Monday,11,2019

Samik Bandyopadhyay is a noted critic and researcher of film, theatre and literature.
He was interviewed by Dr Paromita Chakravarti and Sri Abhishek Sarkar.

A Wiki link about him can be found here.

Year of passing B.A. and M.A. Details of institutions concerned.
I began college in 1955. I came out of school and joined Presidency College in ‘55 and went into my English Honours classes in ‘57 and did my Masters in ‘61 through Presidency College but in Calcutta University, basically.

When did your first encounter with Shakespeare take place (at school or college)?
In class obviously, in my B.A./undergraduate classes.

Not in school! But there’s another thing! My father taught English Literature in City College and Calcutta University. And he had done his Ph.D in 1930 at Edinburgh Institute under Prof. Herbert Grierson and his subject was the growth and evolution of the Elizabethan lyric. So there was an atmosphere of Shakespeare reading. The books were there! In fact I started buying books independently for the first time in 1959 because I got some sort of, I don’t remember what it was, scholarship on my B.A. results in English and this money came quarterly and it was a large amount of money – Rs.300 in those days, when the Penguin books cost sixpence (about Rs.3.50). So when I started buying books in 1959, I discovered that my father’s collection of Shakespeare studies, Elizabethan literature, 18th and 19th century literatures were extremely solid. I found that he hadn’t been able to buy books for ten years, which is roughly between 1950 and 1960 - so I just had to fill in the backlog and then it was an excellent list of books. All the major titles, Shakespeare editions and critical works were there. So, it was easy to read Shakespeare and study Shakespeare.

Who taught the texts in question? College and university syllabi (Shakespeare plays and poems).
In college the two most important Shakespeare teachers that we had were Tarak Nath Sen and Shailendra Kumar Sen.

I’ll talk first about Shailen-babu. Shailen-babu’s specialization was in 18th Century criticism of Shakespeare. His Ph.D, I believe was on the works of the 18th century critics Malone and Theobald. So that was his strength. But obviously in the classroom situation, where he taught us, as far as I remember, As You Like It, closely as a text, his emphasis was on different readings, specially the 18th century emendations – their virtues and limitations. Extremely critical and probing! So rather than get carried away by Shakespeare, there was a great attention, even in my graduation classes, in the Shakespeare text and its evolution and that was because of the strong input from Shailen-babu.

Tarak Nath Sen took us through, as far as I remember, King Lear and Othello – these were the two Shakespeare texts that he did with us. In all these cases it was a very close textual reading of Shakespeare. In our tutorial exercises, the explanation of passages, but always with a great attention on different readings available, comparing them, bringing them in, received a major thrust. The other thing is that Tarak-babu had a theory which he had also published in some scholarly journals already, the Modern Language Notes for example, that all the short lines in Shakespeare, which were shorter than the iambic pentameter norm, these short lines had a purpose, that is either the gap was an indication of some stage action or a pause – a pause which was meaningful in its context. So whenever he read the Shakespeare text he would always explain and relate these short lines. So discovering these short lines and reading them became a rather interesting and stimulating game for us.

The one thing that we missed and lacked in our Shakespeare teaching was the more historical reading of Shakespeare, relating him to this times and history – that never came to us really. When we went for our Masters, the teaching at Calcutta University was miserable! The only person who made any sense was Prof. Jyoti Bhattacharya, who read Lear with us. He was the first person, if we take in what we were getting in terms of a class, who made us aware of the politics of Shakespeare – no body before that!

But due to my political involvement, I was with communist politics from the beginning. There was a background of communist politics in my house and so a lot of books on early Marxist writings on Shakespeare were available. And due to my father’s interest in Elizabethan Literature and Marxism, I read L.C. Knights very early (Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson) and also a lot of Arnold Kettle. So a Marxist reading of Shakespeare, whatever was available at that time, and some very mechanical Marxist readings by Russian critics, Smirnov and Morozov in particular were there. Hence some sort of a political reading of Shakespeare, reading him in the terms of the beginning and rise of capitalism, were also coming in, but these were lines I continued with after my university days and when I came to teach Shakespeare in the ‘60s.

Was the teacher very particular about pronunciation and accent? Were you encouraged to read out aloud?
No. But I started it in school with my children in Patha Bhavan but never in college.

Were expletives and sexual references omitted?
The great joke but the truth in our time was that whenever Tarak-babu would come to such lines he would say ‘Lets skip the next two lines!’And that was the end of it. Jyoti-babu didn’t do the text in detail so he didn’t face the problem. But Tarak-babu read every line but whenever those references came up he’d say – ‘Let’s skip the next two lines!’

Were students encouraged to think independently and challenge the teacher?
Not consciously! The general message that we had from our teachers at that stage, was that read the text as closely as possible. Everything else is extraneous. The text is very important and since this Shakespeare text might not be the authentic Shakespeare text, so the text has its own history hence it was important to know it, go through it thoroughly and concentrate on the text, whatever the text gives you. Don’t go too far away from that. So all the questions and exercises were really based on close reading.

We never had a situation where the students gave an alternative reading so I don’t know what would have happened if that had been the case. The teachers, of course, entertained questions.

What was the reception of Shakespeare by the students in Presidency College? Treated as anything exceptional?
No no! Just another text! In fact for some of us, we were discovering writers who were not part of the academic canon as determined by the University. It was greater fun not to go back to Shakespeare and discover new writers. I got fascinated with Blake and went on collecting illuminated books right from when I was in college. And it was the bicentenary of Blake around that time and Vivian de Sola Pinto came down to Calcutta and given a lecture on Blake where he used a lot of slides from the illuminated pages and I got fascinated with that and I began to collect as many editions as I could. So that kind of thing! Many of us were making our own discoveries of other British writers and poets, concentrating on them and the teachers would help and encourage us.

So there wasn’t a notion of Shakespeare as a hallowed playwright?
No. Nothing as such!

Did teachers not subscribe to the view of Shakespeare as the centre of the canon?
No, not in classroom lectures. Milton was taught with great care. We were given more of history, much more of history. Milton was not being taught for style exclusively.

Who taught Milton?
Milton was taught by Prof. Arun Dasgupta and also by Tarak Nath Sen at the B.A. and the M.A. level.

Which texts?
Samson Agonistes and Areopagitica. Both quite closely. Paradise Lost Bk I was also taught in the B.A. Pass course, Samson Agonistes in the Honours classs and Areopagitica in the M.A.

What did Tarak Nath Sen teach?
Tarak-babu taught us Samson Agonistes. It was very interesting and important for us in another aspect since it gave us our first taste in classical literature at the B.A. level because we didn’t have Greek plays or anything similar. So he used Samson Agonistes as a peg and he taught us Greek tragedy, history of Greek tragedy, lot of Aristotle and Plato. And the other great thing was that he brought in this huge album of Greek architecture. He defined and explained the difference in Hellenic and Hellenistic architecture and he compared these with Islamic architecture and Hindu architecture of the South – the ornamentation and ornateness of the Oriental and the ascetic withdrawn quality of the Hellenic – in terms of the visuals. In those days visual literacy was nowhere around in our whole educational system. So for us that was interesting! It was our first exposure to the visual, in great detail. So he was playing on the distinction between the Oriental and the Greek really. We had one of our classmates who was a classical music singer who was training with Ramesh Chandra Bandyopadhyay of the Bishnupur gharana. Suddenly he asked him now, ‘What is the analogous distinction that I am making between the Greek and the so called Oriental in your music?’ His immediate response was the khayal and thumri and Tarak-babu said ‘No, no, no, it’s the dhrupad and the khayal.’ and he explained why it wasn’t the thumri. So that was very exciting and he did that with Samson Agonistes.

I think he was the only one who had all this in him! Later on, when we were doing our M.A. we had Swinburne and he offered to do a special class. He said he wouldn’t explain or do a commentary but just read it. ‘It’s the sound, the music that matters. And only from bad habit I will make a few comments here and there. Please forgive me. It’s just the music. Take the music away’ and he did it thoroughly for two periods.

So that kind of teaching and kind of application, he did with Samson Agonistes. I found his teaching of Samson Agonistes and his teaching of Atalanta in Calydon more interesting than his teaching of Shakespeare. His teaching of Shakespeare had too much to do with the short lines which were his discovery so he played too much on that.

Editions and critical material prescribed and used. Whether the text was related to performance conventions.
Arden and New Cambridge! New Arden was just coming out and not all plays were available. Two volumes a year were released and New Cambridge was in the same state. Our instructions were to use both for most of our texts. The other editions that were available were the Warwick series, some volumes were interesting, and the Paperback American Signet series and some editions had very good editors like Edith Schwarts Clements. Excellent editions!

n terms of criticism, the emphasis was on texts at one level, thanks to Shailen-babu’s and Tarak-babu’s interest in texts. Along with that there was also an interest in Elizabethan theatrical practices and conventions. Very little history and politics! Rest of it was plot, character, construction, structure and balance. Certain scenes were chosen for elaborate analysis but along those lines and they were related to the overall plot structure.

Examination and question pattern.
Usually on the plot and character – very, very Bradleyean.

Did the teacher refer to stage and film productions of Shakespeare?
The Olivier Hamlet had come out when we were in college. Sometimes Tarak-babu would bring in recordings of Shakespeare plays from British Council. We were aware of and interested in Lawrence Olivier, Alec Guinness, later on we could discover Michael Redgrave.

Whether there was any performance of Shakespeare at the institution.
Nothing of that. The plays performed in college were never Shakespeare. Not even with Jyoti-babu. The performance interest that I developed came from outside college and on my own initiative.

On other notable performances.
When we were at university and immediately after that there was a phase when we had visiting Shakespeare companies mostly brought in by British Council. And we had our experience of the Geoffrey Kendal’s group, Shakespeareana, but nothing much to write home about. I did see these but I don’t have a strong impression about them. They didn’t impress me.

The first Shakespeare play that really created a strong impression was by an actor Marius Goring who passed away 6-7 years ago. He came with a small group, two or three actors I think, and he did some pieces from Shakespeare which were remarkable! This should be very late ‘50s or very early ‘60s. Sometime between 1957-58 and 1960/’61ish.

Shakespeare by Utpal-da (Dutt) we saw for the first time in ’63/’64. He did some plays for the Shakespeare quartercentenary - Othello in English with Aparna as Desdemona to his Othello, Romeo and Juliet in Bangla and scenes from Macbeth, initially in Girish Ghosh’s translation which was bad and did not work. Othello was good.

There is a story that’s interesting as information, around ‘53/‘54, before Pather Panchali, as far as I remember, an actor called Erick Eliot brought in a Shakespeare company and put up shows here. Eric Eliot spent a lot of time in Calcutta before and after the group had come and gone, he stayed on. Utpal-da told me that Eric had gone to see East Bengal Mohan Bagan match and he was excited by the English that the audience spoke to address the players and then he had this bright idea that why can’t we have Shakespeare acted by Bengalis in English in Calcutta. So he sent his company back and kept the costumes. The idea was that he’d set up a group and take the company to Britain, abroad, South East Asia and so on. When he started the group Utpal-da and Anil Chatterjee, his classmate at St. Xavier’s and they had also done some theatre together, were both in the company and my boudi (that’s Karuna Banerjee) too. They rehearsed for 2-3 months rigorously, but then there was a problem. What Utpal-da told me was that when it came to fixing the salaries for the company when it would go out on tour, Eric Eliot was making a big distinction between the lead actor/actress and the rest. And Utpal-da, who had just come into Marxism, Trotsky, Stalin and Lenin, said that this is not on! So they had a big fight and Eric went back and the thing dropped off but Utpal-da got the costumes.

So when Utpal-da began work in the late ‘50s-early ‘60s, during the Shakespeare quartercentenary time he used those costumes. He did not do much work with the Little Theatre Group but the first which is an important part of our theatre history, is in December 1947 – Julius Caesar in English. And it was in modern dress but the modern dress was the dress of Italians in 1940s so Mark Antony and his people wore black fascist shirts and the forum scene was a scene in which the crowd gathered before radio sets and heard the broadcast of the debate.

Utpal-da loved to tell stories; he would make stories out of reality! The story as he writes in many places is that the play was performed on 15th August, and says ‘That’s where my guru Geoffrey Kendal saw me and asked me to join the Shakespearana.’ Which is a lie! It had taken place only in December and not in August. There was no performance in St. Xavier’s on 15th August, all schools and colleges were closed, people were out on the streets, so no question of a theatre performance taking place. Even when it was performed in December, Kendal wasn’t there, Kendal’s actors were there who reported back to Kendal and he took interest. And then of course the connection happened! Utpal-da and Shashi Kapoor and others traveled with the Shakespearana Company for a while. So that was an interesting production, but just that one show really! So I was too young to see it but I didn’t see any of the Little Theatre Group’s Shakespeare. They had done Twelfth Night and not very exciting Shakespearean plays as such. They tried Macbeth in Bangla and failed originally but later on it is obviously a different story.

Do you think it’s just a coincidence that many leading actors of the Bengali stage have had a training in English literature like Shishir Bhadury and Rudraprasad in recent times?
I don’t think so. How many examples can you really give? Shishir Bhadury of course and Rudra and Ashok Mukherjee. But who else? Really trained?

Playwrights?
Basically an Honours in English Literature gives you an interest in the whole range of European literature and access to stuff which isn’t translated, an exposure at that level in terms of information. But I don’t think anything more than the English Literature connection. Well Ajitesh also graduated in English Honours but did not do his M.A. and taught in a school in the slum in Dum Dum. But it enabled him, to read more. In fact that was one of the problems I was talking about to various theatre groups and people at Howrah last week, a big crowd. I suddenly realized 8-10 years ago, of so many, literally thousands of people, doing theatre in Bengal, how many have read a single Shakespeare play. Probably not even a fair percent! No fault of theirs!! How do they access it? And whatever translations we have had are not translations that would inspire and feel like you would like to read it. It’s a shame really. If they are given an option they would love to! So I got an idea and we did it. We published Utpal-da’s translation of Macbeth in a bilingual edition. And Utpal-da has done a very close translation. When I got the manuscript I found that very little, only very few sections like the witches part has been left out. And I wanted it to match the original text and give notes in Bangla explaining all the references. So I was wondering what I should do about these missing lines. So I thought I would do a prose translation of the missing lines and add them to the notes. But then Aloke Ranjan Dasgupta offered to translate them and he did a wonderful job. Even those sections were translated in verse. And it has proved to be very popular – bought basically by theatre groups.

We will also publish Midsummer Night’s Dream in the same manner. We are doing it from the manuscript which has his original stage directions which I am using in the notes, even the elaborate music score and whatever he is using. So one can just reconstruct the performance to a certain extent!

Has this version of Macbeth been staged?
No. I think Kaushik (Sen) has staged his own translation. They did use some parts from this translation as well.

What do you think of the new productions coming up?
I hated Romeo and Juliet. It was terrible, really terrible!

Have you seen the new Julius Caesar?
No, I haven’t seen it.

What did you think of Kaushik Sen’s Macbeth?
Too much of spectacle. And trying to lift everything up to the level of the spectacle. Nothing else. There was no other attitude, no interpretative treatment, I found noting of that. Almost as if the spectacle was thought up first and then trying to pull everything up to that point. Today the choreographer called me up, this was the first time he was working in the theatre. He said that he had done the witches scenes quite independently, according to his fancy and he was very happy with what he has done, but what does it do to the play? He was just let loose.

One couldn’t even hear or make out what was being said. The whole thing is about language and interpretation of language.

What they did was that they converted the verse to prose. The iambic pentameter has a tightness and when that the conversion is done, it results in what were called paraphrases in school. So it is that all throughout. The language is horrible. They thought my phrase was “রগ রগে” so they suddenly put it in.

They were claiming to have used Girish Ghosh’s translation, but I didn’t think so.
Sudeshna had enquired that since he had Utpal Dutt’s translation why didn’t he use it? Then he had replied that it wasn’t performative enough.

That was my problem with the Lear production as well. It was very stodgy.
It was uneven too. What happened was that they borrowed from a Bangladeshi translation, from a translation by Sunil Chattopadhyay and they asked Soumitra to rectify his speeches, so he worked on those as well. You can’t do a text like that. And the text is so important.

And if the text doesn’t sound good then what is left?
Anjan is returning to theatre, and he said that after seeing what is going on with Shakespeare, he didn’t want to do Shakespeare. He would rather do Brecht. He is doing Galileo.

That would be very interesting, he does a lot of very interesting things with music in theatre.
What I told Neel was that you should study the entire development of Brecht’s music and draw on it, as it was one of his last works, which he did from America.

What do you think of Girish’s translation?
It has a literary quality, but doing it on stage is... it is done with care however; he has taken a lot of care with it, far more than Kaushik. From another angle, you have to note that Girish Ghosh didn’t have an academic education at all. So he had to study, labour and understand everything on his own. He also read a lot of actor’s memoirs, actor’s biographies, he used to read a lot of those, and it is from there he found out how people had acted for Shakespeare, and he used those for his productions as well. We used to get books on memoirs, but no press clippings were available. Around 1912-14, Gordon Craig wrote a biography of Ellen Terry which was at the Bengal Club. They had bought it in the 1980’s. I didn’t find it later. They must have disposed it off. I haven’t seen it anywhere. It is not in print. These sort of books used to be readily available. I had bought a book on Sarah Bernhardt, around 1905-06. These people used to get hold of them and read them a lot. At one stage it maybe even worthwhile, to look in the old libraries, like Uttarpara Library or Bally Library, to study their catalogues, where they have the acquisition dates as well. They were obviously not getting these books from abroad, so these books were readily available here. To have some sort of a catalogue for these books, can enable us understand what these people were reading at that time.

The problem that we are facing is that we are getting a lot of information about Kolkata but we don’t know much about the districts and places other than Kolkata? How can we access that information?
There is an organization called the Bangiya Natya Parishad and they are being funded by the IFA to produce an archive of all information regarding Bengali theatre. So they have information about Shakespeare being done in districts because they are working more on the districts. So they have a large stock. You should also tap Natyashad.

And as for pedagogy, have you seen Subodh-babu’s book that we have brought out? Portraits and Memories? In that he talks about his teachers and contemporaries. Then there was also the volume on Tarak Nath Sen. There is also a volume of his writings.

There is also a 1986 article by Swapan Majumdar which uses your interview about Tarak Nath Sen.
I haven’t seen that.

It is interesting to talk to people, but even there we find it is becoming very Presidency-centric.
You will find more of performance at St. Xavier’s though. Utpal Dutt spoke of Father Weaver in his interview, that he had taught him to stage and perform Shakespeare. So there was a culture of staging Shakespeare and the teachers were taking part in it, so there was a link between teaching and performance at St. Xavier’s. It wasn’t there at Presidency in the least.

As far as I know, Scottish did a lot of theater, much more than we had at Presidency, but no Shakespeare. A lot of the new Bengali drama came out of Scottish, but there is no Shakespeare. When you go to Girish Ghosh, Khirod Prasad and D.L. Ray, you see that they have read their Shakespeares and are using their Shakespeares. Nothing of that is present in the work of Mohit, Manoj, etc of that period. There is no Shakespeare at all.

Ajitesh never did Shakespeare, though his last wish was to do The Tempest, he had started translating it three months before he died. He said that he was doing The Tempest and he read some out to me. His idea, as he was always telling us was that he wanted to do the major foreign theatre idioms, (not so much the playwright or the play) absorb it into the Bengali body, the Bengali sound, the Bengali voice, and then see what can be done with that. So he does a Pirandello, he does a Chekov, he does his Brecht, he does Wesker, and then the idea was to do Shakespeare and the circuit would be complete. ‘Once the circuit is complete then I can do my own plays. I have taken in the European tradition of theatre and now I can do my own stuff. So Shakespeare is my last stop.’

Shambhu-babu (Mitra) never did Shakespeare, and the one time I did ask him, he replied that he could perhaps do Shakespeare. So I asked him which one he would like to do, and he said that he would like to do, strangely enough, Anthony and Cleopatra. I could see the point, because at that point he was extremely troubled with the problem of age and ageing, that was what he was obsessed about. When we are going to see Char Adhyay, the first thing he asked me was ‘Boyesh ta dhora poreni toh?’ (‘My age is not showing, right?’) And I said that it hadn’t, he even put in extra effort behind his gestures to convince us that he was young. He was obsessed with the whole thing of being an actor, that he was ageing, how long he could act, which is an obsessive fear. And then he says that he would love to do Antony and Cleopatra, where he would have played Antony, the aging lover.

How would you react to the present trend of de-glamorizing and de-canonizing Shakespeare
In terms of theatre and films, with which I am more involved rather than teaching Shakespeare as a text, I find Shakespeare open to such rich interpretation and such wonderful work. It’s still worthwhile going back to for the purposes of performing and filming. Of course people can fail and create horrors! We have seen some. Leave that out! But of course Kurosawa’s Ran and Kozintsev’s Lear are wonderful works!

In terms of Shakespeare in class, I have no connections with that.

What are your feelings about Shakespeare as he is taught?
My question would be if there are students who are interested in engaging with the classics in a kind of critical, argumentative encounter. You’d know better as a teacher!

That is a difficult question!
I have gone back to teaching in the last 5 years but in a different discipline. I do handle Shakespearean texts also but I don’t find that kind of interest.

But how is that teaching Shakespeare in the discipline of performing arts and aesthetics?
When we are tackling Brecht or Beckett, as in the last semester we did Frisch and Dürrenmatt there is more response or active engagement. The little we have tried to work with Shakespeare in terms of asking students to offer performance models and performance reading for those texts is what we are doing also with Brecht and Beckett etc. But the responses have never worked, there hasn’t been any engagement. We now believe that if there is an option they would leave Shakespeare alone and prefer something else.

Why is that? Is he too distant?
Probably.

Or is it that performatively he doesn’t pose much of a challenge?
Performatively it does pose challenges but I think the problem is that of seeing or reading Shakespeare in his history. That history is lost. So you have to reclaim it, reposition Shakespeare in that history and then relate it to your own history. That’s a different kind of a program.

And also a lot of hard work?
Yes, a lot of hard work. So they would rather prefer an Edward Bond version of Shakespeare. Bond has done most of their work for them. So they take off from there and do not take the trouble!

Another thing I would like to add. The little I could acquire, when I was teaching, out of my personal interest was to try and find out what they were doing in the pre-Tarak Nath Sen period. What I discovered and what is also reflected in the late 19th century/early 20th century Bengali drama (1930s) – Girish Ghosh, D.L. Ray and Debaprasad Bidya Vinod – was that there was a lot of emphasis on the teaching of history plays in that period. In our period, as I told you Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night were there but the last plays, history and problem plays were not there. But obviously in the previous period there was a greater emphasis on the history plays and straight lifts or variations on the history plays are abundant in D.L. Roy, Girish Ghosh and Khirod Prasad – a lot of Henry VI and Richard III. So it is worthwhile to find out why they were more interested in the history plays rather than the so-called psychological plays or comedies.

History plays have almost disappeared from the canon.
Exactly! In our times also they were not taught.

In our times, Henry IV and others were taught but they aren’t anymore. Because again there is a lot of hard work involved in teaching history plays.
The peak of Bengali melodrama in Bengali theatre has a lot of dream vision, dreams, nightmares, ghosts… these come from history plays. Shahjahan and Alamgeer…they are there, straight from there.

Also the understanding of power and tyranny and usurpation.
Yes, all those things. I am not suggesting anything but maybe it had to do with the first exposure to British rule, a rule and governance defining itself in that period. There was a comparison between Mughal governance and British governance – this is Bankim Chandra’s subject and the subject all over the period. Maybe somewhere the Mughal dynastic struggles and the tyranny … was this the point of contact? For a lot of these plays would be dealing with the Mughal-Rajput conflict where the Mughals, in this dispensation became the foreigner/outsider and the Rajput – the insider and patriot. So all these things coming together with Shakespeare history plays!

At what point does the canon become the tragedies-the big four?
That is, I think, directly with the reading of Bradley and Auden. So you can directly date it with the impact of Bradley and Auden. They define the canon. That is very early 20th century.

Auden does have an interest in the other plays but Bradley...
Yes it concentrated on the four tragedies.

We never thought on those lines! That is very interesting! Thank you!
Somebody should work on those lines. The history plays coming in and the reading of history.

But where do we get the information? Richardson, Percival we already know! But what about the others?
More interesting would be late 19th century, post-1857 rather than the Hindu College phase. The transfer of the capital in 1911, British colonial rule defining itself strongly, that shift! From rosy Renaissance Western enlightenment to the practical. It was there till 1857. Initially there was a support of the colonial within the bhadralok culture. After that it starts crumbling!

On his experience teaching Shakespeare.
Obviously I was unfortunate in the sense that I did not get good students. I went to City College initially, Rammohan College and then Rabindra Bharati after that where the level was extremely poor. So really no chance or scope of reading Shakespeare closely and thoroughly! All that I had learnt at Presidency College, in terms of teaching, I couldn’t make use of. So a kind of a general, large scope and broad interpretation of Shakespeare, bringing in different perspectives and a lot of history and politics came in at that stage. But I taught for very few years. I gave up teaching in 1973.

But something I enjoyed immensely and that was much more important – I taught Shakespeare at the Patha Bhavan School in the same period. In those days there was a Shakespeare series published by Gin and Company but distributed in India by Oxford University Press which were abridgements of course of Shakespeare’s plays but entirely in Shakespeare’s language. Much shorter versions obviously and meant for school! I introduced The Merchant of Venice in Class 8 in Patha Bhavan and I taught it for 7-8 years at a stretch.

These younger students could respond to the clash of attitudes and positions. Since the text was The Merchant of Venice, they were not looking into so-called characters like Macbeth or Hamlet. The way they read it and the way I read it with them was at the level of conflicts and clash of interests between the Italian merchants and the outsider, Shylock the Jew, the moneylender – a politics which is anti-human and discriminating. And what I was also doing at the same time was that I used to take two classes one after the other. In one I would teach Merchant of Venice and in the other Achalayatan and before I taught Achalayatan I studied the 19th century history of social reforms in Bengal and lead it onto Achalayatan. So I would be reading Rabindranath’s Mahamaya in class which used to be a very moving experience for them and link it to the historical context. I would take them to South Park Street Cemetery to show them Derozio’s, William Jones’ Madhushudan Dutt’s graves. I also took them to the Bangya Sahitya Parishad, Victoria Memorial and the house of Rammohan. I tried to give them a taste of that and also tell them how Shakespeare and the European Renaissance came to Bengal. That way I could link Merchant of Venice to Achalayatan and Rabindranath and Shakespeare altogether! These classes came one after the other and one of the jokes that my students still have is that I would never speak a word of Bangla in the English class and not a word of English in the Bangla class. So sometimes they would try games on me. When I was teaching Achalayatan, somebody asked ‘Page 14 ey jeta boleychilen na’ and I would say ‘hyan, choddo prishtaye, bolo’. It was a wonderful game and when we talked about it later, I realized that the feel of the two languages coming into contact, into an interaction, speaking English in one class and Bangla in the other and dealing with literatures in both languages was how I placed Shakespeare at the Class 8 level. That’s the best and the most that we can do at that level rather than go beyond that and be more ambitious.