ABSTRACT
Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, the eminent Sanskrit scholar and the leading reformer for women’s rights in mid-nineteenth-century Bengal, wrote Bhrāntivilās, a prose adaptation of The Comedy of Errors based on Shakespeare’s play and its prose retelling found in Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. However, Vidyasagar departed from both his sources to write an anti-misogynist adaptation with a strong and likeable woman figure; in effect, Vidyasagar’s adaptation anticipated Anglophone feminist readings of Errors by several decades and reveals the agency exercised by even relatively minor Indian adapters of Shakespeare. In contrast, Girishchandra Ghosh’s Macbeth provides a rare instance of colonial mimicry, with Bengali actors enacting a translation that was as close to Shakespeare as possible, and performing in a theatre that was closely modelled on the English theatre of the times. Girishchandra did introduce subversive elements by having actors double the roles of good and bad characters, and by hinting at parallels between Scotland under Macbeth’s rule and India under British colonial rule. The failure of Girishchandra’s production renders problematic one of the key tenets of postcolonial criticism by throwing light on the limits of Homi Bhabha’s positing of colonial mimicry as a means of subversion.
