Access Provided by City University of New York at 05/29/11 3:06PM GMT Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter in Merchant Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah Dan Venning The 1965 Merchant Ivory Productions film Shakespeare Wallah depicts a British theatrical troupe performing Shakespeare in post-independence India. Although the film situates the viewer’s sympathy with the British members of the troupe, the filmmakers also present the troupe ironically, showing how they are floundering and nostalgic in the face of a liberated India. The film is made more complex by the fact that the actors playing the central roles were themselves members of the Shakespeareana troupe that had actually toured Shakespearean productions across India both before and after independence; several of the actors were essentially playing themselves. The film and its characters—both the real and fictionalized versions—thus adopt a highly ambivalent attitude toward postcolonialism and the role of Shakespeare in India. This article begins with an overview of interculturalism and cultural imperialism as they relate to Shakespeare in Asia and then explores how these different modes of postcolonial cross-cultural interaction are depicted and performed in this fascinating film. Dan Venning is a doctoral candidate in theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation examines the popular reception of Shakespeare in Germany from 1817 to 1867. Dan has presented papers at a variety of graduate student, national, and international conferences, and has published book and theatre reviews in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Western European Stages. His last article, on Shakespeare in Central Park, appeared in Forum for Modern Language Studies. Dan presented earlier versions of this paper at the 2009 British Shakespeare Association meeting in London and the 2009 meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research in Puerto Rico. Asian artists’ engagements with Shakespeare have created interactions that range from instances of cultural imperialism to genuine intercultural encounters. Since international tours of Shakespearean productions of Suzuki Tadashi and Ninagawa Yukio in the 1980s and Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 150 Venning 1990s, scholarly attention on Shakespeare in Asian languages or within the framework of Asian theatrical traditions has developed and critics have debated whether such productions can be considered fully intercultural. As an example of such, Ninagawa’s The Tempest that toured to the Edinburgh Festival in 1988 borrowed from nō/kyōgen technique and deftly blended nō creator Zeami’s banishment to Sado Island with Prospero’s tale of exile; critical consensus labeled the production as “among the most moving of the multitude of stagings of Shakespeare’s play” (Sasayama, Mulryne, and Shewring 1999: 1). In this article, after discussion of some issues of interculturalism as they are displayed in theatre scholarship, I examine a filmed representation of a Shakespeare theatre troupe attempting intercultural performance: Shakespeare Wallah (1965), an early work of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. This film deals with a British-led Shakespeare troupe struggling to perform in post-independence India, and I argue that in some ways the film also documents aspects of an actual company, the Shakespeareana Players. I will address whether the film engages in genuine, postcolonial intercultural exchange, by which I mean respectful balancing of cultures in the encounter and challenging Western hegemony, or is a work that, using Shakespeare as a tool, perpetuates cultural imperialism, serving colonialist ideology although produced in a postcolonial era. Cultural Imperialism or Intercultural Encounter ? Arguing against intercultural Shakespeares, diverse theorists and practitioners claim that encounters between Shakespeare and Asia necessarily entail an unequal power dynamic in which the Western critic or practitioner tries to exert influence over Asia. Richard Schechner argues that Asian artists are encouraged to perform Shakespeare while no real attention is given to Asian dramatic literature in the West: “That’s a residue of colonialism; the native can ‘step up,’ but the Western developed person ought not to ‘step down.’ It’s a kind of reverse patriarchalism” (quoted in Sasayama, Mulryne, and Shewring 1999: 10). Rustom Bharucha claims that the West foists Shakespeare onto a foreign society “as a way of extending the information retrieval on an arguably burned-out Bard,” or encourages the Asian artist to present Shakespeare as an attempt to “pass” in the Western cultural scene (Bharucha 2004: 4).1 Similarly, Yeeyon Im, analyzing Lee Yountaek’s 1996 production of Hamlet , argues that so-called intercultural performances without postcolonial content are in fact only mirages of interculturalism, performing “complicit postcoloniality” (Im 2008: 273). Other scholars, such as Diane Daugherty, using the example of an Indian-French-Australian adaptation of Kathakali King Lear, argue Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter 151 more optimistically that genuine intercultural encounters between Shakespeare and Asian forms indeed occur and can be “intercultural theatre at its best” (Daugherty 2005: 65). Within this optimistic viewpoint, scholars such as Min Tian and Yong Li Lan have attempted to map out what intercultural productions of Shakespeare are able to do. Tian, giving a wonderful overview of Shakespearean performances in Asia, argues that because there are “fundamental differences between Elizabethan and Asian conditions and styles” of performance, Asian intercultural productions must, in effect, reinvent Shakespearean performance from scratch, and in so doing can recover, or invent, a vital spirit of “authentic Shakespeare” (Tian 1998: 275). Yong, examining Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen’s adaptation of Othello into the avant-garde Desdemona, finds that precisely because Ong’s staging is messy, ugly, and full of apparent failures of communication, it becomes a productive intercultural engagement (Yong 2004). Other scholars, without questioning the possibility of intercultural performance, have investigated the ways in which Asian productions of Shakespeare are constituted: Alexander C.Y. Huang argues that intercultural Shakespearean productions can be divided on linguistic lines: those using Asian theatrical idioms but performed in European language, productions in Asian languages with simultaneous translation, or those that “have featured two or more languages” and emphasize linguistic difference as a crucial part of the Shakespearean encounter. In all these cases, Huang argues that the Shakespearean adaptations must diverge significantly from traditional European theatrical forms in order to be successful (Huang 2008: 55, 58). Along these lines, Kevin J. Wetmore, reviewing a Cambodian adaptation of Othello, finds that paradoxically, by preserving her own culture through performance, artist Sophiline Cheam Shapiro can create a bridge between cultures (Wetmore 2005), and more effectively speak to a Western audience. While I am optimistic about the potential for intercultural encounters between Asian traditions and Shakespearean texts, not every attempt at interculturalism is judged successful. Practitioners such as Peter Brook have been criticized, by Bharucha and others, for perpetuating cultural imperialism even as they tried to stage intercultural productions (Zarrilli 1986; Bharucha 1993: 68 – 87; Kennedy 2009: 119 –120), while others, such as Jiao Juyin, who directed Hamlet in a Confucian temple in China in 1942 as a communal and patriotic allegory during wartime, do not ever intend to create an intercultural performance in which there is a cultural give-and-take, but simply appropriate Shakespeare’s texts, assimilating them into their own culture, language, and traditions in order to facilitate, as Huang calls it, “intracultural operations.” (Huang 2009: 3 – 4, 24). Vice versa, productions 152 Venning that appropriate Asian cultural symbols as a way of exoticizing Shakespeare and making the plays fresh—such a Ariane Mnouchkine’s Shakespeare Cycle in 1981–1984 — also fail to create genuine cross-cultural exchange; Dennis Kennedy calls such productions “Shakespearean orientalism” (Kennedy 1993: 294).2 In my own examination of Shakespeare Wallah and the Shakespeareana company, I discuss the film in terms of its relation to theatre history in an Indian-British instance and explore the issues, vexed or hopeful, of how Shakespeare and Indian performance interfaced in this post-independence example, which could be seen as a depiction of cultural imperialism or intercultural encounter. Thus far, the intercultural performances I’ve mentioned have been live theatre. Film—although process and final result differ markedly in method, materials, and audience reception—has also been a site for intercultural experiments in Shakespeare.3 I discuss a film that itself depicts theatrical performance in intercultural encounter while giving the theatre history background that informs the making of the film itself. Shakespeare Wallah, the first major success of Merchant Ivory Productions, is centrally concerned with intercultural theatrical performance. Through my close reading and historical analysis of this film, I situate the approaches to Shakespeare in Asia that I see in this work on a spectrum from cultural imperialism to mutually negotiated intercultural encounter, and suggest that these two labels are in fact are not necessarily mutually exclusive.4 Shakespeare Wallah (1965): Background and Plot Shakespeare Wallah depicts a British theatrical troupe in postindependence India performing Shakespeare in what appears to be overt cultural imperialism.5 The film replicates and perpetuates this cultural imperialism by situating the viewer’s sympathy with the British troupe members, not the newly liberated Indian culture, but simultaneously calls this imperialism into question by subtle irony aimed at perpetrators of this imperialism—both the troupe leaders and their devoted Indian audience members, and thus, by extension, the film’s audience who sympathize with the troupe. The viewer is encouraged to understand that the loss of “Shakespeare” is natural and even necessary, even as she or he mourns the passing. The story of Merchant Ivory Productions and the genesis of this particular film is perhaps more interesting than the film’s plot. Merchant Ivory Productions, although it eventually became known for creating independent film adaptations of English and American classic novels by authors such as E. M. Forster, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Henry James, originally began by producing English-language films in India, often on Indian themes. Most films were written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (b. Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter 153 1927), a Jewish woman who was born in Germany, married a Parsi, and spent 1952–1976 living in India before moving to New York. Although director James Ivory (b. 1928) is an American, producer Ismail Merchant (1936–2005) was a Muslim Indian educated in Bombay and New York6 who invented his last name in college; he was born Ismail Noormohamed Abdul Rehman (Long 1997: 7–32). The company is marked by their Indian experiences. The crews began every film shoot with a mahurrat—an Indian ritual—even when the films had no relation to India. In conversation with critic Robert Emmet Long, James Ivory noted that throughout his career he remained connected to the team’s Indian origins: these early works were the films he enjoyed most and felt forged the spirit of the Merchant-Ivory collaboration (Long 2005: x, 12). Shakespeare Wallah has a double plot—half backstage drama and half romance. The backstage drama deals with the Buckingham Players, a group of touring actors. The troupe is led by a couple, Tony and Carla Buckingham. These two moderately successful English actors primarily perform Shakespeare (the film contains scenes from Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Sheridan’s The Critic) throughout India, with their daughter Lizzie, their aging friend Bobby, and others, many of whom are Indian. Although the Buckinghams have enjoyed major success in colonial India, following the 1947 independence their services are markedly less in demand. The occasional Shakespeare aficionado, such as a Shakespeare- and antique car–loving Maharaja (played by Indian theatre legend Utpal Dutt), still calls for performances (see Figure 1), but while schools used to request several Buckingham shows per year, newer Indian arts, particularly the showy Bollywood cinema as represented by the film star Manjula, are now more popular. Even Tony himself has become disillusioned about his role as a performer of Shakespeare in India, and when Bobby dies of a heart attack (perhaps symbolizing the “death” of possibilities for the British expatriate in the new India), Tony and Carla resolve to send their daughter to England, where perhaps she can have more success. In the central scene, Tony laments to his wife: I just can’t get it out of my mind: we’ve been here year after year. Five, six, seven performances, they couldn’t see enough of us. . . . Now, such a rejection. A rejection of me. Everything I am. Everything I’ve done. Nowadays why should they care? It’s not appreciation I’m talking about. Why are we here, instead of in Sheffield, or in Bristol, or in at least somewhere like that? (Ivory 1965) Ironically, it is only Lizzie, the girl who has no memory of England, who leaves India and not her parents, who feel extreme nostalgia for the homeland. 154 Venning The romantic half of the plot is simple: Lizzie falls in love with the Indian playboy Sanju, provoking the jealousy of his former flame, the beautiful Bollywood star Manjula. Despite her parents’ wishes, Lizzie contemplates staying in India, but when Sanju is unwilling to voice any permanent commitment, she decides to leave. While some elements seem imperialist, or even colonial—the sympathetic focus on the Buckinghams, the depictions of major Indian characters (Sanju, Manjula, and the Maharaja) as shallow, and the location of England as “home” for a person (Lizzie) who has never been there—the film can also be read as challenging such a simplistic colonialist view. The filmmakers suggest that the Buckinghams are not really British anymore, but rather part of an immigrant diaspora in India, a country in which they are no longer welcome or valued. It is the British who have left their homeland, not the Indians. Critics who have written on the Indian diaspora (see for example Mohammad 2007; Shukla 1997, 2003) have noted that a central element of the diasporic state of being is nostalgia for the homeland, manifested through a desire for cultural mementos (often food, clothing, or familiar art and music), and, especially in the first-generation immigrants who themselves left the homeland, a desire to return. In Shakespeare Wallah Tony and Carla Buckingham suffer this nostalgia, manifested most directly through their devotion to Shakespeare. Ironically, Lizzie, who is sent “home” to England, could herself be considered more Indian than British. Although Shakespeare Wallah can be read as a paradigm of cultural imperialism, the filmmakers attempt to undercut or question Figure 1. The Buckingham Players perform for the Maharaja in Shakespeare Wallah. (Photo: Courtesy of Merchant Ivory Productions) Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter 155 such a reading throughout the film. The central reasons why such a reading seems appropriate are that the viewer’s sympathy is intended to rest with the Buckingham family, and that Indian performance culture, represented by Bollywood and the character of Manjula, is exoticized almost to the point of ridicule. When Tony laments the Indian rejection of his art and theatre, he is also mourning the Indian rejection of Shakespeare and British high culture, which his troupe both presents and represents. Tony is shown throughout the film to be the generous enlightened colonial ideal: He seeks to educate the Indian populace, improving their lives through British culture, and he maintains friendly patriarchal relations with the native Indians in his troupe, gladly offering monetary advances when needed, even as he struggles personally. However, the film could also be read as a critique of Buckingham’s imperialist mentality. Buckingham’s inability to understand why he and his art are being rejected in favor of native Indian traditions and his blatant nostalgia for India as a pre-independence colony of the British Empire is a major character flaw responsible for the growing failure of his troupe through its lack of adaptation to a changing India. He is unable to deal with Indians as equals, to present truly intercultural theatre that speaks to an independent Indian audience instead of down to them. Moreover, while Tony is nostalgic for colonialism, the filmmaking team is certainly not. Their goal is precisely the opposite of Tony’s: they create an intercultural film depicting India and Indians triumphant over this floundering, nostalgic British theatre troupe. However, the question of to what degree the filmmakers were troubling the imperialist discourses present in the characters is further problematized by the identities of the actors. The Actors Shakespeare Wallah is essentially an autobiographical film in which the central actors play versions of themselves. In reality, Kendal and his Shakespeareana Players toured India from the 1940s through the 1960s with a break around the time of independence, playing primarily to school audiences but also giving private performances to aficionados. In 1963, the actor-manager Geoffrey Kendal (1910 –1998) lent his touring diary from the year 1947 to Ivory, who came up with the idea for the film. Kendal, his wife, Laura Lidell (1909 –1992), and their daughter Felicity (b. 1945), all of whom actually toured English theatrical productions across India as the Shakespeareana Players, portray the Buckingham Players. Shashi Kapoor (b. 1938), who plays Lizzie’s love interest Sanju, was the son of an important Hindi traveling the- 156 Venning atre manager and film mogul and was married to the Kendals’ other daughter, Jennifer (1933 –1984), who also has a minor role in the film. Kapoor, in addition to further film work, went on to be a central mover in the Mumbai-based Prithvi theatre (see http://www.prithvitheatre .org/home.php). Hence, we see a kind of doubling of the fictional couples and the actors involved. Tony Buckingham seems to be a fair reflection of Geoffrey Kendal. In the film, it is implied at several points that Buckingham is an assumed name; Kendal himself was born Geoffrey Bragg in northern England. His stage name came from the town where he was born, Kendal. Geoffrey Kendal begins his autobiography, itself titled The Shakespeare Wallah, by noting, “It is strange, my affinity with India . . . it is the only place where I really belong,” and he mentions that his favorite audiences were “Indian schoolgirls riveted by Shakespeare” (Kendal 1986: xi, 1–2, 46). Yet, despite this affinity, Kendal clearly remains an Englishman: He depicts Indian Independence Day as a moment in which the Indian people lack the guidance to “know what would happen next” (Kendal 1986: 95). The vast majority of the players in his company were white English expatriates; in his biography he mentions only four native Indian members of the troupe: Shashi Kapoor, Utpal Dutt (1929 –1993), Anwar Mirza, and Marcus Murch (Kendal 1986: 117). (See Figure 2.) Felicity Kendal, in her introduction to her father’s autobiography, even describes him as someone like Buckingham — devoted to giving Shakespeare especially to the Indian population, who, at least in his mind, desperately need the English playwright (Kendal 1986: viii). Kendal admits he never learned any Indian languages despite his many years in India, although both of his daughters learned Hindi (Kendal 1986: 174). And the Shakespeare that Kendal chose to present was seen by James Ivory as particularly old-fashioned, a Victorian or Edwardian “over-the-top” style of performance; Ivory felt that Kendal may in fact have “consciously been striving for a somewhat outmoded performing style” (Long 2005: 76 –77). Kendal’s affinity with India can be seen, then, as that of the benevolent patriarch, spreading his vision of culture, whether or not it is desired. This is how he is depicted in the film, and his statements in his autobiography support this critical approach to his actual theatre work. British cultural imperialism and its effects are even more clearly represented by the Indian maharaja, played by Utpal Dutt. He is the most ridiculous figure in the film. The Maharaja is first seen playing with the engine of his expensive British car. He smokes cigars, was educated in London, and spouts Aristotle and Shakespeare. In a parody of Hamlet’s instructions to the players, the Maharaja, dressed all in black (see Figure 3), says at dinner to the Buckingham Players: Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter 157 Figure 2. Kendal’s Shakespeareana Company in 1953. Back row: Utpal Dutt, Conor Farrington, Geoffrey Kendal, Anwar Mirza, John Day. Front row: Frank Wheatley, Nancy Neal, Felicity Kendal, Laura Lidell, Jennifer Kendal, Wendy Beavis, Brian Kellet. (Photo: Macmillan and Co.) When I was in London, I would slip away whenever I could, from the round of banquets and whatnot, to spend an enjoyable and instructive evening at the theatre. You don’t find it too hot, I hope? . . . Oh, that’s good. Strangely enough, strangely enough, my great love of Shakespeare was first aroused by one Miss Haming . . . uh, uh, Miss Hamlet. Do you know her? . . . A pity. She was a very accomplished actress, playing the part of Portia. I’m reminded of her by your very charming daughter. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time, and I was held spellbound literally, in accordance with Aristotle’s precepts, purged with pity and terror. “The quality of mercy is not strained. . . .” (Ivory 1965) The Maharaja then goes on, like Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, to attempt to recite a speech to the troupe of professional players; this scene was drawn from an actual private performance the Shakespeareana company gave for the Maharaja of Mysore (Kendal 1986: 114 –115), and many of the traits of this film maharaja are part of the company’s actual encounter with a real one. (The maharajas who had been supported by the British prior to independence of course had as much reason to be as nostalgic for the recent colonial past as did an English player.) In Ivory’s film, the Maharaja—totally distant from the Indian culture in which he so opulently lives —is clearly a relic of the colonial period, even more so than the Buckingham Players. The accent employed by Dutt is more upper-class British than those used by the 158 Venning Figure 3. Maharaja with Buckingham Players at dinner in Shakespeare Wallah. (Photo: Courtesy of Merchant Ivory Productions). Buckingham Players. The suggestion is clear: the Maharaja is more British than the English troupe. Dutt, who began his career as an actor in Kendal’s Shakespeareana troupe, is, like Kapoor, an important part of Indian theatre history (see Richmond, Swann, and Zarrilli 1990: 395–405; Chatterjee 1994; Bhatia 1999). He went on to become a playwright and director in Bengali, English, and Hindi theatre; he founded the Little Theatre Group in Kolkata in 1947 and became a diehard Marxist who was devoted to bringing theatre to a mass audience. He called “progressive theatre” too weak and argued for a “revolutionary theatre” that would “not only expose the system but also call for the violent smashing of the state machine.” On the origins of his Little Theatre Group, and almost certainly referring to his days in Kendal’s troupe, Dutt said: “There were years wasted performing Shakespeare before an intellectual audience. Shakespeare must be done, but he must be done for the common people” (Gunawardana and Dutt 1971: 225, 235). The casting of Dutt as the reactionary figure of the Maharaja, and Dutt’s performance, highlight this king as a colonial remnant, which the new India must and will smash. Also problematizing a reading of the film as supporting British cultural imperialism is the casting of Shashi Kapoor (sanju) and Madhur Jaffrey (b. 1933), who plays Manjula, both major theatre and Bollywood stars. Kapoor as mentioned comes from a major Bollywood film and theatre dynasty, and went on to found the Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai with his wife, Jennifer. Jaffrey can still be seen on stage: in 2004 she was on Broadway in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production Bom- Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter 159 bay Dreams. However, she is perhaps best known for her Indian cookbooks, having published over a dozen, mainly for non-Indian readers in the West.7 The characters Kapoor and Jaffrey play are somewhat ridiculous, but in very different ways from Tony and the Maharaja. Kapoor’s Sanju is a playboy who is unwilling to compromise his hypermasculinity in order to commit to the woman he loves. Jaffrey’s Manjula, on the other hand, the representative of “authentic” Indian culture, is catty, jealous, and violent; although beautiful and intelligent, the film appears to suggest that there is little to her art beyond her natural talent and clever manipulation of her own sensuality (see Figure 4). She is a diva whose massive talent and beauty are outweighed by her uncontrollable (almost savage) ego and temper. She throws tantrums after filming scenes, and when she sees that Sanju is falling for Lizzie, she disrupts one of the Buckingham troupe’s performances of Othello. However, Kapoor and Jaffrey humanize these characters and help to make them part of the emotional center of the film, perhaps even more than Tony and Carla Buckingham: Manjula certainly resonated with audiences, as Jaffrey was honored with a best actress award for her role in the film at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival. Critical Context(s): Critical Analysis of Shakespeare Wallah Academics and critics have taken significant note of Shakespeare Wallah, responding primarily to its apparently ambivalent attitudes Figure 4. Madhur Jaffrey as Manjula, filming a Bollywood sequence, in Shakespeare Wallah. (Photo: Courtesy of Merchant Ivory Productions) 160 Venning toward postcolonialism and imperialism. Lubna Chaudhry and Saba Khattak argue that the filmmakers, despite their best efforts, have created a film that is nostalgic for colonialism (Chaudhry and Khattak 1994), however, they make this argument by focusing primarily not on the theatrical plot, but upon the romance; they see, in Lizzie’s departure after Sanju’s unwillingness to commit, a gendered and political stance privileging all things English. Valerie Wayne, in her essay “Shakespeare Wallah and Colonial Specularity,” finds more postcolonial content in the film. Wayne argues that Shakespeare Wallah depicts cultural hybridity, primarily through the figure of Sanju and the scene in which Manjula disrupts Othello. She argues that Sanju is torn between his Indian nationality and a combination of his love for Lizzie and nostalgia for the Raj, in a manner that blurs the “lines of oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized (p. 101).” His loyalties are split between India and England, and although he ultimately chooses India, he does so not by overtly rejecting Lizzie but by failing to ask her to stay. In Wayne’s analysis, Manjula’s disruption of Othello represents “the movie’s most sustained presentation of hybridity (p. 100).” In this scene, Wayne sees that Tony as Othello is both an English player and an Oriental Moor. Lizzie as Desdemona is, both in her role and as an actor, a white woman rejecting colonial patriarchy for a colonized lover. Manjula, although an Indian woman who has lost her lover, is the most powerful character: She is a film star and can draw far more audience than the colonialist players. Sanju is trapped between. In Wayne’s opinion, in this scene, all boundaries collapse between East and West in the face of postcolonial hybridity ( Wayne 1997). Nandi Bhatia, in Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India, strongly disagrees with both Wayne and Chaudhry and Khattak. Bhatia reads the film as a depiction of the failure of East and West to unite (under a colonial mentality) in India; the film, in her opinion, shows a total failure of hybridity. She notes that the film was itself conceived as a “metaphor for the end of the British Raj” and argues that Sanju’s rejection of Lizzie thus stands in for India’s rejection of the colonizers. She notes that in this film it is the European, not the Asian, who is feminized. Sanju at first idolizes Lizzie, but he ultimately decides he cannot be faithful to her. Bhatia expands upon this to show how the film reveals fissures in the supposed “universality” of Shakespeare, and the ways in which “the theatrical discourse around Shakespeare in India remains contested” (Bhatia 2004: 68–75). In her analysis Shakespeare and the Raj are laid to rest by a new India they cannot accept or understand. Whether the film depicts imperialism, hybridity, or a post- Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter 161 colonial rejection of all things British, the work is tied to the uses of Shakespearean play texts and performance in India. Scholars such as Ania Loomba and Gauri Viswanathan point out that Shakespearean performance and inclusion in educational curricula were a colonizing impulse: enforcing a literary background was a way of establishing a set authority and handicapping any Indian without a sufficient knowledge of English language or literature (Loomba 1989: 16–18; Viswanathan 1989: 18–21). Yet even some critics who accept this analysis cannot help challenging this as a simple case of an author who must be banished. Jyotsna Singh, who points out that while “the notion of a universal Shakespeare ‘loved’ by all Indians is clearly a colonial legacy,” Shakespeare’s plays have become “a part of indigenous theatrical entertainment,” and “through performance . . . Native appropriations of Shakespeare often displaced the cultural authority of the ‘universal’ colonial bard, even while expressing a reverence for his works” (Singh 1989: 450 – 452).8 Shakespeare’s plays cannot be seen— by Merchant Ivory, by Singh, or by Indian theatre/film artists — as solely a colonizing force imposed by the British. The plays are also genuinely loved and respected as great works of art, offering not only European “enlightenment,” but also pure pleasure to audiences and readers. This unwillingness of India to completely reject Shakespeare, even after it had rejected British rule, is similar to the paradox of Shakespeare Wallah: the film neither fully condemns nor condones the colonialism of its central characters. Most of the characters in the film are caught in between worlds and do not want to be forced to choose, yet they must. Lizzie finds herself in a world that has no room for her and is not what her parents promised; her almost forced departure reveals some of the trauma that can accompany the beginnings of postcolonialism. These complexities are also visible in overlapping chronologies of Indian independence present in Shakespeare Wallah: set after independence, it looks both back to the Raj and forward to an uncertain postcolonial future. Buckingham looks back nostalgically on the colonial British Raj while touring old-fashioned Shakespearean productions in a newly independent nation. Yet although James Ivory conceived of the film when he saw Kendal’s 1947 diary—the year that India gained its independence —Ivory did not in fact see the diary until 1963. Shortly after independence, the Shakespeareana troupe left India, returning in 1953. Thus, when the film was made in 1965, it was eighteen years after the diary was written, and the style of performing and situation was in fact a picture of the current 1965 company, although as if they had never left India for five years after independence. Clearly this was fictionalization of history. 162 Venning Ivory noted that the memories of Shakespeareana in pre-independence India portrayed in the film were troubling to the Kendals: “The premise of the film appeared to be the negation of everything they had worked for for so long” (Ivory 1973: 88). Kendal notes that the characters in the film both were and were not his family: “This film was not about us,” he writes, knowing that it was. “It was in some ways close to our experience, yet at the same time seen through a different pair of eyes. We did not recognize ourselves” (Kendal 1986: 145). Although the film ends with Lizzie going to England, Felicity Kendal moved to England—where she became a major star of television and theatre — only after the film was released and because of the film: She went to the German festival screening in 1965, and from there went to start her career in England instead of returning to India (Kendal 1986: 156–157). Like the slippage of the theme between cultural imperialism of playing Shakespeare in postcolonial Indian and the potential for real intercultural performance of a troupe composed of both British and Indian actors stumbling toward a new synthesis in theatre, the film depicts the slippage of identity between actor and role, between pre- and post-independence India. Though Ivory, Dutt, and others may have found the Shakespeareana Players to be a colonial remnant that had to pass, India itself in later years would honor them for their devotion in bringing Shakespeare to all parts of the country on third-class trains—Kendal and his wife in 1990 received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award, “conferred on eminent practitioners, gurus, and scholars of music, dance, and theatre for sustained individual achievements of high professional order” (see http://www.sangeetnatak.org/sna/guide -snaawards.htm). Conclusion: Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter? Whether Shakespeare Wallah is an example of or a critique of cultural imperialism is a tricky question indeed: elements of plot and characterization, the cultural and individual identities of the filmmakers and actors, the language of the film, its relationship to the theatres in which the actors participated, its cultural context, and its intended audience—after a showing in Germany it was first released in New York—all serve to make this a complex issue. The film received considerable notice in Europe. The title of the film (and Kendal’s autobiography) was not an invention of Merchant Ivory or Jhabvala: Kendal was actually known as “the Shakespeare Wallah.” While the film is certainly a picture of cultural imperialism and its aftereffects, the fact that many elements of Shakespeare Wallah critique the colonialist nostalgia of the troupe head suggests that it is in fact a genuinely intercultural work, Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter 163 blending the Western/British form and language with the Indian culture and history. Shakespeare is ambivalently pushed away, and yet his passing mourned. My own difficulty in assessing the film—whether it is a successful intercultural work, critiquing cultural imperialism, or a film that practices the same problematic attitude toward Indian culture that it depicts through its central characters and the theatre they create—points to an intermediate possibility: the film has elements of both aspects. Shakespeare Wallah recognizes in its narrative the cultural imperialism of its characters but also posits a real, if loaded, intercultural engagement between Shakespeare and South Asia. Of course the spectrum I have outlined of imperialist or intercultural is at its heart artificial: one could argue that any work of art aiming at interculturality does not exist at a single point on the spectrum, but sits in a range of possible positions. However, I believe that such a spectrum is useful in analyzing works such as this film and might also be applied to other interactions between Shakespeare and Asia; however, it might be even more useful to watch these categories collapse together. Thus, at the same time as we try to move past cultural imperialism toward postcolonial or intercultural works with equal exchanges between cultures, we can also try to move beyond such rigid hierarchies of cultural exchange. Instead of measuring how much each culture gives and takes, the questions can be in what varied and unexpected ways cultures listen, contribute, and benefit from the final intercultural artistic product. NOTES I thank Alexander Huang, the “Asian Shakespearese in Europe” seminar group at the 2009 British Shakespeare Association in London, the Shakespearean Performance Working Group at ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research), the anonymous reviewers of this article, and Kathy Foley for their many helpful comments, corrections, and suggestions for revision. 1. Though Schechner has, himself, been attacked by Bharucha as neocolonial in appropriation of Asian material, rejection of Shakespeare in Asia is a point on which they agree. However, Bharucha himself may be more open to international Shakespeare than the above quote implies. At the 2009 British Shakespeare Association conference held at King’s College London, Bharucha invited more research on international Shakespearean production. His points, according to my notes, were that “more research must be done on the embodied diasporas of Shakespearean knowledge” and that the most productive future research on Shakespearean performance would interrogate “in what language or languages [one] reads, feels, hears, and sees Shakespeare . . . in what languages beyond English do we engage with Shakespeare?” (His actual wording may have been slightly different.) 164 Venning 2. For more comprehensive theatre studies of Shakespearean interactions with non-Anglophone cultures, see for example Dennis Kennedy’s Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (1993) or Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin’s Post- colonial Shakespeares (1998). Sasayama, Mulryne, and Shewring (1999) give an overview of Shakespeare in Japan, and Tian (1998) and Huang (1998) each deal with a number of productions. 3. Films such as Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (from Macbeth) and Ran (from Lear), Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool (from Macbeth) and Omkara (from Othello), or even James Wooding’s Bollywood Queen (from Romeo and Juliet, but set in London, with a happy ending) take Shakespearean texts into both Asian performance idioms and the medium of film. International Shakespeare on film (especially Kurosawa’s work) is also extensively discussed in scholarly texts; see, for example, Anthony Davies’s Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (1988), John Collick’s Shakespeare, Cinema and Society (1989), Kathy M. Howlett’s Framing Shakespeare on Film (2000), Diana E. Henderson’s A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Film (2006), and Maurice Hindle’s Studying Shakespeare on Film (2007). 4. End points of “cultural imperialism” and “intercultural encounter” are not the only way a spectrum could be theorized. Some would make additional subdivisions and, as I discuss in the conclusion of this paper, there is slippage between these different modes of encounter. However for the purposes of my argument I find this division useful. 5. I realize that I am discussing theatre performance through the medium of film and that a number of major personnel (i.e., actors, director, and writer) working on the project are not Indian. I acknowledge the potential problems this creates. However, I argue this film is a unique document of an intercultural performance style of the 1960s that involved European, American, and Indian input that today is impossible to access in another form. The major premise of the film, albeit framed in a fictive narrative, is useful for my study, in that it looks at changes in Indian performing traditions in terms of popularity and prestige in the move from a colonial to postcolonial period. Likewise the filming techniques are more “theatrical” than “filmic”— reminding us of the theatre lineage of this particular film. For example, although there are a few images of landscapes or distinctive locations (such as the estate La Martinière in Lucknow), most of the shots are taken from a still camera, showing people interacting within small set spaces, as if in naturalistic drama (Long 1997: 46 – 52). The company members are from different cultures, and the screenplay is in English, written by a European-born author and directed by an American. However, Merchant Ivory can still be seen as a South Asian company, because of its producer and Indian cast members; hence I argue this is an intercultural film about an intercultural theatre company. 6. Merchant lived for a period at New York University’s International House, a community for scholars just northwest of Columbia University. By chance I lived at the same site fifty years later. 7. On Kapoor see Jain (2006) and www.prithvitheatre.org, and on Jaffrey see Roy (2002), or one of Jaffrey’s many cookbooks, for example Jaffrey (1973). Cultural Imperialism and Intercultural Encounter 165 8. Todd Landon Barnes, in the discussion at the Shakespearean Performance Research Group at ASTR in November 2009 and a telephone interview on 28 July 2010, mentioned one such example of this reverence. 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