Chapter 1

Introduction

Translations and Adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays vis-a-vis Bengal

Shakespeare, beyond doubt, was used as a tool by the British Empire, being taught in

schools, colleges and universities across the world as a means of promoting the English

language and the agenda of British imperialism. The mode of English education that

started to enlighten the Bengali intelligentsia during the nineteenth century definitely had

Shakespeare as a means to further the colonial invasion. With the passing of time it has

come to influence literature of all nations secular, non-secular and multicultural. Indian

literature in general and Bengali literature in particular has also been influenced, directly

or indirectly by Shakespeare. However, the most obvious reflection of Shakespeare in

Bengal has been through the evergrowing number of translations and adaptations of his

plays into the vernacular.

The adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays started as early as the Restoration period

with playwrights like Nahum Tate and William Davenant bringing about subtle shifts in

plot, addition and subtraction of characters and setting to music Shakespeare’s dramas.

The principle reason why it was done so then (as also now to some extent) was, as Ben

Jonson stated, because of his universality: “He was not of an age, but for all time!”

(Preface to Shakespeare. First Folio, 1623.) However, another prime reason has been

pointed out by Jean Mardsen when she says that Shakespeare remains available to

subsequent ages to translate, adapt and appropriate as one wishes; in any language, in

any culture. It is possibly in his cultural availability that his true value, his true

timelessness lies. Mardsen notes, "... each new generation attempts to redefine

Shakespeare’s genius in contemporary terms, projecting its desires and anxieties onto his

work” (1).
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It is a truth universally accepted that Shakespeare himself was an active adaptor,

imitator, appropriator, delving deep into mythology, fairy tales and folklore, leave alone

Ovid, Plutarch, Holinshed, in order to seek something meaningful for the stage. It is also

known that towards the end of his career as a dramatist he co-authored The Two Noble

Kinsmen and Henry VIII together with John Fletcher. One cannot but agree with Julie

Sanders who correctly claims that perhaps a useful way of beginning to think about

translation/ adaptation/' appropriation is as a form of collaboration, across time and

sometimes across culture or language (47).

Shakespeare translation/ adaptation/ appropriation started in Bengal in the middle

of the nineteenth century. Bengal during that period faced a problem. It was not enough

to give the general sense of what had been said in one language - the English language,

but also to preserve the thought, the nuance, the meaning of the words and an indication

of the formal rules of the language - which includes, of course, grammar and syntax.

While England only had to cope with the threats of invasion, foreign levies and malice

domestic, and religious turmoil, Bengal in the middle of the nineteenth century had just

recovered, if at all, from the cruel and lecherous Nawabs, and a virtual lack of fair or

rigorous administration (in whose place there was only exaction and torture and

uncertainty), which was to be supplied by the victorious East India Company.

Translation of Shakespeare in Bengal started amidst such a situation.

The administrative chaos that the East India Company in the person of Robert

Clive inherited, made it impossible to have the sort of pidgin that eased the ways of

commerce, serve as a language of administration. That is why it was necessary to have

at least some indigenes learn sufficient English to communicate with the new ruling class

and become an underclass by itself, while it was also required to have translations,

between Bengali and English, and for this it was necessary to have some people who

could speak, write and understand both the colloquial and idiomatic forms of the
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languages concerned, with a greater degree of proficiency than the market place

demanded. It was this newfound situation that made Bengalis turn to the English

language. Now, the Renaissance in Bengal had paved the way for English education.

And so, when the Bengalis started mastering the English language, who else would they

turn to when it comes to English literature, but Shakespeare?

The difficulty of understanding Shakespeare in Bengal, a mere 200-250 years

after the playwright died in England, is therefore compounded by the fact that

Elizabethan English had to be translated into late nineteenth-century Bengali (leaving

aside the untraceable Bengali text of The Tempest of 1809 by Claude Monkton) and after

translation, the Bengali reader or member of the audience had to understand the thought

behind the play, which entailed in turn, a thorough knowledge not merely of

Shakespearian times in England, but also on the continent, the histories of people and
*

places narrated, the socio-economic contexts and the great changes afoot. The fact that

Bengal was having its Renaissance was more of a hindrance than a help, since the

Renaissance in the West, with the Reformation, whose “rump” Shakespeare rode on, was

finding the pagan Truths in every man’s life, and of Protest against Authority and

pointing out its feet of clay, whereas in Bengal it was a wholesale movement away from

the roots, and to cast new shadows.

The question of casting new shadow arises because it was not enough to translate

Shakespeare into Bengali for the audience or even the readers to understand the

language; it was essential to find a template, an interface or even a gestalt, which would

be equally intelligible and persuasive for the Bengali psyche. This is perhaps the biggest

reason why direct translation of Shakespeare into Bengali (particularly before

independence) has not always succeeded, whereas adaptations of Shakespeare, be it in

the entirety of the plot or treatment or technique, or parts of it, have always been glorious

if not everlasting.
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It has been opined, in a masterly paper “Shakespeare in Indian Languages” by

Sisir Kumar Das thus:

In India ... Shakespeare translation began when English education

was more or less firmly established and a sizeable population of

English-knowing people had emerged, and Shakespeare had

become a cultural icon for the elite .... It is ironical that the

influential section of the English-educated community that was

keen to see Shakespeare to remain in his pristine purity and not to

be contaminated by translations, undertook the responsibility of

translations (112-13).

Sisir Kumar Das further goes on to narrate that the translated works were never

treated with respect and that the most educated Indian did not require translations of

Shakespeare as they could enjoy it in the original. These translations present both the

literary and social facets of modem Indian literature and playwrights like Michael

Madhusudan Datta, Venugopala Charyar, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, M. V. Malkani all

took Shakespeare as some form of model or the other.

But there was a difficulty. A shift from the haphazard and stylized jatra to a

formed and structured five-act play was taking place. If the situations in Shakespeare

could not be mapped onto Indian circumstances exactly, then there was always

adaptation, the over-arching practice of “intertextuality” as Julia Kristeva calls it, to

generate the interconnectedness or amalgamation which produced a typical Bengali

whole (for a detailed idea of adaptation see Sanders 17-25).

Thus, to paraphrase Sisir Kumar Das once again, Shakespeare existed in India in

two distinctly different and hierarchical figures, the Shakespeare of the English language

and the Shakespeare of the Indian incarnations, which we would call adaptation.
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The first Shakespeare existed exclusively in the class room and in

the study of the English-educated Indian. The other Shakespeare,

who naturally had a wider area of operation, was both welcome

and resisted, admired and subverted .... Indians who wanted to

retain the dramatic forms adopted a different strategy. They

retained all the external features of Shakespearean plays but did

not care for their moral or philosophical aspects. They wanted to

create a new drama of entertainment, a drama of spectacle and

grandeur, which culminated in the Parsi theatre (116 ... 19).

An attempt has been made to survey the existing materials relating to translations

and adaptations of Shakespeare that survive in West Bengal, and from the

comprehensive list, all such translations and adaptations in the dramatic form which are

still in print or are in the libraries in and around the city of Kolkata, have been chosen for

the present dissertation. The list is as follows:

Antony and Cleopatra Antony and Cleopatra Debendranath Basu 1919

Antony and Cleopatra Antony and Cleopatra Mafiz Chowdhury 1992
As You Like It Ananga-Rangini Armada Prasad Basu 1897
As You Like It Moner Moto Saurindramohan Mukhopadhyay 1923
As You Like It As You Like It Sunilkumar Chattopadhyay 1957
The Comedy of Errors Bhramkoutuk Benimadhav Ghosh 1873
Cymbeline Sushila Birsingha Satyendranath Tagore 1868
Cymbeline Cymbeline Saurindramohan Mukhopadhyay 1923
Hamlet Amarsingha Pramathanath Basu 1874
Hamlet Hamlet Chandiprasad Ghosh 1891
Hamlet Hamlet Lalitmohan Adhikari 1893
Hamlet Hariraj Nagendranath Chowdhury 1897
Hamlet Hamlet Ajit Gangopadhyay 1966
Hamlet Denmarker Rajkumar Abu Shahriyar 1976
Hamlet Hamlet Shakti Biswas 2002
Julius Caesar Julius Caesar Jyotirindranath Tagore 1907
King Lear Raja Lear Jatindramohan Ghosh 1902
King Lear Dharma ba Ratnapuri Surendrachandra Basu 1921
Macbeth Rudrapal Haralal Roy 1874
Macbeth Macbeth Taraknath Mukhopadhyay 1875
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Macbeth Kamabir Nagendranath Basu 1885

Macbeth Macbeth Girishchandra Ghosh 1893
Macbeth Witches Scenes Rabindranath Tagore 1870s
Macbeth Macbeth Munindranath Ghosh 1920
Macbeth Macbeth Nirendranath Roy 1952
Macbeth Macbeth Utpal Dutt 1954
Macbeth Macbeth Jatindranath Sengupta 1954
Macbeth Macbeth Shyamakanta Das 1978
Macbeth Macbeth Dattatreya Dutt 2003
Macbeth o Julius Caesar Macbeth o Julius Caesar Basanta Roy 1964
Measure for Measure Binimoy Birendranath Roy 1909
Measure for Measure Ritimoto Saurindramohan Mukhopadhyay 1920
The Merchant of Venice Bhanumati Chittobilas Hurro Chunder Ghosh 1853
The Merchant of Venice Saudagar Bhupendranath Bandyopadhyay 1915
The Merchant of Venice Venicer Banik Saurindramohan Mukhopadhyay 1923
The Merchant of Venice Merchant of Venice Asutosh Ghosh 1925
The Merchant of Venice Venice Banik Mahadeb Dey 1926
The Merchant of Venice Suralata Natak Pyarilal Mukhopadhyay 1934
The Merchant of Venice Merchant of Venice Sunilkumar Chattopadhyay 1953
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Jahanara Satishchandra Chattopadhyay 1903
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Naidagh-Nishith-Swapna Nabinchandra Sen 1910
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Kuhaki Debendranath Basu 1920
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Chaitali Rater Swapna Utpal Dutt 1964
Othello Bhimsingha Tarini Charan Pal 1882
Othello Othello Kaliprasanna Chattopadhyay 1894
Othello Rudrasen Nanilal Bandyopadhyay 1906
Othello Othello Debendranath Basu 1919
Othello Othello Sunilkumar Chattopadhyay 1964
Othello Othello Munir Chowdhury &. Kabir Chowdhury 1984
Romeo and Juliet Charumukh Chittohara Hurro Chundur Ghosh 1864
Romeo and Juliet Ajay Singha Bilasbati Jogendra Ghosh 1878
Romeo and Juliet Romeo-Juliet Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay 1895
Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet Utpal Dutt 1964
The Merry Wives of Windsor Nabin Tapaswini Dinabandhu Mitra 1863
The Tempest Nalini Basanta Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay 1868
The Tempest Prakriti Natak Charuchandra Mukhopadhyay 1882 1
The Tempest Jhanjha Nagendraprasad Sarbadhikari 1913
Twelfth Night Dwadash Rajani Pashupati Bhattacharya 1923
Twelfth Night Ichchhetithir Galpo Dattatreya Dutt 1997
Two Gentlemen of Verona Veronar Bhadrojugal Saurindramohan Mukhopadhyay 1923
The Winter's Tale Rani Tamalini Dhanadachar Mitra 1914

The second chapter deals with a brief survey of criticism published in Bengali in the

different journals. The schism between a play as a readable text and a theatre-text did not
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exist at the end of the nineteenth century or even at the beginning of the twentieth

century because when a drama was unworthy of the stage it was silently cast aside.

Before independence, the thrust of criticism was more at stage productions and not as

texts on the printed page. (Prof. Ananda Lai and Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri had taken the

immense task of arranging chronologically the stage productions of Shakespeare in

English and Bengali in their book Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage.)

Though there can be no doubt that the primary objective of a drama is

presentation on stage and that it is only by such means that it attains completion, yet

there is very little criticism of the translator at the beginning before Girishchandra

Ghosh’s Macbeth in 1893. It was only after independence that criticism of translations

and adaptations in Bengali received true impetus and the Bangiya Shakespeare Parishad,

established in 1951, played a major role.

Parichay, a quarterly magazine started publishing criticism of Shakespeare

translation and several literati of the time expressed their views through Parichay and

some such magazines and journals published from time to time. One notable publication

was a booklet entitled Shakespeare in India, published in 1964, the four hundredth birth

centenary of Shakespeare by the National Library.

The subsequent chapters divide the translations and adaptations across various

timeline. The third chapter traces the beginning of Shakespeare translation/ adaptation in

Bengal with Hurro Chunder Ghosh’s Bhanumati Chittobilas in 1853 and continues till

1893, before Girishchandra Ghosh translated and staged Macbeth.

Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth occupies a cardinal position not so much in

Shakespeare translation as much as in Shakespeare criticism in Bengal as it was one of

the few plays where the critics have acclaimed Ghosh as a master craftsman botli as a

translator and an actor and yet the audience rejected it (Lai 98-99. See also Mukheijee

81-82). Thus a mature and independent criticism of translation was bom.

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The fourth chapter begins with a discussion of Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth

and ends with 1912; 8th February being the day on which the actor, director, playwright,

manager, couturier, property master and even impresario rolled into one, died.

The fifth chapter entitled “A Period of Uncertainty” relates primarily to the pre­

independence years when the fever of nationalism and the associated political turmoil,

forced all men of letters to direct their attention to more earthly matters than that of the

aesthetic.

The sixth chapter refers to the continuing trend of Shakespeare translation since

India became independent. The works of stalwarts like Nirendranath Roy, Sunilkumar

Chattopadhyay, Utpal Dutt, and Dattatreya Dutt reflect a remarkable focus primarily on

translation. The renderings have become more organized in their structural pattern and

are written both for the theatre as well as with the intention of being considered full-

fledged texts in themselves (of course with some exceptions).

Reflect Publications and Tuli Kalam, two publishing houses of Kolkata, had all

the plays translated into Bengali (either by an individual or by several hands) in the

dramatic mode in the 1970s. However, unlike the translations/ adaptations/

appropriations of Boris Pasternak in Russia and Schlegel and Tieck in Germany, neither

of these two publishing houses gave any importance to the quality of translations at all

and merely told the stories of Shakespeare’s plays in dramatic format. A brief glimpse

into some of the translations quoting a passage or two establishes the statement.

It has been possible to trace three texts translated by Bangladeshi authors and all

of them have been analyzed in the dissertation in an effort to judge the qualitative of the

Bengali diction in a different country speaking a similar tongue.

Texts that are not in the dramatic form are left out of this present list including

Gurudas Hazra’s first attempt at writing Shakespeare in prose, as a story - Romeo o

Julieter Monohor Upakhyan written in 1848 following the tradition of Charles and Mary
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Lamb and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bhrantibilas; however, the latter has been further

adapted for the stage in 1980 (Lai 113). The list also excludes the works of Ashok Guha

who translated as many as twenty-seven plays into story form mainly for children

publishing all of them individually.

The dissertation discusses each text in detail, pointing out the variations that have

taken place with respect to the SL text. The poetic as well as the dramatic qualities in

each of the individual texts have also been identified. Attempt has also been made,

consciously, to be judgmental, showing how successful a translation or adaptation is, or

has been, according to both the little criticism that is available as well as my point of

view.

Though more than sixty individual texts have been found and used to draw a

reasonable conclusion, a few more remain untraced primarily because the libraries, in

which they survive in brittle form, have misplaced them. The present dissertation does

not include those play-texts that have not been published in book form.

Before parting, so that the dissertation can speak for itselfj a brief note on the

spelling conventions and the transliterations used is required. While quoting from the

Bengali texts, it has often been found that some words have been spelt incorrectly or

there has been some printing mistake. In fact misprints galore in the printed Bengali texts

but instead of correcting them I have retained the original spelling, excepting in a few

cases in which emendation is absolutely necessary. Some of the corrections are noted in

the (first) discussion of Hurro Chunder Ghosh’s Merchant of Venice.

The Bengali names typed in English are simple transliterations. When the English

name begins with “V” and the Bengali translation also retains the word such as “Venice”

or “Verona”, the abbreviations too have been done accordingly. On the other hand, for

“Bhanumati” or “Bhimsingha” the standard transliteration has been followed.