Chapter 9

Transculturating Shakespeare
Vishal Bhardwaj’s Mumbai Macbeth

Ana Cristina Mendes

This chapter foregrounds transculturation as a cultural practice performed through

adaptation with reference to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool, a 2003 adaptation of
Macbeth set in Mumbai that doubles as a gangster film. This is the first film in the
director’s Shakespearean trilogy, alongside his cross-cultural adaptations of Othello
and Hamlet: Omkara (2006) and Haider (2014), respectively. While Bhardwaj’s first
Shakespearean adaptation did not perform as well at the box office as Omkara and
especially Haider, based on the Ur-text of Western theatrical adaptation, it was
greeted by marked critical interest, probably to a greater degree than the later ad-
aptations. Transculturation in Maqbool works through intermedia and intercultural
exchanges: intermedia because the film, like all adaptations, crosses boundaries
between media, specifically two composite media, such as theatre and film;1 and
intercultural because this film is paradigmatic of an adaptation that crosses cul-
tures. Thematically, two aspects inform processes of cultural recontextualization in
Bhardwaj’s film: the Hindi film industry’s fascination with the Muslim-dominated
Mumbai underworld, and, most relevantly, the trope of corruption. The ways these
intersecting themes undergird the transculturation of Macbeth in India make
Bhardwaj’s work a particularly interesting case of Shakespearean adaptation.
The plot of Maqbool is loosely based on Macbeth. There are thematic conti-
nuities with the play’s focus on power, greed, sin, lust and familial devotion, but
Bhardwaj’s adaptation introduces changes to the precursor text to make its charac-
ters and main events more significant for Indian audiences. The director presents
his artistic vision thus: “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

1. Adaptation scholars have been charting the centrality of broader questions of intermedi- ality
to processes of adaptation in recent years. See, for example, Robert Stam’s preface to his and
Raengo’s Companion to Literature and Film (2004: xiv), and the contribution by André
Gaudreault and Philippe Marion to that companion, as well as Punzi (2007); Voigts-Virchow
(2009); Lowe (2010); McGill (2014).

https://doi.org/10.1075/fillm.9.10men
© 2018 John Benjamins Publishing Company
166 Ana Cristina Mendes

denial” (quoted in Jha 2004). The backdrop of the film is the present-day Mumbai
underworld, which is almost a character in itself, reaching from the Bollywood
film industry to various illegal businesses. The character of Maqbool (Macbeth)
is, alongside Kaka (Banquo), the trusted man of Jahangir Khan (aka Abba Ji or
“revered father”, King Duncan), a controlling underworld don,2 to whom Maqbool
has always been loyal. The storyline gets more dramatic when two police officers,
Pandit and Purohit (also on Abba Ji’s payroll, revealing how law and order figures
are corrupt in Macbeth’s new setting), forecast that his right-hand man Maqbool
will soon take over from Abba Ji as the current master of the Mumbai underworld.
Adding to the intricacies of the Shakespearean-based plot, Nimmi, Abba Ji’s
mistress (a composite of Lady Macbeth and Lady Duncan) is in love with Maqbool,
who is in love with her too. Involved in a forbidden love affair, Maqbool’s loyalty is
tested when Nimmi instigates him to murder Abba Ji. She encourages his ambitions
so that he can succeed as the rightful don of the underworld instead of Guddu
(Fleance), Abba Ji’s soon-to-be son-in-law, engaged to his daughter Sameera (a
female version of Shakespeare’s Malcolm). Abba Ji (Duncan) has to be killed so that
Maqbool (Macbeth) can take his place. This also represents for Maqbool’s lover a
way of escaping unhappiness and her marriage of convenience to a much older man.
As planned by the couple and predicted by the corrupt police officers-cum-astrolo-
gers Pandit and Purohit – who thus perform a role similar to the Three Witches or
Weird Sisters in Macbeth – Maqbool takes over from Abba Ji. The antihero kills his
former father figure in a dramatic scene that leaves the audience uncertain of his
motivations: the quest for power and the ambition of becoming the don of Mumbai, or
his love for Nimmi and the pursuit of happiness, or perhaps what drives him is
an uneasy mix of both. Mounting feelings of guilt and suspicion loom over the
lovers and they meet with tragedy: Nimmi dies of post-partum complications (the
identity of her baby’s father is never disclosed) and Maqbool is shot outside the
hospital by the avenging Boti (Lord Macduff, the thane of Fife).
The continuities and departures between Macbeth and Maqbool are obvious
from this brief synopsis. The combined meaning of these continuities, similarities
and changes adds to the effectiveness of recontextualization. An extensive list of
points of contact (which would catalogue shared themes, figures and forms) and
the various instances of disruptions between the “source” text and the adaptation
beyond those already mentioned feels redundant for demonstrating that Maqbool
is a recontextualization of Shakespeare’s play. The purpose of this chapter is to

2. In the context of discussions on the representation of organized crime in India, in particular

the depiction of the Mumbai underworld in Bollywood gangster movies, the conventional lan-
guage of Hollywood representations of Italian-American organized crime families, such as “ma-
fia,” “don,” and “mobster,” is characteristically used to identify character roles and relationships.
 Chapter 9. Transculturating Shakespeare 167

draw attention to the dynamic cultural conditions that determine the film’s pro-
duction as a concrete cultural object via intertextual recontextualization, rather
than to examine the continuities and deviations between Shakespeare’s play and
Bhardwaj’s film. A polycentric, dialogic analysis of Maqbool as a transcultural
adaptation of Macbeth is what this chapter aims to contribute. This examination
follows earlier readings of the film as primarily a Shakespearean adaptation con-
ducted by, for example, Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, who hail Maqbool as
“a powerful example of a local appropriation that troubles the simple binary that
Shakespeare must always represent a univocal Western tradition” (2008: 5), and
Carolyn Jess-Cooke who argues that Bhardwaj’s film “re-configure[s] Scottish-ness
as a somewhat quaint ideal of localisation through which a post-colonial imper-
ative can be articulated” (2006: 174).
The thematic anchor of this chapter is the trope of corruption as my arguments
are based on two senses of this ambivalent term: corruption as dishonest or fraudu-
lent conduct by those in power, such as that involving bribery; and corruption as a
mode of adaptation, a synonym of contamination via intertextuality and interme-
diality, a “mashup” of an “original” or “source” text. In our “age of contamination”,
as David Greetham argues, it is expected that “one mode of discourse (political,
religious, musical, philosophical, and so on) leaks into or infects another, so that we
experience both at the same time” (2010: 1). Adaptations are, in this sense, contam-
inated or corrupted texts; contamination can occur between creation and reception,
between process and text, and between genres (Hutcheon [2006] 2013: 8–9); the
new contexts that transcultural adaptations produce add to this contamination
the attendant intercultural hybridities. Acutely aware of its own constructedness
and intertextual, interfilmic layers, the screenplay written by Bhardwaj and Abbas
Tyrewala defies categorization and blurs genre boundaries: not only is Maqbool an
adaptation of Macbeth, adding to the long lineage of transcultural Shakespearean
adaptations in general, and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in India, in particu-
lar, it is also a postmodern self-reflexive cinematic narrative that draws on contem-
porary cultural iconography, combining the conventions of the Bollywood gangster
film and a sub-genre of Bollywood drama known as Muslim Socials (whose main
difference to Hindi film is that the settings and characters are Muslim).
Besides this latter sense of corruption as textual contamination, inextricably
connected to the artistic movements of postmodernism and post-postmodernism,
the chapter is equally based on the idea of corruption as an ineluctable aspect
of visual artistic creation, essential for understanding the visual as an aesthetic
category, as in Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s concept of “polycentric aesthetics”
(1998: 55). Supplementing the idea of corruption as an overdetermined term, the
logic of co-implication within the workings of the visual, advanced by Shohat and
Stam in their theory of polycentric aesthetics, is active when Maqbool is read by
168 Ana Cristina Mendes

critics as a Bollywood film where Macbeth meets the Hollywood gangster dramas
The Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin
Tarantino, 1994). As with Indian Shakespearean adaptations, gangster dramas in
Bombay popular cinema can be traced back to the silent era of the 1920s. An ex-
tended interfilmic analysis of Maqbool in its relations to Bollywood and Hollywood
gangster films necessarily acknowledges the self-reflexive references to Bollywood
in Bhardwaj’s film, reminiscent of the postmodern self-referentiality to Hollywood
cinema in Pulp Fiction.
Furthermore, the choice of Maqbool’s setting recognizes the extent to which
those references constitute a critique of the Bollywood industry as itself being in
the hands of the underworld. In fact, the police are shown in the film to be in collu-
sion with the underworld whose dons often finance Bollywood, and Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, the thane of Glamis, is changed into the likewise arrogant, but drowned
by guilt Maqbool, a gangster whose sector of activity is Bollywood. On a different
level, an interfilmic analysis involves recognizing Hollywood’s huge influence on
Bollywood, in particular after the economic reforms by the Congress government
in the early 1990s – an influence that is obvious in the very act of coining the
designation “Bollywood,” which only then began to circulate (Mishra 2006). The
popularity and cross-cultural appeal of Shakespearean adaptations relies on famil-
iarity to global audiences, i.e. its social survival. This makes Macbeth, as a tragedy
about corruption and the abuse of power, apt for actualization to cater for specific
representational purposes in a post-millennial Indian cultural context.

Acts of Shakespearean recontextualization

Interest in the expansion of Shakespeare’s iconicity, or in Linda Hutcheon’s phrase,

“the cultural power that has accrued to Shakespeare’s works” (Hutcheon [2006]
2013: 151), through transcultural appropriations and remediations has generated
an entire academic industry of its own, including numerous dedicated panels and
film screenings at conferences (Maqbool was screened at the 2004 conference and
festival “Shakespeare in Asia” at Stanford University) and various publications (re-
cent ones include Cartelli and Rowe 2007, Burnett and Wray 2006, Jackson 2007,
and Huang and Ross 2009). Among the many scholars who have written on the
subject of the transcultural adaptation of Shakespeare’s works, Dennis Kennedy
and Yong Li Lan propose the idea of “intercultural revision” which, in their words,
“estranges the Shakespeare play in a Brechtian manner in order to create a new
text, a third text, which is neither the original nor an estranging device but the
result of their performative interaction” (Kennedy and Yong [2010] 2013: 10).
Linda Hutcheon, while discussing how power differentials between colonizer and
 Chapter 9. Transculturating Shakespeare 169

colonized impact the adaptation process, likewise stresses the newness that comes
out of mingling and blending of boundaries; she observes cases of indigenizing in
former British colonies and the extent to which the cultural power embodied by the
Shakespearean canon “must be adapted into differently historically colonized con-
texts before being transformed into something new” (Hutcheon [2006] 2013: 151).
Poonam Trivedi takes the arguments of newness in indigenizing further and notes
that this “re-visioning […] adds to and expands the canonical texts” and “leads to
the […] current stage in the engagement with, by now, a globalized bard, which is
of a postcolonial confidence to ‘play around’ with and deconstruct Shakespeare for
our own needs” (Trivedi 2007: 153). Similarly, about Une Tempête, an adaptation
of The Tempest by Aimé Césaire, Pier Paolo Frassinelli argues in ways that resonate
with Bhardwaj’s Maqbool that
Shakespeare’s text and cultural capital are not so much destroyed as refashioned,
transculturated, turned into the agents of a transformative process in which the
pre-existing oppositions – between the canonical text and its anticolonial adap-
tation, between Western and peripheral, colonizer and native cultures – are put
under pressure. (Frassinelli 2008: 184)

Unexpectedly, perhaps, Bhardwaj betrays a conflicted relationship with his source.

The director was cautious in marketing his film’s affiliation to Shakespeare – and his
interviews to promote the film are free of claims to fidelity or faithfulness. Bhardwaj
frustrates attempts – such as of textual criticism – to follow the threads of trans-
mission back to an “original.” Although the opening credits announce that the film
is based on Shakespeare’s play, this lineage is left out in the official movie poster,
whereas the poster for Haider had a clear Scandinavian tone to it and indicated that it
was a Shakespearean adaptation, as was the case for Omkara. Maqbool’s poster, in
fact, seem to promote a Bollywood gangster film tout court, with no reference
whatsoever to its being an adaptation of Macbeth.
Possibly, one of the reasons why Maqbool did not fare well at the box-office
might be because it defied expectations created by the promotional poster of it
being a mainstream Bollywood gangster film; at the same time, it did not present
itself evidently as a Shakespearean adaptation. Instead, the newness resulting from
the film’s blurring of boundaries between the conventions of the gangster film, the
Muslim social and the adaptation of a Shakespearean play might arguably unsettle
viewers who were then first introduced to the characters from Macbeth, especially
when the connection to its precursor is disavowed as such by the directors. These
viewers will perhaps find the film’s storyline hard to follow, in the face of its discom-
fiting newness, while those conversant with the play, not only through the source
text, but possibly also through other adaptations, will feel they can access the lay-
ering that undergirds the film’s artistic accomplishment. Audiences see their prior
170 Ana Cristina Mendes

knowledge proved and rewarded even if Maqbool cannot and does not intend to be
faithful to a preexisting text. Of Bhardwaj’s intention, he declared in an interview:
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.
(Bhardwaj 2006)

Judging from these interviews, Bhardwaj’s intermedial act of adaptation is not in

thrall to his precursor text. In fact, there seems to be a deliberate attempt to empty
out the precursor text. Reading this strategic differentiation through a psychoan-
alytic lens, the director is aware of the history of adaptations that have capitalized
on Shakespeare’s global iconicity or, in other words, of the globally-circulating
Shakespearean canon (of these adaptations as vehicles of cultural transmission of a
particular canon), and presumably of prior discourses on Shakespearean adaptation.
Of three host lineages from which the films issues, the gangster film, the Muslim social,
and adaptation of Shakespearean plays, the first seems to be the strongest. Maqbool
adheres to the genre conventions of gangster films, including plot and character
development, as well as to the paradigmatic choice of big, crowded cities as setting;
distinctively, Maqbool as gangster film also functions as a morality tale in the face of
the protagonists’ moral ruin and foreseeable, and usually violent, death. Scenes of
gangster warfare often contribute to a substantial part of the action in the genre of
gangster films, and weapons are virtually always leitmotifs. Bhardwaj’s film uses the
motif of the gun to symbolize Maqbool’s manhood, playing with the interpretation
of Macbeth that reads the sovereignty of Scotland presented to Lady Macbeth as a
compensation for Macbeth’s unmanliness, i.e., for his inability to satisfy her
sexually and father a child (Barmazel 2008). In one scene of Maqbool, Nimmi grabs
Maqbool’s gun and forces him to surrender to their self-destructive romantic
relationship; he slaps her for the defiant act after she returns the gun, but his
manliness had already been compromised. The fact that he regained control of his
gun was not enough to retain and prove his manliness as it had already been
irretrievably taken away, to the point of making him doubt, later in the plot, that
Nimmi’s unborn child is actually his. In another illustrative scene, Maqbool’s gun is
unable to perform in a physical confrontation with Mughal (Macdonwald, who is
not materially present in Shakespeare’s play); this impotency of Maqbool’s gun
to fire bullets is met with Kaka’s contemptuous laughter.
Given Maqbool’s triple lineage, the film can be analysed as an example of a
composite adaptation, following the “de(re)composing” category of adaptation
that Kamilla Elliott proposes, where the adaptation and the source texts, not only
Macbeth, but Bollywood gangster films and Muslim socials as well, “decompose,
merge, and form a new composition at ‘underground’ levels of reading” ([2003]
 Chapter 9. Transculturating Shakespeare 171

2009: 157).3 This involves, as Elliott suggests, a bidirectional reading from pre-
cursor text to films and then from films to precursor text (157); relatedly, this act
of “re-playing” (Poonam and Ryuta 2010) presumes the shared knowledge of the
precursor texts by the screenplay writers and the audience. However, in the case
of Maqbool, the acquaintance of the Indian audiences with the specific in- tertext
Macbeth was apparently subsumed, which contributed to differentiate this
Shakespeare adaptation from the other two later ones in Bhardwaj’s trilogy. The
“anxiety of influence” is apparent when Bhardwaj reclaims the newness of his work
by disowning, to some extent, the precursor Shakespearean text; with this creative
move, or “liberating discontinuity,” in Harold Bloom’s words ([1973] 1997: 88), the
filmmaker is able to “clear imaginative space” for himself.
Interpreting Maqbool as an example of transculturation and actualization al-
lows us to situate the film within an artistic practice whose lineage goes back to
the nineteenth-century Parsi theater’s first ventures into indigenizing Shakespeare
for homegrown Indian audiences. The use of Shakespearean texts in Indian per-
formance art and films spans two centuries, functioning initially as “signs taken for
wonders” in Homi Bhabha’s influential description, “an insignia of colonial author-
ity and a signifier of colonial desire and discipline” (1985: 144), through which the
British colonial administrators pursued the consolidation of imperial hegemony. In
terms of cinema, the earliest engagement with Shakespeare can be traced back to the
silent era of the 1920s, and specifically the 1927 film Dil Farosh (Merchant of Hearts)
based on a Parsi theater adaptation of Merchant of Venice. Another significant early
example of Shakespearean filmic adaptation is Kishore Sahu’s Hamlet in 1954, ap-
parently modeled after Lawrence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet, which recontextualizes the
play through the use of classical Urdu poems. The 1982 Hindi-language comedy
film Angoor (Grape), directed by Gulzar, is a fully-fledged recontextualization of
Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors in an impending post-liberalization India.
Playing around with Shakespeare thus results in the multivocality that we wit-
ness in Bhardwaj’s adaptation in a way that also makes the process of recontextu-
alization in Maqbool into a retextualization.

3. In her reconsideration of the novel-into-film debate, within the context of the doubles “cin-
ematic novels” and “literary cinema,” Elliott advances a framework for categorizing adaptations
based on six metaphorical constructs: “psychic,” “ventriloquist,” “genetic,” “de(re)composing,”
“incarnational,” and “trumping” ([2003] 2009: 133–83).
172 Ana Cristina Mendes

Recontextualization in Maqbool

On a general level, two themes inform processes of recontextualization in Maqbool:

the appeal exerted by the Muslim-dominated Mumbai underworld on Bollywood
and, more visibly still, the trope of corruption. This fascination with the Muslim-
dominated world of organized crime replays the cultural conflict that has ever since
centered around the markers of “Muslim” particularity and difference. Setting the
Hindu hero in opposition to “a villainous character specifically marked as Muslim”
became part of an “emergent trend in Bombay cinema” in the 1990s (Vasudevan
2007: 259).4 Even if Hindus are cast in Maqbool in the role of Macbeth’s witches,
underscoring the idea of a Muslim-dominated criminal world speaks to pressing
issues of communal violence in contemporary India.
While the sense of alienness that having Scotland as the setting of Macbeth
would have achieved in Shakespeare’s time translates into the attachment to Islam
of Bhardwaj’s protagonists, the use of the trope of corruption strengthens the pro-
cess of recontextualization of Shakespeare’s play in India even more. Choosing
corruption as a theme is not an unfamiliar move, however. In fact corruption,
and its moral, social, and political implications is a leitmotiv of Indian cinemas,
as demonstrated by the more recent examples of the Bollywood period gang-
ster film Bombay Velvet (2015), co-produced and directed by Anurag Kashyap,
based on Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables (2011), and the Tamil release Visaranai
(Interrogation) (2015). India’s entry to the 2016 Oscars, Visaranai is a gritty and
grueling exposé of Tamil migrant workers’ experiences of dislocation and bru-
talization in the border area of neighboring Andhra Pradesh at the hands of the
corrupt police and political apparatus. In the two decades preceding Maqbool’s
release, corruption and the underworld themes had already become a staple of
Bombay popular cinema following the surprise box office hits of the low-budget
Hindi film Ankush (dir. N. Chandra, 1986) and Nayakan (also known as Nayagan,
The Hero) (dir. Mani Ratnam, 1987), a Tamil-language film inspired by Coppola’s
The Godfather (India’s official submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film in 1988). The subgenre of gangster films continued to thrive with
Parinda (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1989). Its innovative social realist perspective
in the context of Hindi cinema, with its unforgiving portrayal of the everyday
lives of Mumbai’s mobsters and inhabitants, resulted in Parinda being, similar to
other films depicting India’s underworlds,5 the country’s official entry for the Best

4. An example of this is Angaar (Fire) (dir. Shashilal K. Nair, 1992).

5. In this respect, probably the most prominent of the Indian films submitted for the Academy
Award is Mira Nair’s 1988 Salaam Bombay!, which conveys the harsh realities of life on the streets
of Bombay through the plight of the street child Krishna.
 Chapter 9. Transculturating Shakespeare 173

Foreign Language Film at the 1990 Oscars.6 Satya (The Truth) (dir. Ram Gopal
Varma, 1998), a Mumbai noir film for which Bhardwaj had composed the score
before he started his filmmaker career, further added to the subgenre.
The hypervisibility of the trope of corruption is not exclusive to contemporary
Indian cinemas, as it extends to recent Indian social realist fiction and hybrid non-
fiction7 in English. At least since the scathing representation in the early 1980s of
Indira Gandhi in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (in the novel, she is por-
trayed as a power-hungry, megalomaniac and corrupt leader), the Indian political
landscape has been depicted in literature written in English as not only corrupt and
inefficient, but also displaying strong undercurrents of gangsterism (Goh 2014).
Attesting to the notion that a reputation for being a goonda often helps to assert
the popularity of political leaders is the controversy sparked in Kolkata and Kerala
by the premiere of Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Midnight’s Children in 2012, three
decades after the publication of the novel. The reason behind the controversy was
that the film supposedly shows Indira Gandhi “in a poor light,” with a former
Kerala minister quoted as saying: “This should not have been allowed to be screened
because Indira Gandhi is a passion for many” (Nair 2012). Later, it was revealed
that the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) censored Rushdie’s voiceover
comment, in the Emergency section of the film, that: “Indira Gandhi wanted to be
treated as a goddess” (Jha 2013).
Mumbai, New Delhi, and Bangalore, among many others Indian cities, have
been projected in Indian social realist fiction and hybrid nonfiction as sites of cor-
ruption, social struggle, and poverty, both by Indian diasporic authors and authors
who live in and write from India. This social realist fiction in English textualizes
postcolonial cityscapes as dark areas from which the dispossessed cannot break
away from, more than sites of encounter, of transit and transition, by depicting
them as the underbelly of modern India where the corruption lies at the very core.
In particular, narratives by Aravind Adiga (2008, 2011) and Rana Dasgupta
([2014] 2015) are populated by bereaved and dysfunctional families, tech workers
and CEOs, fraudulent politicians and their dedicated goondas (bullies), entrepre-
neurs who are getting richer through illicit means, aspiring film stars and mod- els,
and slum-dwellers living in fear of violence. For example, Adiga’s novel The White
Tiger (2008) – where the narrator contrasts an affluent “India of Light” and a
deprived “India of Darkness” – is uncompromising about the corrosiveness and

6. In an example of cross-cultural film-to-film remake, Bollywood’s Parinda has been remade

into the Hollywood thriller Broken Horses (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2015).
7. Wiese notes that hybrid nonfiction, “play[s] with the boundary that readers expect will de-
lineate fiction from nonfiction in order to emphasise the difficulty of representing experience”
(Wiese 2015: 67).
174 Ana Cristina Mendes

dehumanization of grinding poverty and is served with dark humor and grim relish,
unwilling to soften the harshness with heartening accounts of human resilience and
essential goodness.8 The deconstruction of the “India Shining” image has made
postcolonial Indian writing in English global and transnational in scope, catering
as these novels do to the demand of a multicultural, transnational, and global au-
dience. This writing strategy increases the visibility and marketability of certain
authors and their works (Mendes 2016). Arguably, what makes sense – and is thus
significant – for the Western imaginary is that the exceptionally high economic
growth rates of “New India” are unregulated and venality-ridden.
In this context, Bhardwaj resorts to the trope of corruption with the openly
acknowledged intention of targeting transnational audiences as well. Given his
background in the Bollywood industry as a music composer (besides directing
Maqbool, he also composed the score), the director is market savvy, keenly con-
versant with current sociocultural as well as commercial contexts, local and inter-
national markets, and audiences. Bhardwaj draws upon well-known Bollywood
conventions, such as the use of the “item number,” defined as “songs inserted into
a film, primarily to titillate the audience” (Alter 2007: 134). Nonetheless, he also
aimed at “touch[ing] a chord with international audiences,” as his project involved
“many commercial considerations” (Bhardwaj 2006). In fact, suggesting an uneasy
relationship with this hegemony of Bollywood, Bhardwaj’s film has fewer musical
numbers than the average popular Hindi film of a decade earlier, and most of these
numbers are instrumental rather than vocal.
As exemplified by gangster films such as Maqbool and social realist novels such
as The White Tiger, Indian cultural production has been challenging the notion of
“Asian progress” as development along a linear temporal axis. Bhabha notes that the
ideological construction of modernity uses terms such as “progress, homogeneity,
cultural organism, the deep nation, [and] the long past” to “rationalize the authori-
tarian, ‘normalizing’ tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interest
or the ethnic prerogative” (Bhabha 1990: 4). After the colonial civilizational pro-
ject, India was to aim at “modernization” modeled after the industrialized West as
rapid social and infrastructural transformation for its citizens to achieve first-world
affluence. In the post-independence period, under the parliamentary majority of
the Congress, the “modernity” created for India by Jawaharlal Nehru was founded
on aggressive infrastructural reforms, such as state-driven industrialization. The
period of exclusive central planning, known as the “License Raj,” in place between
1947, after independence, and 1990, became the backdrop of many gangster films

8. See Mendes (2010). Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), set in the slums of Mumbai,
is also paradigmatic of this social realist writing.
 Chapter 9. Transculturating Shakespeare 175

as a powerful “black” economy flourished alongside the Congress government’s

bureaucratic command economy. Licenses were given to a select few and untaxed
wealth thrived as a result.9
In literature, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses ([1988] 1989) presents this Nehruvian
vision of a Modern India, and chiefly this zeitgeist of the License Raj. The novel like-
wise brings to the fore corruption as being ubiquitous in Indian society. It achieves this
by, for example, mobilizing the number 420 as intertext. “420,” referring to a section
of the Indian Penal Code addressing corrupt practices, and also a synonym for a
trickster, is used twice in the narrative. On their way from Bombay to the im- perial
metropolis, the protagonists Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha hurtle out of the
hijacked jumbo jet Bostan, Air India flight 420, after an attack by Sikh terrorists above
the English Channel. One of Gibreel’s favorite films is Shree 420 (Mr. 420, or
Gentleman Trickster), a popular 1955 Hindi film directed by and star- ring Raj Kapoor.
The film is folded into The Satanic Verses by its cross-referencing of the hit song
“Mera Joota Hai Japaani” (“Oh, My Shoes are Japanese”). In Shree 420, the song is
performed by the film’s vagabond-hero, Raj, played by Kapoor, but actually sang by
playback singer Mukesh. Rushdie had already included the song “Mera Joota Hai
Japaani” from the film Shree 420 in a series of memory triggers for the Bombay of
his childhood when he set out to write Midnight’s Children (Rushdie 1991: 11),
confirming the popularity of this staple from the “golden” age of Hindi cinema.
During the “angelicdevilish fall,” Gibreel improvises a rough English translation “in
semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation” of the “old song.”10 He
translates the refrain thus: “O, my shoes are Japanese … These trousers English, if
you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that” (Rushdie
[1988] 1989: 5). Gibreel, born Ismail Najmuddin in Poona, “at the empire’s fag-end”
(17), but soon taken to the “bitch-city” Bombay, becomes the mirror image of Shree
420’s protagonist Raj. Both country boys come to the big city dreaming of success.
Tellingly, on his descent towards England, the Bombay film star who mimed playback
singers is now turned into a “tuneless soloist” (3). He thus takes on the part of both
the Chaplinesque Raj from Shree 420 and Mukesh.
In the opening shots of Kapoor’s Shree 420, the innocent Raj has recently
embarked on a journey from the countryside, Allahabad in north India, to the
seductive Bombay, a metropolis brimming with dreams and opportunities after

9. Interestingly, the gradual demise of this bureaucratic system of licenses during the 1980s and
early 1990s, brought about by India’s economic liberalization, paved the way for Bombay popular
cinema to cross-pollinate with gangster films by American and Hong Kong directors.
10. Music by Shankar-Jaikishan and lyrics by Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri.
176 Ana Cristina Mendes

independence, but also, as he will soon discover, a soulless city.11 As Rashmi Varma
writes, Raju is “‘in-vested’ in the material markers of his idealistic conception of
globality” (Varma 2004: 84), but his song nonetheless voices the economic mi-
grant’s anxieties about belonging in the wake of an expanding global mass con-
sumerism. En route to Bombay, his allegiance belongs to India, even if he is not
wearing clothes produced locally. Ahead of him is a circular path of innocence and
poverty (Allahabad) and moral degradation and wealth (Bombay), culminating in a
homecoming and its attendant repudiation of the venalities of urban life and accept-
ance of poverty. The License Raj was adopted precisely to develop manufacturing
across the Indian states and counteract the pressure of an emerging global market
(of foreign products such as Japanese shoes, English trousers, and Russian hats).
The film thus helped strengthen India’s new-found status as a sovereign socialist
republic, one that had only just cast off the colonialist yoke, and whose Nehruvian
foreign policy was outright non-aligned and non-confrontational. With its quest
narrative, aligning the loss of personal integrity with capitalism, and providing in
the end an opportunity for recovery, Kapoor’s film spoke to anxieties related to
the project of nation-building and nation-imagining around new socialist ideals.
“Mera Joota Hai Japaani” stood for Nehruvian ethics and quickly became a patriotic
anthem.12 The film resonated with an overall mood of hopefulness and idealism in
the wake of India’s first general election in 1951, as rendered in Vikram Seth’s
novel A Suitable Boy (1993). Additionally, it underscored corruption as the enemy
of the nation via the characters of the dishonest politicians and entrepreneurs that
Raj encounters in Bombay.
From Bombay to the grime and grit of Mumbai’s underworld, from the forest
of Scotland to the sea of Mumbai, Bhardwaj uses Macbeth to reflect the violence and
corruption of New India’s urban symbol of cosmopolitan modernity. In keeping with
the conventions of the Bollywood gangster film, the tyrannical despotism in Macbeth is
recontextualized as the corruption of Mumbai’s underworld. The doomed King
Duncan of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy becomes the Muslim head of a crime
family, even if the ruthless and respected Abba Ji, a character that borrows heavily

11. Recurrently, in Hindi films from this time there is, as Michael Fischer and Mehdi Abedi
observe, “a standard circular movement from the village to the corruptions of urban life back to
the village, and from poverty to affluence to willed poverty (renunciation, ethical development)”
(Fischer and Abedi 1990: 402).
12. In addition, transposing “Mera Joota Hai Japaani” from Bombay in the 1950s to London in
the 1980s is part of the strategy to establish the narrative foundations of The Satanic Verses, de-
parting from a provincial Bombay into the imperial metropolis “Babylondon” and then returning
to India. The song, when sung by a migrant who has abandoned a thriving career in Bollywood
after a psychological breakdown, takes on an additional affective charge with a nostalgic yearning
for the homeland the migrant has left.
 Chapter 9. Transculturating Shakespeare 177

from Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone (including the demeanor, facial expression,
and even characteristic mumble) is far from being the model of the virtuous, be-
nevolent ruler that Duncan represented. In one scene, Abba Ji defiantly stuffs beetle
nut into a politician’s mouth, a testament to his prepotency and to the respect he
commands (garnered through having violently murdered his way through life). Yet,
his expressions of filial love for both Kaka and Maqbool, and his devotion to Nimmi,
together with his professed love for Mumbai, his home, make the character of Abba
Ji more fleshed out and ambiguous than the character he is modeled on.
In keeping with the blurred boundaries between the gangster and the law en- forcer
conventionally associated with the gangster film, the roles of the Three Witches or Weird
Sisters are taken by the two corrupt, fortune-telling police officers Pandit and Purohit
who, despite being on Abba Ji’s payroll, predict, via kundal charts, aus- picious signs
for the potential ascent of Maqbool, his second-in-command. Their seemingly split
loyalties aim at a balance of power necessary for the maintenance of their official
occupations, for instance, when they help Maqbool to take down a rival gang. Most
relevantly, perhaps, the corruption of Maqbool’s anti-hero underlines the impossibility
of salvation in the end. This tragedy was looming from the moment of black comic
relief that opens the film, wherein Maqbool’s Three Witches draw Mumbai’s
horoscope on a fogged window. Unlike in Macbeth, the corrupt police officers-cum-
astrologers are not passive; they actively drive Maqbool to tragedy, even if he disregards
their seemingly playful predictions at first.

Conclusion

The practice of adaptation, in Hutcheon’s words, “is how stories evolve and mutate
to fit new times and different places” (Hutcheon [2006] 2013: 176). Drawing on a
similar Darwinian rationale, Sarah Cardwell (2002) posits a parallel between the
film and television adaptive practices and the socio-biological definition of the term
“adaptation.” Adaptation is the sine qua non condition for survival. Cardwell argues
that “[g]enetic adaptation can be broadly conceived as a linear process of progres-
sion, with each new organism in the chain being genetically (causally) linked to its
predecessors, but being nonetheless significantly different from them” (2002: 13).
Following Cardwell, in Maqbool there is a blurring of this genetic line as the tension
between linkage as filiation/affiliation and difference lies at the center of the film.
Transcultural relocation and actualization were established as a central theme
of this chapter, particularly on the ways Bhardwaj mobilizes the context of
Mumbai’s underworld in the twenty-first century to reimagine and shine light
on its Shakespearean intertext. Bhardwaj’s adaptation uses recontextualization,
extracting the Shakespearean text from its original context, de-exoticizing and
178 Ana Cristina Mendes

decontextualizing it, and then mediating current preoccupations. When an existing

work is adapted for television or film, the reading of the past is “a contemporary,
even aspirational one” (Whelehan 1999: 12). By establishing overt connections to
present-day Mumbai, the globally-circulating Shakespearean text formula is em-
bedded in Maqbool within the specific social and media contexts of Bollywood, the
commercial film industry in Mumbai, in which it is actualized and fulfils the function
of commenting on topical issues such as corruption, as well as religious conflicts and
escalating regional tensions in India.
Underlying the arguments presented by this chapter were a couple of open-ended
questions: to what extent, and in what ways, does Maqbool present contemporary
readers with new ways of interpreting the play it adapts and appropriates, and that
invite a critical perspective on the present time of production? Does it need it to
be Shakespearean enough on film for it to present itself as based on Shakespeare?
Reading Maqbool as an instance of recontextualization or actualization, more than
exemplary of adaptation as remediation or reparation, allowed us to offer tentative
answers to the above questions. Drawing first on corruption as a master trope of
contemporary Indian artistic production, from cinema and then excursively to liter-
ature, to demonstrate its hypervisibility, this chapter concomitantly underscored the
constitutive intermedial corruption of all adaptations. Textual corruption as intertex-
tuality is arguably key to Maqbool, as knowledge of Macbeth perhaps proves crucial
for the audience to fully grasp the textual layers of the film. If intertextuality refers to
the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, addressing the text-in-context that
corresponds to the recontextualization of Macbeth in the Mumbai underworld gives
us yet another perspective of the adaptation beyond an analysis of the intertextual
networks of influence linking Shakespeare’s play and Bhardwaj’s film or, in Dionne
and Kapadia’s formulation, beyond the univocality of the Western canon (2008: 5).

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