed at the wedding preparations leading upto the wedding of Abbaji’s

daughter, Sameera, to Guddu. The song portrays the strange relationship between Nimmi

and Sameera, as they dance together. At moments one feels that Nimmi is like a sister to

Sameera, sharing her joys and teasing her. At other occasions, Nimmi substitutes for a

mother (Sameera is motherless) by helping with Sameera’s wedding preparations. At a

scene during the song, Nimmi suddenly becomes pensive. The feeling of envy and longing is

unmistakable in her as she has longed for such a wedding to one that she loves, possibly

Maqbool. As the song ends, Abbaji enters with his new mistress, a hot new entrant in the

Bollywood film industry. Nimmi and Maqbool exchange glances as Abbaji, who measures no

taller than his mistress’s shoulder, dances a limping old dance, bobbing his aged head as his

eyes look seductively at her. The acting is brilliant and Abbaji succeeds in disgusting the

audience.

Other songs in Maqbool are used to show the shifting dynamics of the relationship between

Nimmi and Maqbool. The first song, Rubaru, is used when Maqbool and Nimmi are walking

to the dargah, a place of worship for the Sufis. It is the first time that Nimmi has planted the

seed of murder in Maqbool’s head. In the background traditional Sufi singers are singing the

praise of Allah. The emotions of love and surrender are running high. In one of the scenes of

the song the Sufis are singing, Ek masoomi dil ki tajveez hai, ishq mein jaan dede to badi

cheez hai, meaning, “it is an innocent heart’s wish that to give up one’s life in love is the

greatest thing one can do.” The song ends in a high, with the sufis singing, “yeh zindagi kuch

bhi nahin, yeh bandage kuch bhi nahin” meaning, “(without you) this life means nothing,

there is no meaning to this bondage” as the worshippers in the dargah are twirling madly to

the increasing momentum of the song. The lyrics are telling of Maqbool’s state of mind as

he begins to see reason in killing Abbaji.

In the final scene of Maqbool, after Nimmi dies on Maqbool’s lap, he hears the police

breaking into his house to get him as he places his head on Nimmi’s body one last time,

before he prepares to run. In the background we hear a beautiful folk song being sung by

Ustad Sultan, “Listen, O breeze, softly and sweetly blow…following my heart I offer up my

heart to you…” The same song plays in the end after Maqbool is shot. We hear the sounds

of the traffic on the road fading as the song begins and we see Maqbool, fallen on the road,

facing the endless sky.

It is a commonly known truth that tragedies seldom make box office hits in Bollywood. The

Indian movie goer is someone who goes to the cinema after a hard day’s work, to be

entertained, much less come back with a tragic hangover to add to his own personal woes in

life. Bhardwaj uses the music as a sound bridge to help the audience connect to

Shakespeare.

Are Maqbool and Omkara transnational or national?

“It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation. I cling obstinately to

the notion that something can be gained (Rushdie 1991).”

According to the Oxford English dictionary, adaptation is the process of modifying a thing so

as to suit new conditions or the alteration of a dramatic composition to suit a different

audience. Appropriation on the other hand, is the making of a thing private property,

whether another’s or (as now commonly) one’s own; taking as one’s own or to one’s own

use (Hodgdon 2005).

I would argue that Bhardwaj has appropriated Shakespeare in his films through the method

of intercultural revision. Authors and film critics Dennis Kenny and Li Lan Yong, in their 2010

book, Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, write:

“Intercultural revision refers specifically to those Asian performances that have deliberately chosen to highlight the difference between the Shakespearean material and the time and place of its current representation, adapting the text to a foreign mode of performance or a

signified meaning that in the West would normally be considered outside the concerns of the play. Intercultural revision estranges the Shakespeare play in a Brechtian manner in order to create a new text, a third text, which is neither the original nor the estranging device but the result of their performative interaction (Lan 2010).”

The best known intercultural practitioners in Europe, French stage director Ariane

Mnouchkine and English film maker Peter Brook, have made some interesting and rather

controversial interpretations of Shakespeare. According to Dennis Kennedy and Li Lan Yong,

their work, admittedly powerful and revelatory, has been often criticised for its insensitivity

to the politics of cultural appropriation: in both cases the director has assumed the right to

acquire, essentialize, alter, or distort the attributes of traditional (and sometimes religious)

performance modes of Japan, China, India, or certain African countries, ignoring the unequal

power relationships behind their actions, dismissing accusations of cultural imperialism on

the grounds that art is exempt from such charges (Lan 2010).

Bhardwaj himself admits: “My intention is not just to adapt the play. My intention is to

adapt it and make it look like an original work. After a point, I forget that Shakespeare has

written this. I start believing that I have, 400 years ago, so it is my birthright to change

everything” (Sen 2006).

I would argue that Bhardwaj has created third texts of Shakespeare’s works, appropriating

the stories as his own. Maqbool and Omkara have both been labelled by critics as

“crossover cinema” (Trivedi 2007). Maqbool was produced within a budget of Rs

30,000,000 or USD 600,000. It was produced and distributed by Kaleidoscope Entertainment

Pvt Ltd, one of India’s leading television and film production houses. Omkara on the other

hand was produced on a much larger budget of USD 1.4 million by Indian filmmaker Kumar

Mangat Pathak and it grossed USD 16,466,144 worldwide. Production wise, both Maqbool

and Omkara were home productions with a Bollywood caste and made for an Indian

audience. One could argue that apart from the basis of the storylines being drawn from

Shakespeare, there is nothing foreign about these films; nothing transnational. Omkara and

Maqbool are very much a part of Indian national cinema today, only created by making

intercultural revisions to a western script. In that sense, it can be loosely called “Crossover

Cinema”.

Conclusion

Both Maqbool and Omkara are the first Indian film adaptations of Shakespeare to have

gained international recognition and that are discussed in Daniel Rosenthal's 100

Shakespeare Films (2007), published by the British Film Institute. It is obvious that western

critics have not only accepted a “Bollywoodized” Shakespeare but even applaud it.

Yet, one can’t help but notice that Maqbool, which is Bhardwaj’s critically more acclaimed

film, manages to attract lesser media attention and lesser success at the box office when

compared to Omkara. After making Maqbool, Bhardwaj must have realised the missing

ingredients that need to go into making a commercially successful film – Mainstream actors,

Bollywood “item” dance numbers and the “dishoom dishoom” bollywood fight sequences.

His formula was right because Omkara was the box office hit. Maybe the real threat to the

quality of work from directors like Vishal Bhardwaj, going forward, is being confined to the

hegemony of Bollywood itself. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha has observed:

“While Bollywood exists for, and prominently caters to, a diasporic audience of Indians, and

sometimes (as, for example, with Bhangra-rap) exports into India, the Indian cinema —

much as it would wish to tap this "non-resident" audience — is only occasionally successful

in doing so, and is in almost every instance able to do so only when it, so to say,

Bollywoodizes itself . . . (Rajadhyaksha 2003)”

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