The desi Bard: Jonathan Gil Harris goes from 'firangi writer' to an Indian in Masala Shakespeare

Jonathan Gil Harris decodes the popular appeal of Shakespeare’s classic works for Indian mass audiences in Masala Shakespeare: How A Firangi Writer became Indian.
Jonathan Gil Harris
Jonathan Gil Harris

"The word 'masala' might conjure memories of bad Manmohan Desai films from the 1980s. But I am interested in masala in the sense of mixture - a tasty confluence of many different elements," Jonathan Gil Harris says, explaining the story behind the title of his latest offering, Masala Shakespeare: How A Firangi Writer became Indian. Here, the New Zealand-born author chats about his latest offering, the mass, popular appeal of Shakespeare and his own journey as an author in India. 

Tell us about the book. How did the idea behind it come about? 
It all started in 2001, when I first came to India. I saw Lagaan in the long-gone Chanakya Theatre in Delhi. I loved the film, but most of all I loved the ambiance of the huge single-screen cinema hall.

It was so socially inclusive. Richer people sat politely in the balconies. Poor people stood downstairs on the cheap seats, screaming and throwing coins at the screen when Aamir Khan made his first appearance. 

And I was suddenly struck by how the Chanakya, far more than any modern theatre in which plays like Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream are now performed, was deeply Shakespearean. Shakespeare's plays weren't written as high literature to be consumed only by the elites: they were first performed in spaces like the Chanakya, to mixed audiences who spanned the social spectrum.

And so I became curious about how Indian forms of entertainment might have a lot more in common with Shakespeare's drama than modern English-language productions of his plays for well-off audiences.

Why 'Masala' Shakespeare? What's the story behind the title? 
'Masala' might conjure up memories of bad Manmohan Desai films from the 1980s. But I am interested in "masala" in the sense of mixture - a tasty confluence of many different elements. Long before Desai, virtually all Bollywood films - like the Parsi Theatre's sangeet nataks out of which the first Hindi talkies evolved - were masala in this sense.  

They mixed comedy and tragedy, serious dialogue and naach-gaana, Hindi slang and Urdu shayari. And, like Lagaan, they did so for mixed audiences that included rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim, Sikh and Christian, upper-caste and lower-caste, men and women, and people who spoke many languages.  

This kind of masala mixture mirrors Shakespeare's plays, which were likewise multi-generic entertainment for mixed audiences, written in poetry and prose in an 'English' that combined elements of high Latin and everyday slang.

But masala in this sense also embodies an idea of India as a mixture, as a multi-voiced conversation between many traditions. It's not surprising that in this age of shuddhta, the masala film as we used to know it is dying.

The large single-screen cinema hall is disappearing; films are increasingly targeting small niche audiences rather than trying to embrace India's rich pluralism. The idea of India is changing, and so are our entertainments.

<em>Masala Shakespeare: How A Firangi Writer became Indian</em>.
Masala Shakespeare: How A Firangi Writer became Indian.


While reconstructing the popular and the 'masses driven' quality of the bard's plays and positing that next to their Indian film adaptations, what were some of the main ideas that informed such a comparison and negotiation? 
The chief points of similarity all have to do with mixture: mixed genres, mixed languages, mixed locations. Romeo and Juliet is in many ways the archetypal masala story, inasmuch as it is about a forbidden love that mixes members of rival communities.

There have been countless adaptations of the play on Indian screens, and not just in Hindi. And for every obvious adaptation - Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Goliyon ki Rasleela Ram-Leela, Aparna Sen's Arshingar - there have been twenty more that are riffs on the play - Ek Duuje Ke Liye, Bobby, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, Ishaqzaade.

All involve the utopian fantasy of young lovers from different communities coming together and modeling for us the possibility of living in and across difference. It's little wonder that nowadays, when such jodis are understood primarily through the lens of love jihad, that some Chief Ministers feel a responsibility to set up Anti-Romeo Squads.

It's not just lecherous young men they are after; it is the spectre of cross-communal love, as in Shakespeare's play, that most frightens them.

You also make a mention of Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and the inevitable comparisons between your project and the 2003 book. Can you explain the thought behind your conception of India's "more-than-oneness" which you see as the main point of departure between yours and Nafisi's book? 
Masala is not about the individual, the 'one'. It is always about the "more than one" - comedy AND tragedy, rich AND poor, Hindi AND Urdu, Hindu AND Muslim.

If we think of masala not just as a genre of entertainment but also as a world view, we can see how it cautions us against thinking reductively in terms of the individual - whether the lone individual or the individual clan or community.  If masala is about the "more than one," it is crucially also about the "more than me."

It is no accident that Aamir Khan sings to his mixed audience in Lagaan that "yeh dharti apni hai."  That "apni" is the favoured pronoun of masala; it embraces Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Dalit, even a culture-shocked gora like me. This is quite a different world view from what we find in Nafisi's book, which is about individuals heroically resisting the authoritarianism of the Iranian state.

Anti-authoritarian heroes in masala films are never quite individuals in this way.  They are always "apne" heroes, embodying collective wishes that bridge individuals and the social and cultural differences that might otherwise divide us.

You have also structured the book as a Shakespearean play in five acts. Can you elaborate on the interludes or 'item numbers' as you have called them and their importance in the overall narratorial design? 
We have been taught to regard item numbers as embarrassing diversions. I think they are vital to the masala worldview. I am not talking here about sexist dance routines which invite prurient attention to writhing female bodies.

I am talking instead about what a naach-gaana sequence does to a story. It adds more than simple entertainment; it also interrupts a story with a showpiece that usually involves many performers and that is highly repeatable, which is to say we want to sing it and even replicate its dance moves long after the film has finished. 

We are no longer just individuals sitting in the dark. An item number makes performers of us too, inviting us into the "apni dharti" of the film. My item numbers do something similar - they are designed to remind the Indian reader that the object of this book isn't just individual plays or films but something larger, an idea of a plural India that we are at risk of losing.

<em>Jonathan Gil Harris</em>
Jonathan Gil Harris


If you had to choose one Shakespeare play which is quintessentially Indian in its themes and ideas but hasn't been adapted to the Indian imagination yet, which one would it be and why? 
Without doubt, Antony and Cleopatra. Lovers from different continents, high tragedy and earthy comedy, lots of music, huge scenes filled with melodramatic performers, a heroine who is described as embodying "infinite variety"; it's masala entertainment par excellence.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali needs to get on the phone with Ranveer and Deepika today and book them for twenty years from now, when they will be older, as are Antony and Cleopatra.

Tell us about your journey as an author and how have your experiences of living in India informed your works? 
My previous book, The First Firangis, was about foreigners who made India their home. I was writing about migrants before the age of colonialism, and the ways in which their bodies as much as minds had to adapt to a new climate, new terrain, new cuisine, new languages, new clothes, and new ways of moving through space and time.

But I was also very much writing about my own experiences of transformation here. On that score, Masala Shakespeare is a sequel to The First Firangis. It isn't just about the transformation of Shakespeare's plays into entirely Indian forms of entertainment. It is also about my own transformation again - how I learned to re-read Shakespeare's plays in India, through India, as India.

What is on your reading wish list for 2019? 
Right now, in between writing projects, I am enjoying reading for sheer pleasure. I am currently in the middle of Anna Burns's brilliant novel Milkman, set in the time of the sectarian troubles in Northern Ireland yet uncannily reminiscent of recent tensions in India. And I am working hard on my Hindi so I can read Premchand in the original. Little ways to go yet, but I'm getting there.

What are you working on next? Is there any particular genre of writing that you would like to try your hand at? 
My next book is likely to be a family memoir of some kind. My mother is a Holocaust survivor who, immediately after the war, experienced another Partition - the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine - and I want to tease out the resonances between her experiences and those of North Indians and Pakistanis who lived through the events of 1947.

I've often thought that it's no coincidence that I ended up living here, that there is some unfinished familial psychological work that I am now attending to by virtue of my decision to move to a partitioned land. But I'll find out what that work is, and where it will lead me, only by writing the book! 

Aleph Book Company, INR 798. 

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