ABSTRACT
Examining Preti Taneja’s 2017 English language novel We That Are Young, which is a vivid and carefully situated reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear in the context of contemporary Delhi, and Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 Hindi language film adaptation of Hamlet as Haider, a movie set in 1990s Kashmir amid political insurgencies and disappearances, this chapter will explore the manifold ways in which Shakespeare is – to deploy Sandra Young’s resonant phrase – “dismantled”. Dismantling Shakespeare enables new thinking about issues of social justice, global inequalities and climate justice, and these specific examples of Shakespeare in India invite authors, directors and adapters to rethink his plot lines from the perspective of the Global South. This chapter offers less an essentialised version of Shakespeare as a figure of inherently adaptable global cultural value than a politically informed interrogation of a decolonised Shakespeare. It will explore how his texts have been consciously moved from colonial anglophone contexts to speak in the 21st century to pressing issues and histories in Indian Ocean and South Atlantic contexts. I am interested here in making a case less for Shakespeare’s exceptionalism than for his availability as a resource (what I have called in previous publications on Shakespearean adaptation in 21st-century China his “usefulness”) for political and cultural literary activism in the 21st century.
