Sunday,24,2019
Formerly Shakespeare Professor of Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata.
Interviewed by Shri Abhishek Sarkar
This is his blog.
Year of passing B.A. and M.A. Details of the institutions concerned.
Year of Passing B.A. and M.A. is 1966 and 68 respectively, the details of the institutions concerned are St. Xavier’s College and Jadavpur University.
First encounter with Shakespeare.
My first encounter with Shakespeare took place at South Point School, my teacher of English was Utpal Dutt, who was officially our teacher of English, but worked with us on drama and theater and things dramatic.
So what text was it that introduced you to Shakespeare?
Well, the text that we finally performed was Julius Caesar, but the texts we were generally introduced to were all of Shakespeare.
Was it a part of the official curriculum?
No, no, it wasn’t, it was his agenda, he was given whatever the usual syllabus was, he was in South Point as an English teacher, but he didn’t like being framed within the syllabus, and he didn’t like to teach what was there. So, whenever the principal or the rector passed by the window, he would shift to whatever was in the syllabus, but he would talk to us about history, culture, theatre, Shakespeare, anything that would be interesting to him and us, and anything that would be educative, in an extremely entertaining and brilliant way. He was very young then, he had not yet become the great Utpal Dutt as we know him now. He was full of enthusiasm, which he was till very late in his life too. I have written about this, about the class he took, so that you can understand what he used to do in class, he got into class and he was supposed to teach us some niceties of grammar. When he looked around and saw nobody was around, he started teaching us literature and theatre. So, he said, “Have you heard of the blitzkrieg? The word?” So, we said “No”. Naturally, we were young, how would we know of the blitzkrieg? So he gave us the history, the term, war, what happened in the war, all this as if he was a theatre person doing a soliloquy, so it was in the theatrical mode, very theatrically presented in the sense of the term “theatrical”, from jatra to Shakespearean to modern, and we learnt a lot and we were spellbound. It was in the Hindu School memorial number, it is called “Blitzkrieg”, it was an exact reproduction of what the class was like, 35-40 mins, he would talk about Shakespeare, he would talk about his work. It was like that. Shakespeare we found very interesting. Shakespeare was in the course, first language English, Twelfth Night, he didn’t teach us that. There were others who taught it, then we weren’t into that class when he was teaching us, that was from classes 9 to11. He taught us in class 8.
Could you tell us something more about the Twelfth Night classes? How was the text approached?
Twelfth Night was taught by two or three people, some of them stayed for some time and then went elsewhere. We had a wonderful group of teachers at South Point, they could have been some of the best teachers in any top university at any point of time. One of them was a very famous sitar and sarod player, who is now in America. He used to teach in a brilliant manner. Our teachers at South Point would teach us a lot of things apart from Shakespeare. There was an Anglo-Indian sahib. There was also someone called Gagan Dey, who I think went to Jadavpur and then went on to settle in Mauritius or somewhere, I don’t remember.
Generally the teaching was text-based. Our teachers taught us to fall in love with the words. They also tried to help us visualize the scenes through our imagination. It was great fun studying Shakespeare in school. It was not at all boring. Of course, we had a very good group of English teachers. The Principal was a person who was an M.Sc. in Physics, Mathematics and something else. His name was A. Ray. It is a pity we are not fortunate enough to have teachers like that in our colleges. So, you see, it was all my teachers who really got me immersed in life and in literature and of course in Shakespeare, whatever little I know or do not know I owe it all to them… I have tried to be like them, and as I said, it is a pity we don’t have such inspiring teachers any more. People are very busy now, and very busy with a lot of things. Teachers do not really try to inspire students nowadays.
Were you a part of Utpal Dutt’s Shakespeare productions?
No. I was his student, and then I became his friend. I never acted in his group. He had his own group of actors. If one had to act there one had to be a professional, which means every evening one would have to attend rehearsals from 5 to 10. He was a stickler for punctuality. I did a lot of theatre, but I couldn’t do it in such a professional way. I had to earn a living also, I had to do a lot of other things. So I could not take up theatre as a profession, but I valued his guru-ship and then his friendship. He was a very interesting and funny guy. You have seen his book of course, Shakespeare-er Samaj Chetana. There he used more than 600 bibliographical entries to prove that Shakespeare is even more of a revolutionary than Lenin or Marx. Which is all rubbish, but he writes brilliantly, marshals facts in his own way brilliantly. So I had asked him about his book, so he said tumi to onek kichhu jano, eta tomar jonno noye [You happen to know a lot, this book is not meant for you]. I said, na na ami ki jani, onek kichhu shikhlam, kintu apni ja likhechhen sheta ekebarei shotti noye [No, no, I know very little, I have learnt a lot from you, but what you have written is not at all true].
Which Shakespeare texts did you have at the B.A. level?
We had four texts for BA: The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Macbeth. What our teachers did was to lead the discussions on to extra-textual questions, and that would lead to great debates, where we had the full scope to speak our minds. St Xavier’s is a college where you had the full freedom to speak your mind, I don’t know how it is nowadays, but we could speak our mind. I recall telling the teacher who taught us The Merchant of Venice, who he did not like Shylock at all, that he had a terrible bias against Shylock only because he was a Christian. He replied, “You may be right, Mr. Roy, but I try not to bring my bias into my teaching.” I wasn’t penalized for that, or thrown out of class for that. If you said anything like this in other colleges you would be in great trouble.
In St. Xavier’s College there was a lot of theatre. We also did a lot of plays apart from Shakespeare. We did a Macbeth where Victor Banerjee, who was junior to me by a year, proved his mettle even then, before he went on to become Victor Banerjee. There were other good actors around as well, so it was an atmosphere which was theatre-oriented and of course one of the central aspects of theatre is Shakespeare. We did a lot of Shakespeare in St. Xavier’s, in Bengali as well. The Bengali teacher was very enthusiastic, he was Prof. Debabrata Mukherkjee’s father. He would help promote theatrical performances and readings and debates and things like that. When Subodh Sengupta was the head of the department at Jadavpur, around the 60’s (he was in Presidency before that with the other legendary names, and then he went to Jabalpore and then he came to Jadavpur) he was on the lookout for wonderful people to build a wonderful English Department, young people and old, so they took in a lot of new people.
Though he was a traditional person, he was very interested in theatre. What he did became quite historical. every year Jadavpur University would produce one Shakespeare play. And the responsibility for the Shakespeare production, Debabrata-babu would take up from the teachers’ side, the Englishmen who would come, they would be involved as well. I don’t know if this still happens or not, but young Englishmen would come to teach at Jadavpur, not that they were very good teachers all of them. One was very good, Hayden Williams, the others were nice people. I was in St. Xaviers College, and I went to see that and one of the reasons I joined Jadavpur was because of the theatre activity and the Shakespeare productions along with other practical reasons. CU was a year behind in exam results, and the situation was very dicey, it was dicey everywhere, but at that moment around Presidency and College Street it was very dicey. My wife’s classmates were burning up the city. They were nice people, they would tell the girls in the class that there would be action at 3:30 … so come along with us, we will escort you out safely. Nobody else would know that there would be action at 3:30, but they would tell the classmates and get the girls out, and the few boys who were willing to get the hell out of there. Then there would start the riots and the killing and the violence, and the bombing and things like that, such things are very old-fashioned nowadays.
When I was in Jadavpur, I acted in three of them, when I was not there we went to see the productions. It was a great annual occasion, so from all over people would come to see it, they were very lovely productions. Jadavpur would do not only Shakespeare but the teachers and the students also did a wonderful Volpone. Volpone can be very boring in text but not necessarily in performance, but this play was very popular in its time. It was quite wonderful. Debabrata-babu was also one of the architects of the production.
Hayden Williams was marvelous, a great teacher, became head at Melbourne University, he did a lot of things here as well, wrote a lot on modern fiction as well as Anglo Indian fiction, anyway so that was it.
Which teachers taught the Shakespeare texts?
Prof. Lal [Purushottam Lal], he really didn’t have Shakespeare as a part of his teaching syllabus, but we wanted him to do a part of the Shakespeare with us, because he was so wonderful with the other things. We had tragedy as a literary type, and there we had to study everything, so we had requested him that he should teach us some Shakespeare, specially because one of our Shakespeare teachers was horrible, god-awful, he was the worst teacher I had ever met. I don’t want to name him, nice man, but hell in class. Prof. Lal had a remarkable memory, the first day we came to class, it was a General English class, First Year Compulsory, 114 people, those who used to study it were all very good at English, sometimes better than those of us who used to study it for Honours. Those who used to teach Compulsory English were the same who used to teach Honours classes as well, they would teach it with their full energy and commitment, usually those who weren’t studying it for Honours would get better marks than those who were. So it was the same for us there even for those who weren’t studying English Honours at St Xavier’s. There was also some competitiveness and jealousy between us, that how could someone who was studying Economics score better than someone who was studying English Honours. It was like this. Prof Lal came in and saw this absolutely wild 114 strong bunch. St Xavier’s was a little problematic then, slightly wild and sahebi [anglicized], we were from an English medium school but a Bengali background, the others were very sahebi and Park Street-ish. There were lots of these demarcations and such things, and it is not always that it was a bad thing. Prof. Lal had to impress us, otherwise we would create a ruckus. He had to teach this terrible thing, rhetoric and prosody, which was geared to put one off. So he started by saying that he would do prosody with us, and asked “Do you know what prosody is?” So he explained what prosody is and he said that he would be teaching us how to scan. So he says, “Tell me any poem and I will write it on the board”. Some of us came down with the usual suspects, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Shakespeare. He then asks, “Which lines do you want? The first four? The last four? I will scan those, if you want it from the middle tell me the beginning of the line and I will start from there”. That really floored us, and he was true to his word. Whatever we did come up with from our limited range of English literature, he came up trumps every time. For a while we were completely subdued, this wild bunch.
We were very frank with each other, the teacher and ourselves, he used to ask us to come to his house for a cup of coffee, and we used to discuss tutorials. Prof. Lal would make us draw lots for the topic. We didn’t have a formal tutorial system, which we did have at Jadavpur, so he devised one. We drew lots, came to discuss it with him over coffee, wrote about it at home, submitted it to him, and we were subsequently invited again to discuss it over coffee. First time I went to his house, I had to discuss something, it was a funny story which I had written about. The second time I went with a tutorial, something on Marvell’s “The Garden”. I still remember, he told me, “You know nothing”. So I said, “Yes sir, I know nothing.” Then he said, “No, it is not that you know nothing, you don’t know how to write English, you stood first in west Bengal in first language English, but you don’t have any idea about punctuation, you have no idea about when to use inverted commas and when not to, we have to start from the bottom”. so I said yes sir, I have to start from the bottom, we didn’t used to beat up our teachers nor did we commit suicide, after that we got to really be his students, and we used to ask him to teach us whatever we wanted him to teach, and he had a lovely way of teaching also, so he would come with thirty books on his motorcycle carrier, and he would say that I have brought these books, which are culled from my library from all over the world, so here are the important bits from these thirty books, write them down, and at St. Xavier’s we were told that for every answer we wrote, we had to provide three conflicting critics opinions, so it was a major problem as we couldn’t get hold of more than one critic at all, but Prof Lal was a great boon, so he used to say that since you have to do this, take this down, say for example, Riders to the Sea, brilliantly taught, so he used to dictate to us things from T R Henn’s Harvest of Tragedy, Riders to the Sea is simple, but wise in its simplicity, stupid, but wise in its folly, and we would write it down. And then he would ask us to stand up and read out. And then when we were reading it out, we would falter and he would ask us if it made any meaning, and that if we studied in that manner, that we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere in our lives, and not just with studies, you took for granted, that what I was saying was right, but intentionally I was saying something wrong, to see how alert and aware you are, he did it one day and we were completely ashamed of ourselves, and one day while teaching us Lamb, Lamb is full of allusions, that this was taken from one of Tennyson’s last poems, so we took it down, and then: please stand up, what have you written, so we said what we had written – so you have no sense of chronology, of which comes after what – Arms and the Man, Bluntschli, we took down many, 10 to 12 from many critics, I got hold of the book after a lot of searching, it was a Marxist analysis of Shaw, very difficult to get hold of, he had had it, I got a copy as well, my head of the department at Rabindra Bharati had a magnificent library, he was one of the leading exponents of theoretical Marxism at that point of time, he had a magnificent library. After a lot of quotes, he came to X critic, it is obvious that Bluntschli is suffering from the effects of radiation, we wrote it down, and then we were asked to stand up and read it out, so in this manner, our teachers tried to make men out of boys, to have teachers like this, at St Xavier’s Prof Lal used to teach, Prof J J Pinto used to teach us, settled in Australia after that, Ranjit Ghosh used to teach us, I am talking about Shakespeare mainly, the Father who was the head used to teach us, Father Gomes, the head had to teach, not that he loved teaching, but he taught as he was the head, there was a Father called Father Lewis, who was very bad but who was very good with word annotations and things like that, he was very good with that, that was a great positive. Very famous man for the wrong reasons, for his sexual predilections, so St Xavier’s College has this tradition also, so these were the people who taught us, none of them famous, except Prof Lal, we had a great time, and we had a Bengali Dramatic Society, English dramatic Society, a Hindi Dramatic Society, so plays would always be going on.
Which were the Shakespeare plays which were produced at St. Xavier’s?
Julius Caesar, Merchant of Venice, Lear(partly in Bengali), Twelfth Night, these were the ones.
Were they faithful reproductions of the entire play or just bits and pieces?
Twelfth Night was the whole of it, Lear was only a part of it, Julius Caesar was the whole of it, Merchant of Venice was in part, but the main parts, the major parts. AS: Which were the roles you had played? I had acted in many roles, in Julius Caesar, from school I would act as Julius Caesar, because I could die very well, having been taught by Utpal Dutt, how to die well on stage, and I added my own frills, I was a very creative person then, I was well known for my dying skills, and death in Elizabethan Tragedy is a famous area, so I would be Julius Caesar. In As You Like It, in Jadavpur, I did one of the crazy lovers, Sylvius, In Measure for Measure in Jadavpur… Oh you were talking about St Xavier’s, no? At St Xavier’s, for Julius Caesar, the title role, in Merchant of Venice, I did Bassanio, as far as I remember, for Twelfth Night, Sir Toby, for King Lear, I didn’t do anything, I was helping with the production.
What was taught in the MA class at Jadavpur?
We were taught Hamlet, As You Like It, Winter’s Tale, Richard III, that was about it.
We had heard, some were for detailed study and some were not for detailed study.
We were taught everything in detail. It made no difference; we also liked learning things or learning of things in detail. All the teachers taught in detail. Not that every detail was enjoyable, or mid expanding, but they taught in detail.
Would you like to name the teachers?
Subodh Sengupta for one, he taught Hamlet, he used to teach everything in a simplified manner, too simple we thought, because we were young people, they can be egotistic in their own ways, we thought we were intellectuals, and he was teaching too simply, we of course held him awe and respect, it was actually too simple, he didn’t think that we should be taught in a very complicated way, and his main objective was to create the base, which I have learnt also after my so many years of experience, that teachers can do a lot of things, that maybe they needed to do a lot of things as well, but they needed to keep their own base steady, and help the students create a base for what they are studying, and after that the student can go and do a lot of things, much more than the teacher can do, I can say a lot of things, and they can go on to do a lot more as well, but the base must be very strong, Subodh Babu believed that, and in fact most people in Jadavpur believed that, and there were varying talents and they tried to develop our base, some were very bad teachers, but they were all very sincere and committed, and now I realize why they made everything so simple, at that time, there were a lot of new editions, so he would take Verity, nowadays no one has head of Verity’s Hamlet, which was a school text, we used to use that. I remember in class that he was teaching a soliloquy, the one about sullied flesh, he was explaining, so I got up to say something, it doesn’t mean that I was the only person who spoke in class by the way, so I got up and said that it could be sullied as well in addition to sullied, so he asked me what edition is that? So I picked it up, and I knew where it was from, and it wasn’t that edition, so I said, Dover Wilson sir, it was the new Cambridge Edition, so he looked at me said, Dover Wilson, more learned than wise, stick to Verity, these things will come later, pass out first, teach, after that, so you see, it was like that, it tended to be boring, and it tended to be too simple, but he created the basics very well, in everything, he used to teach Aristotle, I teach Aristotle to my students in the manner he taught us Aristotle, Aristotle has thousands of commentaries, all wonderful books, but he used to teach us the basics very clearly, I still teach my students that, I add the frills and all that, because one has to do those today, but if they can absorb that, they will have a clear grasp, that this is what Aristotle wants to say, and then we can go on to that he might have wanted to say something in a particular manner: So he said one day in class that Hamlet has a subtitle, and asked what is that subtitle. We had Miss Calcutta in our class, Miss Texas and Miss Calcutta, Miss Calcutta didn’t study much, she was a very attractive woman, with dark glasses, was very friendly with everybody, there was a class on Virgina Woolf, her book was kept in this manner, Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, she picked it up and asked what class it was today, so I said that, so she said, Mrs Dalloway had written Virginia Woolf, so I said I didn’t say so, but do the class and find out, but a marvelous woman, so She leapt up upon being asked what the subtitle was and said Prince of Venice, then Subodh babu said ‘eta bhalobolecho, the moor of Denmark and the prince of Venice, bah, you will go far’, the clas was nice, Subodhbabu was the anchor who was doing the basics very simply, Debabrata Mukherjee fortunately taught us Restoration, because Restoration can be very boring, he did a wonderful job of it. Shishir Chatterjee did a bit of Shakespeare, Sati Chatterjee, Jagannath Chatterjee, these people. AS: Who taught As You Like It? Don’t remember actually, it would be one of these people. Richard III, I think a bit of it was done by Debabrata Mukherjee. Pranati Dey used to teach other things, not Shakespeare. AS: Who taught the Shakespearean Sonnets? As far as I remember, nobody taught us the sonnets, they just came into discussion while other things were being taught, Subodh babu taught us about them as part of Shakespearean background, but as such, Shakespeare sonnets were not taught, as far as I can recall. Subodh babu used to do the background, he spoke about certain sonnets, we would read them up by ourselves, and we had read Shakespeare sonnets in our BA, a small number, in fact I remember being very much taken up by the fact that some of them were such wonderful love poems, Prof Lal pricked the balloon by saying that these were written by Shakespeare for a man, homosexual idealism you can call it, so we were a bit taken aback, we liked them, we were taught a lot in schools and colleges, there were discussions, people used to translate them, a lot of my friends translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into Bangla, a lot of the Bengali poets used to translate them as well. So we absorbed it everywhere.
Did the teachers enact the scenes in the classroom while teaching Shakespeare?
Only Debabrata Babu, he taught us Richard III. The rest would read from the texts, but one the requisites of a classroom teacher, nowadays classroom teaching is almost not there, the system is different, one of the requisites of a classroom teacher is an art akin to the actors art, to hold someone’s attention, to create realities out of words, I am not talking just about plays, it is obvious for plays, but even for prose and poetry, because words create scenes, words create worlds, and to create these worlds, you can breathe life into them, you can release various resonances in the words and the lines, the dialogues, Prof Lal was wonderful in this manner, Prof Debabrata Mukherjee was wonderful in this manner, Utpal Dutt was a man of the theatre, it was something wonderful to hear them,this tradition is there in Bengal from what I hear and what I read, Richardson and all that, they used to elocute and perform Shakespeare, I can forget everything about the British Empire but I shall not forget your reading and teaching of Shakespeare, very famous words, I think that if one has to teach literature in class, one should develop these skills, which are akin to the skills of an actor.
Was the socio-historic background discussed in class?
This was in the 1960’s, late 1960’s, lots of socio-historic things were happening all over the world, especially in Bengal, France and America, everywhere. I think I told you about that poster all over the place, agun legeche onekdur, Sorbonne theke Jadavpur, so it was lovely, it was wonderful, worthy of Shakespeare, to write a couplet like that. Our classmates used to write things like this. But in spite of that not much of contextual socio-historical commentary, background explanations were given. One of the possible reasons could be that books were not available. There was only one book available, Social History of England by G.M. Trevelyan which is a very conservative kind of book, a good book, but the basics, nobody reads that these days, books like Hobsbawm were very difficult to get hold of, but a few people tried to get hold of these, like for Jonson, books by L.C. Knights, background for Jonson, money and capitalism among others. And those who felt like it, from life and from Marx, everybody read Marx even if they weren’t Marxists, from social, logical and historical perspectives, and Marx had written about a lot of things, so that helped. Marx had written a lot of things about Shakespeare and literature, so everybody read Marx, so that was a kind of substitute for all these texts about social history, economics, among others, and they were easily available as the market was flooded by these Russian publishers like Progressive and they were very cheap, a rupee or eight or four annas, Mao Tse Tung was also available cheaply as well, Utpal Dutt’s Stanislavsky for one rupee, this was a lot of money then. All the penguin texts were available for 1/6th, 2/6th or 3/6th shillings, maximum was 6 shillings, so if you take one rupee for 6, which was a lot of money then, but even then, we did manage to buy them by tutoring, but these were available. So we drew from Marx and we drew from life, it was the same in class, but maybe the mindset was like that, the grooves of academia should be isolated from what was going on around you.
So were the theatre conventions discussed in detail?
Yes, they were.
While teaching Shakespeare were expletives and sexual references omitted?
Prof Lal reveled in it, told us about the bawdy, Eric Partridge and the rest of them. We went on a hunt for finding out such references even when such references were maybe not there. But the other teachers… DM used to speak very urbanely of them, the other teachers however thought these were topics not worth discussing, that was to be expected you see, all of this erupted after that, the mindsets of the people was wholly different, and teachers had a fixed frame, the Subodh-babu kind of teacher would wear a long shirt, a dhoti, or a Panjabi-dhoti, wear a shawl, have a bag like this, or if you were of the sahib type, you would wear shirts and pants, nobody would take jhola-bags though. Some of our friends who were slightly anti-establishmentarian, like Buddhadeb Basu’s son, then you would go about with drugs, take them, but other wise life would be pretty traditionally constricted, especially so for teachers, they were paid quite a low amount, and they were very vocationally conscious, as well as about their image, and they would keep a distance from the student but they were willing to be friendly with them. There would be a distance, but you could cross the distance if you wanted to try and they wanted to let you.
Did they encourage questions in the class?
Jagannath Chakraborty did, Subodh babu did not so much, he thought it would be a bit of a waste of time, as he had to cover a lot of topics, and he would especially take a class on Saturdays, Jadavpur used to close down on Saturdays at one o clock. I don’t know if it is still the same, but we used to be there, for politics, love or adda, to each his own interest, but we used to interrupt all that at 2:45 for class, not just because he was the head, but because we would like to learn the basics, so there was a lot of teach us, and it was a class on a Saturday, so entertaining questions would be a waste of time. Debabrata babu would encourage questions, he would cut nice urbane sexy jokes in class, Jagannath babu was of course extremely open, the ladies were a bit inhibited, but Sati Chatterjee was open to questions. The other ladies were not so open.
Were the teachers particular about accent and pronunciation?
Not at all, oh yes, I forgot to mention the name of Dinesh Biswas, who came from Jalpaiguri to teach us The Winter’s Tale. He had the most atrocious accent going, a wonderful teacher; he had the most peculiar mannerisms in class. He was a very nice guy, because on the first day he took the class, a lot of people laughed at his accent, but you see, we were basically of the Bengali tradition, but some people were not of the Bengali tradition, so they laughed. At the end of the class, I along with a couple of my fellow students were walking along the corridor, and he came up and said, ‘tomader kotha amra onek shunechi, tomra to khub bhalo chele, ami babu mophossholler mashter moshai, amake subodh babu ekhane niye eshechen, uni mone koren ami kichu jani, aar amar khub bhalo lagey Shakespeare poratey, tai jonne’ and then he caught hold of our hand and he said ‘amar ucharon ta khub bicchiri, tai na?’ So we said that there are many kinds of pronunciation, as people have come from many kinds of backgrounds, but why would pronunciation be important? He said ‘na tomra hashchile’, So I said that some people may have laughed, but some things may sound strange to some people, my pronunciation may sound strange to somebody else, whatever I could say for damage control. I told him that very people had laughed, but that we certainly respected his teaching, and the way he taught us was different, very frankly, we had never studied in such a manner with anyone else before this. So he said, ‘amake bolo baba, amar ja bhul bhal hobe, tomra shob boro boro college theke eshecho, ami toh mophossholer lok, amar onek ghatti achey’. Many people had odd pronunciation, but how does it matter? He used to teach well. I went through most of university without texts of my own. I used to borrow books from other people because I didn’t have the money. He used to teach a lot of things, the Renaissance, Tamburlaine. He taught it brilliantly. I didn’t have a book you know, so I would dip into people who were sitting next to me. Some of them also didn’t have books, they had Kittridge’s language book or some other book apart from Tamburlaine, texts were also difficult to get. But he spoke most of the important lines in class, which helped, and we would write that down as part of the textual material we had access to, every time ‘z’ occurred in the text and it occurs many times, I wrote it down as ‘j’. So it was a great lark that a few days before the exam a classmate of mine had a text. Upon seeing it I immediately realized that all the ‘j’s were ‘z’, and vice versa, in any case Bengali’s have a lot of problem with ‘z’s and ‘j’s with ‘s’ as well. He had this terrible thing. He used to act out bits in class, in a jatra mode. It was moving.
Which were the Shakespeare productions which took place at Jadavpur?
The Tempest, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night. I played Escalus in Measure for Measure, Sylvius in As You Like It and Sir Toby in Twelfth Night. The production teaches you a lot, you have to grapple with the words, and you have to make some meaning out of those words. Those meanings don’t have to be Shakespeare’s meanings, but at the least they have to be your meanings, and meanings that make sense to whichever audience is sitting there. That is a great education; I would like to suggest that production should be part of the teaching process. I have done Julius Caesar many times, but only when I directed it, did I understand this, that the longest part is not of course Caesar’s not Brutus’s, or Mark Antony’s but Cassius’s. This of course could have been easily found out with the help of a computer, but computers weren’t readily accessible then, and what you get from a computer is something that you haven’t realized, you just get it. How much of it you understand is anybody’s guess. When you do plays, you come up against facts like this. Then you come to think of a lot of things, that Shakespeare was writing a play, where the dramatic interest were not just two people, but rather rested on a lot of people. Marlowe, in Edward II, let the dramatic interest rest in a lot of people. In this manner you come to realize a lot of things, you come to think of Cassius in a different way. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, and he had lots of reasons for doing what he did, mainly practical reasons, but also conceptual reasons. Making students see productions, teaching them ‘productionally’… I teach Lear now, at whichever university asks me to teach it, the last line… Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never! It’s a magnificent line, there are five nevers, a lot can be said about these five nevers, Shakespeare was in the habit of doing things like this… but if you ask the students to speak this or ask them to read this, and you give them a free reign, you will get many kinds of nevers, which is actually it, this never can be a very sad never, it can be a very angry never, this never can be a passive never, it can take on multiple styles and one can have many kinds of nevers in the five nevers, depending on his emotional punctuation there, and this immediately shows you the resonance, this is life, not a frozen text, I would represent this life in a certain manner. One can say that one can enact Shakespeare once, but what is the point in doing it many times, it is because each of us can relate it into our own ways you know. The students read it in many ways, then we try to analyze this, as to why they had read it in a certain manner, and I do something which the students cannot do, naturally, I have a 26 language dictionary, I read out the word in the languages, in the Indian languages as well, whichever comes to my mind, and whatever is at hand, and believe me, in every language, the power of those five nevers is released. In English, never has a power, a resonance, it is there in Hindi as well as Bengali, even if it takes up more syllables, strange enough that it happens in these two languages, but in the other 10 to 12 languages it has the same effect, how he transcends the borders of language and feeling. Shakespeare didn’t know these languages, it wouldn’t have been possible for him as well, but these are strange things, and if there are productions, if we work in a theatrical manner, and if we see plays in other languages, there are lots of productions in Germany, where Lear is a woman. There is a lot of hue and cry in Canada, about how Lear can be a woman, but women have been enacting Lear for a long time in Germany. Those Lear roles are fantastic. These things give you various ideas, and it involves you. Generally students like to read, but there is scary disinvolvement as well. It is the same in all the countries. In order to get them into something, in this case a text as a part of a literature course, this is good training to get you involved in life. Once this happens, if I try to get inside something, in this case, the text attracts you inside without you having to try. But if I try to get inside of my own volition, that thing will appear interesting. This is my main objective behind all this. This is literature, people can get involved easily. That trades off into your other situations in life, you learn this great truth, that if I try to get deeply involved with something, that will soon start to become interesting. Shakespeare therefore opens a key to all of this. Just teaching Shakespeare is great fun, and maybe very uplifting and inspiring, and good for examinations for students, but it really makes you very life oriented, which is my primary argument, other dramatists can’t do it to the same extent. He deals with every situation that has occurred or will occur or has occurred. Patterns, he has grasped wonderfully. You could see this new play by Bratya Basu, cinemar moto, he takes a lot from Shakespeare, whether instinctively or whether from his scholarship, it is very everything, but it is very Shakespearean, he has managed to grasp those patterns very competently, which is present in Shakespeare, the relationships between humans, the various kinds of relationships, the relationships between humans and objects, money, and nature. Shakespeare has everything, and we shouldn’t read him, even when we are doing him for a course, only for that course. It involves me with something which is a pattern of a relationship, which occurs for me as well. There are certain variations which have occurred for me as well, or might occur or will occur. That is something very great. B0ecause of 37 plays he has all the permutations and combinations that life can offer up. Of course there are variations, time, place, person, but the basic patterns Shakespeare had been able to grasp very well, which nobody has been able to grasp in such a manner. The basic patterns are very educative, he is being taught at Harvard Law School, and he is being taught in management courses in Princeton, because Shakespeare gives you the basic models for interpersonal behaviour. For personnel management, that seems to be a key text. I liked the idea that they are doing this. I have heard about this from a few people, and I have read a few articles as well, from those who have read this. You are really doing life when you are doing Shakespeare. This may sound very traditional in one way, but whatever it sounds, it is the absolute truth.
Were Shakespeare’s contemporary dramatists given the same amount of interest during your time?
Yes.
Were they taught with the same amount of rigour and commitment?
Yes. Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Webster. Not at the undergraduate level, there we had only Marlowe. In B.A. we had Edward II.
How was the issue of homosexuality addressed?
The person who taught us, he highlighted it because he didn’t want to highlight it. While discussing the dance of the seven deadly sins in Doctor Faustus, he would say, Dr Faustus had seven deadly sins, like sloth, envy, and all that. The ‘and all that’ was very intriguing for us, so we tried to find out what that was all about. Here they were very friendly, but they tried to bypass discussing certain ethical problems. Obviously we were very curious about the nature of the ethical problems, so we tried to find out. So, most people were in a kind of denial, but their denial highlighted the presence of such dimensions.
Which editions were prescribed in the class?
There were hardly any editions, we used to study Tancock’s edition for Edward II. When OUP brought out an edition somewhere at the end of the 90’s, or early 2000’s, they burnt the previous copies. Now there is an Indian reprint by Radha. When they brought out the edition by Roma Gill, they burnt all the previous copies, but the Tancock edition is still the best. It hasn’t got any frills, it doesn’t have any post-colonial views or things like that, but the basics are all there. For Shakespeare we had the Arden edition. They were available, the new ones used to cost Rs. 6.5. We couldn’t afford them, so we got hold of second hand editions, or we used to borrow from others.
What about secondary material? What was prescribed?
If a lot of things were prescribed, they wouldn’t be available, Bradley was available, and therefore Bradley was prescribed. D. C. Biswas used to refer to books up to the 60’s like Rossiter, like Eugene Waith, L. C. Nights, books like these, the books by Subodh-babu, very basic but very good, especially for character studies. Why do people go to see Shakespeare? For the characters, which hits you in the under-belly. When we see plays, we don’t look at the imagery or the post-colonial implications. Maybe it reaches us subliminally, maybe as a delayed reaction, but what hits us is the realism in the presence of these real living human beings. So, there is no running away from that. You may be the most anti-characterological critic, but they do not perform as blips in a graph on the stage, they have to function as alive human beings taking decisions or having decisions forced on them, or using subterfuges, deceits, aspirations, hungers. So, we were asked to read Bradley and some people used to talk about critics up to the 60’s. The books were not always available in the libraries. It was difficult. We have a misconception that the books published after the fifties are the books to read. There is a book on Restoration Comedy published in 1932 which is very good, by Kathleen M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy. That is a very old book, but that is still the best book on the subject I have come across.
Could you tell us about your classmates who have gone on to become noted Shakespeare performers or scholars?
Pradip Bhattacharya and Victor Banerjee are the names that spring to my mind at the moment. A lot of people became very famous journalists, but teachers… a lot of my juniors have taught at Jadavpur, Prabhat Ghosh’s son, Prabhat Ghosh was a famous publisher, he died, he was a very learned man, he used to be very shy about women in his class. He knew Greek and Latin. Scholarly. He had a tough time with girls in the class. Not too many people get into academia, it is not a favoured profession, I was so enamoured of my teachers that I thought that this is what I wanted to do. I managed to get what I wanted very strangely enough.
Could you talk about the question pattern for Shakespeare?
Have you seen the Calcutta University question papers of the last 100 years? If you do you will find a lot of interesting things, one is that in the 1930’s, from the 20’s to the 40’s, there used to be questions of a particular sort, and I don’t think that was a bad thing, though other people say bad things about it. Like “Quote from memory the first twenty lines of Macbeth’s soliloquy beginning “If it were done…””. There were questions like this. Questions were quite horrible. For those in the system, we have to set questions like this. I have a lot of views about questions, there is no point airing them, because nobody puts them in. These are all in the pipeline, nothing happens.
Questions were either predictable or questions on character or on scenes or on themes. I can reel off all the expected questions on Lear or any of the Shakespeare plays because I know what the students expect. The students say, “We come to class because we like it, but we have to take the exams as well” (which is true, and I am teaching them because they have to take exams, it just so happens that I like teaching and they somehow come to me). We had very simple questions, or questions which have to be answered within a certain time. Nobody thinks about the parameters of a question. One has to answer a certain question within a certain amount of time. Is a question answerable within a certain amount of time? What exactly does a question want? It is not just about Shakespeare but about anything and everything. This is very bad. So, it is stereotyped, predictable or very flashily intellectual, or very consciously unorthodox, in order to impress people. In our time the questions were very straight. The questions were different at Jadavpur, but they were not flashily aantel [Bengali slang word for pompously intellectual] or anything like that. They were alright. If you studied you could answer them. The problem is that everybody studies topics these days, not plays. Nobody studies anything these days, they only do topics. I am talking about students in general, not the good students who would study in any case, you cannot stop them from reading and studying. There is nothing to be done, even if you are a terrible teacher and nothing happens in class, they will study. If we leave them aside, they prepare topics these days. And that is it. If you read a text, and explore its various dimensions, background, you might have your personal interest which you read up more on. You explore less of the approaches which do not interest you but you do so nonetheless. You let the text grow on you. The system is such that you can no longer let the text grow on you. You have to do it in six classes or maybe even less. So, in this system this is what will happen. This is the American system, they are discarding it now, because their students aren’t learning anything. And we are now taking it in as ‘the’ thing.
Do you think that students are less interested in Shakespeare nowadays?
Smart students realize that Shakespeare is very big business, that Shakespeare gets you access everywhere in the world, so either academically or in theatre they want to engage with Shakespeare - those who are smart and think of it as a career move, for advantage. The interest in post-colonial literature is so great nowadays that it overshadows everything else. That is the problem. Everyone is doing post-colonial and Indian Writing to such an extent that we are running out of texts. So, this is a problem. Ordinary people have an interest in Shakespeare. Which is a very good thing in my opinion, ordinary people want Shakespeare. They want it on stage and on TV. They want to learn more about Shakespeare, because I relate and work with a lot of ordinary people who have no education like I have or you have, and who are fascinated by Shakespeare.
Have you seen any evolution over the decades? Has there been any change in the reaction to Shakespeare?
Previously, the approach was text-based, now it is post-colonial or post-modern, New Historicist or Bakhtinian reading. The obvious evolution.
Do you think that Shakespeare is an overrated author?
I don’t think so, I think that he is the world’s greatest author, and only stupid asses and fools who do not want to have anything to do with life, disregard Shakespeare at their own peril.
How would you react to the present trend of decanonizing Shakespeare?
I guess it has to be done if you have to bring in other texts. I don’t like it, I think that there should be more and more of Shakespeare on the syllabus. More time allotted, more teachers who can make it interesting. Well, whatever you teach which you can make interesting. The point is not to tell students what is there in Shakespeare, which you can do, but that is what Paulo Freire says is the banking system of education, you are giving me money and I am giving you knowledge about Shakespeare. That knowledge is something which you can acquire from books, the idea is to get you interested in Shakespeare so that you can be interested in everything else through Shakespeare, so that you can learn to be involved in things. So that you can get some joy out of reading. You can get joy out of reading many authors, but the joy out of reading and seeing Shakespeare, I think is more immediate and much greater.
It doesn’t matter how you teach Shakespeare. Even if you have a lot of scholarship, you cannot say all that you know in the class, and that scholarship everyone can find out from books. The main thing is your personal engagement with the text, whatever it is that you are teaching. From that personal engagement you go out into the world. That is what we should do with Shakespeare, because he repays that personal engagement more than any other text. Except the epics, maybe. If you read the epics, you will be drawn into them and be involved. Mainly Indian epics. But Homer’s two and Virgil’s one, they have (though they are very limited kind of epics, very Greek and very Roman) the patterns of life which have the power to draw you in, to educate you, to inspire you, to move you. Very old-fashioned words, don’t carry any weight now. But one should read the epics, the two Indian ones, in any language.
How would you react to the phenomenon of reading Shakespeare in a simplified language or in paraphrase now popular amongst students in the West?
That should be banned. I know about it, publishers send me letters regularly that they want to give me a fee to inspect their books, about Shakespeare in a simplified form. We have simplified everything, even eating, have tablets and eating is over. But life isn’t simple. It is a very bitter, hard, cruel, wonderful, very complex thing. You can simplify it, but you will understand its consequences later. Who said that Shakespeare’s language cannot be understood? That is why I say that if you watch plays and enact plays, you get to understand Shakespeare’s language. In Bengali, in other languages, and of course in English. Either you make it very scholarly and heavy or you get the feeling that this language is historically outdated and therefore unusable. There is no problem with the language, and even if there is a problem for first generation learners, you punch in the language of that locality. If you are teaching in a Santhal locality, you teach some of it in their language mixing it with English. If you are in Maharashtra and they do not understand English well, then teach it in Marathi. Similarly, use Bengali, Hindi, punch it with the English, and people will pick it up. If they find it interesting and worthwhile, they will go on and read Shakespeare in the original.
Have you seen the recent spate of adaptations in Bengali?
I have seen all of them.
Could we discuss some of them? What about Bibhash Chakraborty’s Hamlet?
I didn’t like it, that is because he hasn’t done anything new with it, he has just changed the beginning and the end. It’s all right. When I was at a seminar, someone pointed out, in fact the secretary of the Shakespeare Society pointed this out that it is very strange that three of the greatest adaptations of Shakespeare in Bengali are all by Basus. The Basu family. He mentioned a 19th century version, the name I forget now. He mentioned Asit Basu’s Kolkatar Hamlet from the 1970’s.
I have looked for it but haven’t found it.
This is the problem with our country, the accessibility and distribution system is a mess. It is a marvellous text, he took two years to write this. Then in 1975, when the world table tennis championship was taking place, since foreigners were coming here, there were classes held with volunteers, and since Kolkata was the cultural capital, Utpal Dutt was taking such a class, he told them, “The foreign visitors would want to see my plays, and you would want them to see my plays as well, you can show them, but it is more important to show them Asit Basu’s Kolkatar Hamlet”. I am saying this because Utpal Dutt said it. It is an absolutely marvellous text. Usually the Bengalis don’t shower so much praise with ease. That is a great, outstanding work, as is Bratya Basu’s Hamlet, Hemlat which I have translated along with two other people. One reason for adapting is that is big business, and you associate your name with Shakespeare and you are up there on the marquee. Whatever I do, it is Amitava Roy and Shakespeare. We have a very good tradition of adapting and translating Shakespeare. Most translations are adaptations. From the 1850’s. It is still going on, it had petered off, but with effort… You see people have to be made aware, a lot of people are interested, they want to do translations and things, and what you said, it is not available. Now if I say that I have a lot of heritage, you can ask me what they are, and then you can’t get hold of it. So how do you align yourself with any kind of tradition. Even to reject a tradition, you have to know the tradition, and to align yourself with it, you have to know it of course. Tradition and the individual talent. So we have a wonderful tradition, now the problem with that is, those translations and adaptations which are problematic are tremendously rooted to those times and the style of language of that period. Across the time period, the accessibility is low. But those who are good are good. Marvellous. Asit Basu is marvellous and Bratya Basu is marvellous, no doubt about it. The other Basu is very good as well. The problem is that when teachers or intellectuals translate, in our country, or adapt, then it becomes too heavy. It no longer remains in touch with theatre. They are more on the verbal/poetic side. You have to communicate the play across the board, to a wide group of people, the lack of this notion is a flaw with the creative and intellectual translators of our country. Therefore many renowned translations or adaptations, on which a lot has been said, I found to be pretty bad. They are good as poetry sometimes, but they cannot be spoken.
Have you seen Utpal Dutt’s Macbeth?
Yes. He had staged just Macbeth. Othello was written by someone else, he acted in it. He acted, translated and directed Macbeth. That Macbeth was a special kind of Macbeth, it was a very fast moving Macbeth. It was mainly tied up to the emergency, to politicize it. It was very good in its own way. Very fast moving. That political tension isn’t there. When Utpal Dutt adapted Shakespeare in his jatras, he did a brilliant job. The very flavour of his plays is very Shakespearean, whatever he might have said, tremendously serious and tremendously amusing, the grave and the gay, he has always brought them together. Which is a completely Shakespearean or Elizabethan thing. He has learnt a lot from Shakespeare, he has taken a lot from Shakespeare. Then the characters like the fool, they owe more to Shakespeare than to our folk theatre fools. He had put up a series of jatras which I had to see because I was a drama critic for five years, and Utpal Dutt being my teacher and hero… Those plays were written and directed by him, they used Richard III, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard II, he had used these plays for a series of jatras. And they were magnificently done, to someone who has read Shakespeare, the Shakespeare will be very obvious, but so what? The effect is what you were writing for, the effect was very powerful and very moving, he did not act in them, he directed and he wrote. For those who hadn’t read Shakespeare, it didn’t matter, because again, the effect is so powerful and moving. This is a better achievement by Utpal Dutt, by using Shakespeare texts, and Shakespearean conventions and dramaturgy, for his jatras, than his own making of Shakespeare. He made Macbeth, the others he just acted in. He had also directed in college.
Had you seen performances by the Kendals?
No.
Did touring companies come to Kolkata?
Yes, a lot of them did. I have seen them. They were very clear in their enunciation. Debabrata-babu was a man of the theatre. He was one of the other mentors who got me deeper into theatre. He went to England to study on a British Council scholarship. He spent his time in and around the theatres. Acting, directing and around as an audience. He was reviewed in English papers about his work. When I told him once, so many sahibs [Europeans, Englishmen] toured Kolkata with acting companies, but their productions didn’t seem so exciting, he asked me to watch other plays by the sahibs, watch Shaw, and he also told me that their history plays were acted brilliantly. My experience of Shakespeare in England and other theatres is that they don’t do Shakespeare very well. History plays are done well, somehow they identify with themselves, or they put in more hard work and are more involved. They do the other modern British classics well. I have seen Shaw, I have seen history plays by touring companies. The companies which came were well established ones. The famous plays were quite unexciting, but the history plays and Shaw used to be very moving and powerful.
Were these plays discussed in class?
No, these plays were not. We used to, at the canteens, because those were the days when theatre in Kolkata was on a roll. Sambhu Mitra, Badal Sircar, Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay, the whole lot of them were putting up plays at various places. So how can you be indifferent to them? Even if you don’t like the theatre, how can you help not responding to it? It was a real cauldron. We did as students, and there were exciting things happening, all kinds of things, political theatre, but the teachers were blissfully in a state of denial.
Were films discussed in class? Olivier, for example?
Only Debabrata-babu did. Nobody else.
Were there facilities to show films to the students?
There were such facilities. We went to see a lot of films from school. Some were organized at St. Xavier’s, but the scope was greater at South Point. These screenings used to take place at British Council, at Gorky Sadan, at Max Mueller Bhavan. Here South Point scores very high. They organized and took little boys and girls to these films, adult films, of Shakespeare and others. But at college and university, this didn’t happen.
Did you find any of the recent adaptations stirring?
Compared to Asit Basu’s adaptation of Hamlet and Bratya Basu’s Hemlat, I didn’t find anything special. Did you see Raja Lear? The translation was terrible. There are so many thespians there, but the quality of translation wasn’t good. I was associated with the production at the beginning, then I saw that these people are not open to suggestions, so I came to see the production but didn’t get involved. An important power of Shakespeare is the spoken word. Whichever language he writes in, whether it is archaic or not, whether it is poetic or not, if you cannot grasp the power of the spoken word in your presentation you miss a lot. That is true for any play. A play is basically spoken words, with some action.
How many complete plays of Shakespeare have you performed?
Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, many thematic collages of scenes, primarily these. Have you seen the translation of Hemlat? Did you see the ending where the three generations bless each other?
No, that wasn’t there. It ended with the son and his waving of his sword.
After that there is an ending involving the ghosts of the three generations. There is a tableau with the three placing their hands on each other’s head. This was added later.
I got to know from Bibhash Chakraborty that the shootout in his Hamlet was added later. The first few productions had sword fights.
That was added later. The thing with adaptation is that you want to write a commentary on your times through Shakespeare. That is what adaptation is all about - I am going to recreate my times, my society through my vision - commenting on that through a play, I am trying to understand my period and time through the frame of Shakespeare. If that objective is there, whether you succeed or not, that is a worthwhile thing to do. I felt that this element is missing from Bibhash Chakraborty’s adaptation of Hamlet. We are all fighting on the battlefield. This is too general a thing. Why bring in Shakespeare? You can bring in other playwrights who are war-oriented and in their own way more powerful. Shakespeare is big business, if we do Shakespeare we can get to a lot of places. If we add Shakespeare along to our names, a lot of things become easier. In every sense of the term.
Are the texts of Utpal Dutt’s jatras available?
Yes, they are available. You have to look for these in the theatre district.
I don’t think that they have been published.
Yes, they have been published in certain journals. Utpal Dutt used to have something called the Brecht Society. The journal had published some of the jatra texts. The scripts are there in the theatre para. A wonderful thing for research, they were very very powerful and very good, cut across thousands and thousands of viewers. Unfortunately, very few people like us have seen it. I have seen it because I used to review theatre, and I had a special link with Utpal Dutt, and I liked the jatra, and I wanted to see what he did with Shakespeare and jatra, because his main stand was that Shakespeare was Elizabethan jatra. A very good book by him is the one on politics and theatre, Towards a Revolutionary Theatre. You should read it. He has written very well on Shakespeare and what he had tried to do in practice. Read the English, it was written in English first, and then he had translated it. Seagull has published a lot of good things, but their primary motive is commerce and business, there have been a lot of translations as well. But they are not doing it out of a love for theatre.
Which newspaper did you review for?
Not a very famous newspaper, The Business Standard. I don’t think that it is around anymore. I think they brought it out as an answer to The Economic Times. The good thing about it was that they gave a lot of space. I could write from 1500 to 2000 words. I could write more if I wanted to. And nobody used to get this kind of space for writing on theatre. So, it soon established itself as a good place to have your plays reviewed. I did it for five years until it became a bit too problematic. If I went on a holiday I had to write the reviews before I left.