ABSTRACT
Peter Donaldson characterizes Jean-Luc Godard's quirky 1986 film, King Lear as a "distant and debased copy" of William Shakespeare's text which like Gloucester's bastard son, Edmund, asserts "filial rights despite illegitimacy, by turns denying paternity and appropriating the riches of the paternal text." While The Last Lear continues the cultural work of earlier English-language, Shakespeare-themed "heritage" films like Merchant and Ivory's Shakespeare Wallah, it also flirts with the marketing possibilities opened up by the phenomenon of "Bollywood Shakespeares." Although a dedicated theatre worker, Utpal Dutt had to find employment in films to sustain himself. Uneasy with his relationship to the film industry, which he regarded as a site of capitalist production, films come in for trenchant criticism in his plays as a commodity seducing the masses away from a critical, political theatre practice. Aajker Shahjahan is a veritable archive of lost plays of the golden age of the Bengali stage and its role in nationalist history.
