English Shakespeares in Indian Cinema: 36 Chowringhee Lane and the Last Lear

The two Indian films under review in this article — Aparna Sen's 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) and Rituparno Ghosh's The Last Lear (2007) — absorb Shakespeare differently from Bollywood movies: he is recited and performed in English instead of Hindi; the films are set in Kolkata instead of Mumbai; and Shakespeare also helps to construct the main characters' identities. Via an analysis of the protagonists' displaced identities — one is an Anglo-Indian and the other an Anglophile theater actor — and the nostalgia for their past, this essay aims to explore the movies' endless similarities in the interpretation of Shakespeare, despite the significant span of time between them. Although the performance of Shakespeare in English and the inevitable connection with a nostalgic past in the movies may sometimes hint at a neo-colonial perspective, the protagonists' hybridity challenges that interpretation. These two films pursue the problematic manifestations of Shakespeare in English and investigate the difficulties and complexities derived from linguistic choices and intertextual references. They are characterized by an ambivalence that is certainly characteristic of post-colonial India.