ABSTRACT
The devastating failure of Girish chandra Ghosh's Macbeth points to a crucial rift in the history of Shakespearean stagings in India: a rift, if people may so call it, between translation and adaptation. By contrast with Ghosh's faithful recreation, William Shakespeare had been Indianized for the stage from the mid-nineteenth century, in versions that retained only the bare bones of the fable, characters, and language. The earliest translation of Shakespeare into an Indian language was a Bengali version of The Tempest produced as academic exercise at Fort William College, set up in 1809 for training colonial officers. Moinak Biswas suggests that the task of the urban crime film is an interrupted work of mourning, that it records a loss - familial, or religious - which the mainstream Bombay film fails to acknowledge. No viewer of the modern urban crime him could be in any doubt about deep attraction exercised upon largely sedentary and pacific audience by violence "outside the law".
