ABSTRACT
The Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry draws deeply on Shakespeare and particularly on King Lear to explore the 'janus faced' psychological dilemma of the male Parsi postcolonial subject. Shakespeare's tragedy is a primary organising device for the novel, acting as meta- and intertext, the medium through which Mistry writes a political critique of life in 1970s Bombay. This chapter examines Mistry's appropriation of Shakespeare as a key site of postcolonial negotiation and contrasts the approach taken by Gunnarsson and Taraporevala to the theme. It shows how an idea of 'India' is created for a global marketplace in two different kinds of artistic media: an intertextual literary work by a writer of the Indian diaspora whose debt to King Lear has far been underappreciated and a Western art-house film about which there has been a dearth of critical thinking to date, perhaps partly because of its 'silencing' of the Shakespeare ur-text.
