ABSTRACT
A compelling scene in the film Shakespeare Wallah (1964) depicts a performance of Othello in a quaint proscenium stage theatre in the former British summer retreat, Simla (India) in the mid 1950s. In the middle of Othello’s speech, and before he murders Desdemona, the Indian spectators notice a glamorous Bombay movie actress seated in one of the viewing boxes. She looks bored at the play and suddenly, excited, obviously starstruck viewers point at her, and walk to her box to get autographs. She signs a few autographs and leaves as Desdemona is murdered on stage. The English actors playing Othello and Desdemona from the Buckingham players struggle gamely to continue, but soon it is clear that the performance is disrupted. Shakespeare’s play is nudged “off stage” by the appeal of a Bombay actress. This moment in the film signals the end of the colonial, English language—fairly “straight”—productions of Shakespeare that continued at the end of the British Raj in the 1950s. The players in the film are loosely based on the experiences of Geoffrey Kendall’s Shakespeareana touring company, who put on more than 800 performances between 1953 and 1956. But by the late 1950s, their days were numbered and the Merchant Ivory film is generally accepted as a nostalgic farewell to the Raj, as Ismail Merchant explains:
In the sixties we made Shakespeare Wallah as a metaphor for the end of the British Raj and its aftermath. A group of itinerant actors who stage the works of Shakespeare and other English classics across the subcontinent find they have become an anachronism—an irrelevance in a country where the old order had collapsed and the emerging culture is beginning to draw on other influences. (29)
