The idea of using source material from literature in cinema has been in vogue since the beginning of the latter, most of the earliest films being adaptations of literary works. If we take the year 1900 as a point of reference, we find titles like Romeo and Juliet and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, based on well-known masterpieces, to be already popular on screen. The reasons for filmmakers turning to literature for their plot lines have been numerous. Apart from the stories being well-known and film adaptations of these stories being a way of bringing the iconic works of literature to the masses, a very important reason for filmmakers using material from literature, in the opinion of Cartmell, is a belief harboured by many of them “that a dependency on literature or ‘great art’ would also elevate the status of the film” (2). Whatever might be the reason behind literature providing the source material for filmmakers, one thing which cannot be denied for sure is the fact that the most sought after literary figure whose works have always inspired the world of cinema is Shakespeare, a playwright whose plays have not only been adapted into features, but a few like Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Comedy of Errors, etc., have more than a hundred adapted versions from across the globe, thereby adding to his legion of discursivity. In fact, such a rich source has been Shakespeare’s oeuvre for adaptation and appropriation that, as Fischlin and Fortier point out, “[a]s long as there have been plays by Shakespeare, there have been adaptations of those plays” (1).

In India, Shakespeare has had a fairly long history. As Charry and Shahani point out, Shakespeare’s plays were performed in India first in Calcutta and Bombay in the 1770s “as entertainment to the early traders”, before being “eventually made a staple of an educational system dictated by colonial policy, and soon after translated into Indian languages and played on stage in Calcutta, Bombay, and other urban centres…” (107). In Bollywood (a term which is a blend of ‘Bombay’ and ‘Hollywood’, and refers to India’s premier Hindi film industry), the Bard has enjoyed a sustained popularity, with the first known adaptations being the 1927 silent film Dil Farosh, based on The Merchant of Venice, the 1932 film Hathili Dulhan, based on The Taming of the Shrew, and Shorab Modi’s Khoon ka Khoon in 1935 and Said-e-Havas in 1936, based on Hamlet and King John respectively. It is pertinent to point out here that these cinematic endeavours were greatly inspired by Parsi theatre productions which frequently turned to Shakespeare for plotlines. The practice of this kind of adaptation has always been acceptable in the Indian artistic traditions which have never perceived it as indicative of a lack of originality of any kind but have rather permitted “rewritings to exist without challenging the status of the ‘original’ urtext” (Trivedi 53). In the multilingual context of the subcontinent, this practice of adaptation, as Trivedi points out, has always functioned as “localizing, indigenizing, and ultimately democratizing factor: just as the Sanskrit epics had been reworked in the regional languages, so was Shakespeare adapted into local cultures” (53). In the post-independence era, Shakespeare Wallah, produced and released in 1965 by Merchant Ivory Production Company, was the first film which attempted to appropriate the Shakespeare canon and, through this appropriation, question “the cultural purpose and position of the Bard and more broadly British culture within India” while simultaneously employing “the signifiers of a proto-Bollywood – song and dance sequences, fandom, opulence, and fantasy – to suggest the rise of Indian nationhood” (Kapadia 46). However, while a film like Shakespeare Wallah mourns “the decline of the classic purity of the original”, as Chakravarti puts it, it is not until Vishal Bhardwaj released his films like Maqbool (based on Macbeth) in 2003 and Omkara (based on Othello) in 2006, which “indigenize and assimilate Shakespeare into popular Bollywood idiom”, that ‘Bollywood Shakespeare’, a term Chakravarti uses to refer to “the growing interest in Shakespearean themes within the mainstream, commercial Bombay (now Mumbai)-based film industry of India”, comes into its own (127, 128). Some people might wish to point out that the Gulzar-directed Angoor, a remake of The Comedy of Errors, released in 1982 and starring iconic Bollywood actors like Utpal Dutt and Sanjeev Kumar, was the first well-known post-independence Bollywood production based on a Shakespearean play. However, as Charry and Shahani point out, Angoor was publicised mainly as a story of twins and more often than not precluded any reference to Shakespeare (108). On the other hand, in Bhardwaj’s Maqbool and Omkara, the two films on which this article focuses, the filmmaker expresses his indebtedness to Shakespeare in no uncertain terms, more so in the latter than in the former, of course. In discussing these two films, this article takes into consideration two central issues: first, the situating of the films in the Indian context, and second, how the transmutation of the medium and the subsequent technical incursions have affected the original narrative. But, before venturing into this endeavour, it becomes imperative to make an attempt to understand the concept of the ‘Bollywood Masala Film’, a genre to which the two films under consideration belong.

A typical ‘Bollywood Masala Film’, named after ‘masala’, which means a mixture of spices of different kinds in Indian cuisine, is one in which there is a curious mix of a plethora of emotive genres – tragic, comic, action, romance and melodrama, with an ample dosage of music, diegetic songs and spectacular dance routines, lavishly impressive marriage spectacles and so on. In other words, in Bollywood films, disparate elements which are even incompatible with one another come under the same roof, the primary objective being to provide entertainment. The aesthetic conventions of this kind of films is possibly captured effectively in Rushdie’s phrase “Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala Art” (148). It is through this kind of a genre that Shakespeare adaptation has largely happened in Indian cinema although, as García-Periago says, “Shakespeare has also proved an accommodating friend to the codes of Indian arty, parallel cinema in locally inflected productions such as In Othello (dir. Roysten Abel, 2003) or the movie The Last Lear (dir. Rituparno Ghosh, 2007)” (63). However, it is pertinent to point out here that “Bollywood’s appropriation of Shakespeare has not been (in its narrowest sense) a postcolonial endeavor, aiming to ‘write back’ to the empire through its usurpation of the colonial Ur-text” (Shahani and Charry 162).

It is important to bear this point in mind in our appreciation of Maqbool for although the film resituates Shakespeare in the Indian milieu by transposing the Scotland of Shakespeare’s play to the world of the Mumbai underworld, which is predominantly Muslim, it does not attempt to contest the authority of the canonical English text. Maqbool retains the main plotline and characters of Macbeth: Macbeth is Maqbool and Lady Macbeth is Nimmi; while Duncan and Banquo are respectively Abba-ji and Kaka, Fleance and Malcolm are represented in Guddu. In addition, Macduff is named Boti while Duncan’s sons are represented in Sameera and the witches become the two corrupt policemen, Purohit and Pandit. Obviously, the mise-en-scène of Bhardwaj’s film changes owing to the differences between the cultural matrices of the film and Shakespeare’s play, but what is really striking is the ingenious way in which Bhardwaj recasts a few things. Among them, mention must first be made of the fact that unlike in Shakespeare’s play, where Macbeth’s ambition to become the King of Scotland spurs him on to murder Duncan, abetted and aided by his wife, Lady Macbeth, in Bhardwaj’s film, several reasons precipitate the betrayal and murder of Abba-ji by Maqbool, who is shown to be caught in a cobweb of ambition, love and jealousy. Unlike in Shakespeare’s play, where Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are man and wife, Maqbool and Nimmi, who is Abba-ji’s mistress, are in a forbidden relationship for Abba-ji is, after all, a father figure to Maqbool. Apart from this lustful relationship, which possibly serves as an incitement, another provocation for Maqbool is the possibility of his having to serve under Guddu, who would be the heir to Abba-ji’s gang following his marriage to Sameera, Abba-ji’s daughter. Maqbool is very much aware that the Guddu-Sameera relationship has the potential of jeopardizing his high position in the gang and, hence, he gets rid of Abba-ji on the night before Guddu’s marriage with Sameera is to take place. The act is hastened by Maqbool coming to know from the two policemen that Abba-ji himself was no saint; he killed his mentor to take over the reins of the gang.

The recasting of the three witches of Macbeth, whose prophecy leads to the sowing of the seeds of ambition in Macbeth’s mind, as two corrupt astrologer-policemen, Purohit and Pandit, who have deep connections with the underworld, is brilliant, to say the least. These two not only predict the future at appropriate junctures, feeding Maqbool with the necessary pieces of information about the astrological developments in his birth-chart and indicating the repercussions of the movement of stars, but they also seem to control the fate of the characters. Their decision not to eliminate Boti (Macduff) towards the end turns to be crucial since it is Boti who ultimately kills Maqbool. Hence the two policemen, apart from making predictions, are intricately involved in the development of the action in the film. Two other instances of Bhardwaj’s reworking of the original play seem noteworthy. One is the prophecy of the witches in the play that Macbeth will be vanquished only when Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane hill.