ABSTRACT
Inspired by The Tempest, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the pioneering nineteenth-century Indian novelist, wrote in 1866 the novel Kapālakunḍalā, in which Miranda and Caliban are combined into one figure, the eponymous heroine. Such a fusion, along with strategic intertextual references to Sanskrit texts in addition to Shakespeare, in a story set in seventeenth-century Mughal India, enables Bankim to also frame Kapālakunḍalā as a critical text through which he foregrounds the plight of contemporary Bengali women. At the same time, Bankim crafts in the novel’s heroine an early symbol of the woman as nation, and through her struggle for freedom, offers a critique of the British civilising mission. Kapālakunḍalā and two of Bankim’s essays (translated in this book as appendices 1 and 2) shed new light on the ways in which colonial writers probed colonial modernity and its consequences. Bankim’s writings, in turn, led Tagore to provide a trenchantly anticolonial reading of The Tempest which, however, did not lead him to endorse a culturally purist or exclusivist nationalism. The writings of Bankim and Tagore, read together, show the limitations of the concepts of colonial mimicry and hegemony for the purposes of analysing responses to Shakespeare by colonial Indian writers, while their pioneering responses to The Tempest anticipate anticolonial readings of the play from the 1960s onwards.
