Nationhood and Identity in Indian Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1989-2020

Investigating an increase in the visibility of Indian adaptations of Shakespeare in film, theatre and fiction between 1989 and 2020, Taarini Mookherjee suggests that this popularity reflects the political affordances of adapting Shakespeare in contemporary India. A foreign, yet familiar, text, Shakespeare provides both opportunities for radical reinvention and subversive political critique. Mookherjee mobilises the term desify, a bilingual portmanteau popular in the South Asian diaspora that simultaneously references the abstract and aspirational nation (des) and the quotidian process of making local or native in popular culture, to argue that these self-consciously Indian or desified Shakespeares disclose contemporary Indian ideas and inquiries of the nation. Precisely because they are self-proclaimed ‘Indian’ adaptations of Shakespeare, these works provide us with a unique corpus of material that is both constitutive and representative of contemporary public contestations around identity, belonging and what it means to look and sound Indian.