Bollywood loves Shakespeare... but sadly not everyone can pull off a Haider

by Nandan Kini Shakespeare comes back to Bollywood this week, and it’s his old hand, Vishal Bhardwaj, who brings him back in style in with Haider, a grim adaptation of Hamlet. Having already made his mark with Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello), Vishal clearly has a nose for the Bard’s works. However, Bollywood’s obsession with Shakespeare runs deeper than Bhardwaj’s trilogy. This is not surprising since the Bard may just have been the pioneer of Bollywood’s favourite masala stories, penning girl-meets-boy-and-then-dies love stories on one hand, and maa-kasam-badla-loonga revenge dramas like Hamlet on the other. (Papa-kasam-badla-loonga story, in Hamlet’s case, of course.) More Hindi movies than one can imagine have sought inspiration from his works, intentionally or otherwise. We all applaud the good ones, but it’s clear that most of the adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays were made, wittingly or unwittingly, with the unstated goal of making old Willie turn in his grave. [caption id=“attachment_1741101” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Sadly, not all Bollywood tributes to the bard are quite Haider: Facebook[/caption] Given Bollywood’s fixation on romance, Romeo and Juliet has been a perennial favourite for filmmakers. Everything from Ek Duje Ke Liye to Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, to Ram… Wait, Goliyon Ki Rasleela – Ramleela, were apparently inspired from the tragedy. But while some of those films might have hit the mark, quite a few clearly lost the plot altogether. The most recent example was last year’s Prateik-Amyra Dastur (who??) starrer, Issaq. Director Manish Tiwary has some good work to his name (Dil, Dosti, Etc.), but with Issaq, he seems to have decided to go in a more experimental direction by casting two pieces of cardboard as Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, together, Prateik and Amyra had the combined expressive range of a wooden spoon, and audiences might just have been better off staring at their home cutlery than watching this travesty. By the numbers, Hindi cinema’s penchant for Shakespeare’s comedies is way greater. While Bhardwaj’s mentor Gulzar famously adapted A Comedy of Errors for the silver screen with Angoor, starring Sanjeev Kumar and Deven Verma as a pair of identical twins with a whole lot of confused identities, David Dhawan’s Ba_de Miyan Chhote Miyan_ was also a twisted but unintentional take on pretty much the same story. Nowhere close to Angoor, Dhawan’s Shakespearean turn was presented as Amitabh Bachchan’s comeback vehicle, but instead saw Bachchan hamming it up, playing virtual second lead to Govinda, and basically rehashed his dead-on-arrival ‘80s’ act with some very crass jokes. Thankfully, better sense prevailed, and the Big B followed Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan up with roles closer to his actual age. He did take one more stab at Shakespeare, with the desi English language film, The Last Lear. This time, he managed to drive the stake right through Willie’s soul in this painfully contrived adaptation of King Lear. Not exactly Bollywood, but I digress. If you look down upon Amitabh Bachchan for succumbing to _Bade Miyan Chhote Miya_n, know that even Bollywood’s biggest production houses couldn’t resist taking a shot at Shakespeare. Take Yash Raj, for example, which, in 2009, released a bomb called Dil Bole Hadippa, starring the current Mrs Chopra aka Rani Mukherjee and Shahid Kapoor. Director Anurag Singh probably thought he was plagiarising from an equally terrible Hollywood comedy called She’s The Man when he made his film about Rani dressing up as a sardar, beard and all, to get onto a cricket team. Perhaps not a sports team, but the earliest version of this cross-dressing confusion was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which the Countess Olivia dresses up as a young man Cesario to enter Duke Orsino’s service. That, however, was the end of similarities. Dil Bole Hadipp_a featured no Shakespearean flourishes and went down without effort at the box office. Perhaps it was the fact that Rani as a sardar looked more butch than Shahid… but then, who knows? Speaking of butch women and effeminate looking heroes, Rajshri’s 2010 release, Isi Life Mein featured a similar pairing, with two doe-eyed unknowns Akshay Oberoi and Sandeepa Dhar in starring roles. The film started off as a ham-handed adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and even featured the play as a plot device before veering into more familiar, sanskaari, Barjatya territory and sparing the Bard’s soul some terrible torture. Not every filmmaker is that understanding: filmmaker Sharat Katariya adapted the magical A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a film called 10ml Love back in 2012, and one imagines he must have been hopped up on 30ml of something while making it. The film was your typical low-budget, arty Bollywood fare, starring regulars like Purab Kohli and Rajat Kapoor. The twist, though, was that the actors were probably not informed that the film was meant to be a comedy, and ended up sleepwalking through it all, turning this dream into an insufferable dozefest instead. Given his track record with Shakespeare, one can be sure that Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider will not disappoint this week. Until then, however, could we please hide those copies of L_ove’s Labour’s Lost, lest David Dhawan or Sajid Khan find them? Nandan Kini is a documentary film researcher and journalist based in Mumbai. Also the national president of the Association of the Sartorially Challenged, he tweets at @bombilfry and has booked his face at Facebook.com/nandan.kini.