Performing Shakespeare in India

An adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays as a basis of critical exploration of identity formation in India. Even while a conscious dismantling of colonization was happening since the 19th century, the Indian literati, intellectuals, scholars and dramaturges were engaged in deconstructing the ultimate icon of colonial presence—Shakespeare. This book delves into what constitutes Indianness in the postcolonial context by looking into the text and sub-text of the Bard of Avon’s plays adapted in visual culture, translation, stage performance and cinema. The book is an important intervention in the ongoing explorations in social and cultural history, as it explores how Shakespeare has impacted the emergence of regional identities around questions of language and linguistic empowerment in various ways. It reveals an extraordinary negotiation of colonial and postcolonial identity issues—be it in language, in social and cultural practices or in art forms. 

Shormishtha Panja is Professor of English and Director, Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi. She received her BA in English (Hons.) from Presidency College, Kolkata, and her PhD from Brown University, where she was awarded the Jean Starr Untermeyer Fellowship. She has been awarded a Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a Mayers Fellowship at the Huntington. She has taught at Stanford University and IIT-Delhi and has been invited to lecture at universities in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia. She has been the President of the Shakespeare Society of India from 2008 to 2014.Her books include Shakespeare and the Art of Lying (ed.), Shakespeare and Class (co-ed.), Word Image Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture (co-ed.) and Signifying the Self: Women and Literature (co-ed.). Babli Moitra Saraf is the Principal of Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and heads the department of Multimedia and Mass Communication. She received her MPhil degree in English and PhD in Sociology. She is fluent in several Indian and foreign languages and is a published translator. La Preda e altri Racconti (Einaudi 2004) and La Cattura (Theoria 1996) are Italian translations of the Bengali activist–novelist Mahasweta Devi’s works in collaboration with Maria Federica Oddera. Her work Rajouri Remembered (2007), is a translation of oral history and documents from Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi, recounting the effects of the Partition of India in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. She has published in the field of Translating and Interpreting Studies. She is on the editorial board of Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, and of Saar Sansaar, dedicated to Hindi translations directly from foreign languages.Moitra Saraf has been a scholar under the Indo-Italian Cultural Exchange Program, Visiting Scholar under the Fulbright-Nehru International Education Administrator Program, a Research Associate and Visiting Faculty at the NIDA School of Translation Studies. She received the Distinguished Teacher Award of the University of Delhi, the Amity Women Achiever in Education Award, the 27th Dr S. Radhakrishnan Memorial National Award for Teachers and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, for Lifelong Pursuit of Excellence.