Thursday,21,2019

Dr. Pradip Bhattacharya

Retired IAS Officer and independent scholar

(Interviewed by Sri Arunava Banerjee)

When did your first acquaintance with Shakespeare take place?

My acquaintance with Shakespeare started at school. I used to study at St. Lawrence School. It was around 1960 and our text book was Julius Caesar. Most probably that was class 10. We used to be taught by a Keralite Father, Thomas Vetticad. Keralite Jesuit. The edition used was Verity. The approach was basically explicatory. The language was difficult; we were not used to that type of language. We had paraphrases, but we did also put up scenes from Shakespeare on stage, for which I remember that a present judge of the High Court, Ajoy Nath Roy, he was Anthony, and Santanu Roy, who is a secretary of the ICFAI, was Brutus, or vice versa. We had a stage performance where the toga was worn, and some attempts were made at a non-Indian pseudo-Roman setting with very good enunciation of the speeches. So that was the exposure to Shakespeare we got. The task we were set was to produce a written paraphrase, scene by scene, of the entire play, which was a tremendous advantage when I taught Julius Caesar at St. Xavier’s College to the First Year General English students.

I still used my own paraphrase, because these were students belonging to non-English Honours disciplines, like Economics, Political Science and History. To make Julius Caesar comprehensible to them, this type of paraphrase was very useful. At the college level at St. Xavier’s, we had three plays

– we had Julius Caesar for General English, we had As You Like It for Alternative English, and for the Honours we had Macbeth. The preferred text for As You Like It was the Stanley Woods edition. We preferred Stanley Woods as students as well, as you had the text on the left and the annotations on the right, unlike Verity, where you had to flip the pages to get at the notes at the back. Stanley Woods was very helpful and As You Like It was not a problem really. The teaching consisted of simply explaining the text by Indian lecturers. There was no performance of the plays, because at St.

Xavier’s we were performing other types of plays, from Sheridan and other playwrights for the dramatic society. For Macbeth, for the first time some of us bought the Arden edition, but most went by Verity, and Verity was what was suggested by our teacher. Our teacher was Father Peter Gomes, a Jesuit, and the teaching basically focused on explaining the text and bringing out the characters, and nothing very sensational or nothing very memorable either. So that was the college level.

Could you tell us the specific details and dates of your educational accomplishments?

Class 10 would be 1962. That was Madhyamik. In those days there was no class 12, I passed my class 11 in 1963. I don’t think that we had Julius Caesar in class 11; I think we read it in class 10. Class 11 was also from St. Lawrence. College, B.A. English Honours was 1963-66 at St. Xavier’s.

My M.A. was through Presidency College at Calcutta University. That was a very interesting experience. If you interview my classmate Dr. Shubhash Chandra Saha, who later became the Vice Chancellor of two universities, you will get a very different picture, because he did not study through Presidency – he was only in the University. In the University, there were 150 students in a classroom. At Presidency, there were only 6 or 7 of us. At Presidency I first heard from my classmates who had done their graduation at Presidency, that Prof. Tarak Sen had taught

them Macbeth over a period of three years, whereas we had just done Macbeth over a period of one year. So I was much surprised to hear this. And one of the classmates showed me her notebook, which proved that every semi-colon, every full stop, every punctuation mark had been explained with respect to its significance. It was a complete eye opener, because we had not had any such experience, nor had we any concept of Shakespeare’s short lines, which was Prof. Sen’s great contribution, nor the multiple dimensions of meaning in the knocking scene and the witches.

In the M.A. class we had several plays of Shakespeare. At Presidency College, Prof. Sen taught us King Lear, and his classes would go on late into the evening and were totally riveting. They brought out the anguish of Lear unforgettably and the emphasis was totally textual, bringing out various meanings and implications. The text used was really not important, but we all had the Arden edition. I personally consulted the Variorum and the New Cambridge editions, because their introductions and annotations added considerably to what the Arden editor provided. Lear was taught by Prof. Jyoti Bhattacharya in Calcutta University in a performative and dramatic manner, and he would act it out and even in a huge class of over a hundred, the silence was total. My class in the university had Prof. Amalendu Bose, Head of the Department, teaching Lear, in a manner which is totally forgettable. I remember nothing.

You see, at that time Prof. Jyoti Bhattacharya was the education minister. Prof. Amalendu Bose did not give him any important text to teach, he was given only Swinburne and Rossetti. After he ceased being a minister, my junior batch got him for Lear, and I attended those classes. That is how I got to hear him teaching Lear. Prof. Bose also taught us Anthony and Cleopatra, where he attempted to be performative by reading out Cleopatra’s speeches in a shrill voice, but it did not leave any impact. The same with The Tempest. So actually we studied Shakespeare on our own in the university.

What other Shakespeare texts did you have in college and University?

I think we also had a history play which was not taught. I think these three were taught, but the syllabus had several more. I think Henry IV was there, but I can’t remember exactly. I think Measure for Measure was also there but it was not taught. The plays which were taught were these three.

What traits of any particular teacher impressed you most?

Well, I told you about Prof. Tarak Sen’s intense involvement with the intricacies of the text and bringing out dimensions that one had not even imagined.

What any special attention paid to pronunciation and accent?

None of the teachers, including Prof. Sen, had a proper accent. The only person who used to speak English properly was Prof P. Lal, but unfortunately he never taught us Shakespeare. Prof. Jyoti Bhattacharya’s accent was added on, extra-emphatic.

What about expletives and sexual references in the plays of Shakespeare? Were they left out?

Well, at St Xavier’s College, thanks to the use of Verity, there was some blacking out even in the porter scene. At St Xavier’s these were never touched upon. In the university, bringing out the sexual issues in Lear, is something I do not recall being done. Because Prof. Sen never finished teaching Lear, we never did get to that area with him.

What was taught in terms of the socio-historic context of the plays?

No socio-historical context was taught by Prof. Sen, we were supposed to have known that. Before starting the classes, for two months, he gave us a detailed bibliography, paper by paper, for eight papers. After telling us that if we had come to obtain the M.A. degree of Calcutta University, we had better forget it, because it was not worth the paper it was written on. If we had come for a degree, no point, if we had come to study literature, yes, and for two full months we got a bibliography which I still have, divided into three parts. The first was what must be read, the second was what is desirable, and the third was what is optional. They always included the socio-historical background. Trevelyan was always there, and you had to know it, that was not going to be taught. In the university, half of our paper was on the Shakespearean background. The Shakespearean background and the Shakespearean scholarship part was taught most prosaically from E.K. Chambers and similar books. It was never interwoven into the teaching of the text. So you didn’t have a concrete picture of the social setting of Lear. Nor did you have an evocation of the Globe playhouse in which it was being performed. Even at Presidency it was not done.

Another thing which we used to do was to get these records from the British Council from the BBC or the New Shakespeare Company, their recordings of the performances of Lear and other plays and watch them. This was purely an individual initiative from me in the Presidency College seminar. I don’t think the University did anything of that sort, the class was too huge anyway.

What about Shakespeare’s contemporary dramatists? Was Shakespeare given a position above them somehow?

There was no reverential treatment as such. We studied the other dramatists because they were a part of another paper in the syllabus. The Elizabethan, the post-Elizabethan, the contemporary, all of these dramatists were studied, but Shakespeare compared to them… no such comparison was ever made. I think there was an implication that you cannot compare Shakespeare with them. I think so, now that you mention this. The only comparison we had was when we studied Dryden’s All for Love. There were some comparisons with Anthony and Cleopatra. Since the differences were so vastthe comparison did not make any sense.

Who did this comparison?

All for Love was taught by Dr. R.K. Sen. He would discuss Anthony and Cleopatra, and side by side hewould refer to similar scenes in Shakespeare. But that was not particularly illuminating. The difference is too big, how can you compare?

Were students encouraged to think independently and challenge the teacher?

At Presidency College the entire atmosphere was that you must think for yourself. I remember being asked by Prof. Sen to do a tutorial not on Shakespeare but on Rape of the Lock. And I studied extensively in the Xaverian fashion which was to read up all critical writing available and produce an essay. He took a look at it and gave me back my notebook saying, “I want to know what you think.” I tried hard and redid everything, and this time he gave back the notebook with a single remark, “This will do.” I was very put off, because there wasn’t any evaluation. No marks were given. So in a bit of confusion I asked my Presidency classmates as to what it meant. So they looked at me and they assured that it was quite satisfactory. I asked them again, so what does that mean? They said, “Well, it means it is difficult to do better than this”. So that was quite an eye-opener. So what was prized was that you think for yourself. In the University, there was no such thing. In the University, the size of the class made any such thing impossible. So basically it was a one-way lecture, and there were hardly any questions. In some University classes even notes were dictated.

Can you tell me something about the examination and question pattern?

Nothing exceptional. You looked at the last ten years’ questions, and you knew what type of things were asked. Nothing that would make you exert yourself.

Did the teachers refer to the stage and film productions of Shakespeare?

These were never discussed. But the British Council used to hold film shows, and those of us who were interested, there were just a handful, attended them regularly. And at that time the British Council play reading group was revived by me. It had died out after Dick Rogers was transferred. I revived it and we used to play-read, and these recordings were listened to. One of my classmates, Amitava Roy, who later became the Shakespeare chair at Rabindra Bharati, founded the Shakespeare Society of Eastern India. We used to have these records played out and watch these Shakespeare films. A particularly memorable one was Hamlet at Elsinore. Extremely well made film, which had Christopher Plummer as Hamlet.

When you were doing Shakespeare, was there any reference to performance conventions?

Not at all. Except that you knew about the Globe playhouse which was taught as a separate half-paper in M.A. But Prof. Jyoti Bhattacharya used to act it out verbally, emotively, so that would be very riveting and revealing.

Was Shakespeare performed at college or university while you were there?

At the University level, no, definitely not during my time.

Do you know of any classmates of yours who have distinguished themselves as Shakespeare teachers or performers?

Amitava Roy was a director, he had produced many plays, but I don’t know if he has done any Shakespeare.

In my class we had Godrej Engineer who founded a new drama society called the Oskars. But he didn’t do Shakespeare, he did modern plays. Godrej Engineer was one of the best actors I have seen.

Later my students started Red Curtain when I was teaching at St Xavier’s. I don’t think they did Shakespeare. The Amateurs was an independent theatre group at that time. The British Council officer Dick Rogers was a prime mover, so they put up several Shakespeare plays. I have a strong recollection of Richard III being done brilliantly on stage. They would also get over films which we would watch. The Royal Shakespeare Company made visits. The Amateurs also put up Much Ado About Nothing. The Royal Shakespeare Company put up The Tempest, a memorable performance.

What was the timeframe for which you taught at St Xavier’s?

1969 – 1971.

Can you tell us more about Dick Rogers?

You can ask the British Council, they will be able to tell you about him. You can ask Sujata. He used to have rehearsals at his house and we would attend them. Remarkable man.

Do you think there has been a change in the way Shakespeare has been taught and in the way students have reacted to it over the decades?

I have no idea. I have left teaching, so I cannot tell you. You should interview Amitava Roy and Shubhash Saha.

Do you think Shakespeare is overrated?

No, no, I don’t think anyone has equalled him in English literature, for his insights into life are unequalled. I unconsciously quote Shakespeare in my writing, and only later on do I realize that I have quoted him. It is like that.

There seems to be a present trend of deglamourizing and decanonizing Shakespeare. What do you think about it?

I don’t know about it. Oh yes, I do know. New interpretations, Americanization of Shakespeare. You had The Comedy of Errors done in a Wild West style. Highly amusing. But very revealing because the language was not changed. The costumes were different, the setting was different, but the language was retained. Now that was a remarkable experience, but when you change the language, which happens when you Americanize Shakespeare, it might be very intelligible to the half-literate person in America, but where is the magic and where is the insight? You get the story clearly in modern terms, but if I change Portia’s speech in a stock exchange scenario into American English, you’ve got the story, but that is not Shakespeare. “The quality of mercy is not strained.” Now how will you paraphrase that? “You can’t be too cruel a man” and things like that won’t do.

An easy way of understanding the issue is that Shakespeare is facing the same thing which Rabindranath faced, when you had Buddhadev Basu and company saying things like this man is wishy-washy, mushy-mushy, but where are they and where is Rabindranath? Where are the insights? And you can say that Milton wrote no language, but then the whole thing reverberates within you. Who else would write of “Man’s first disobedience and the fruit of the forbidden tree”? I think the denigration is part of the Lytton Strachey-Eminent Victorians cut. The only way you can become famous is by laughing at the past. T.S. Eliot tried doing it but he ended up assimilating it, all that past, and putting it back into Four Quartets. If you want to have greatness, you can’t get away from that. There is a fashion though that instead of looking at the four great tragedies and the golden comedies, you now try to make your presence felt by concentrating on All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida …. That is understandable, but that is not denigrating, that is shifting of focus.

But, there is one thing I want to tell you, which is, we grossly overrate some of the Indian authors who have written on Shakespeare. We were told much about Prof. Subodh Sengupta’s history plays. Even Tillyard has praised his Whirligig of Time. So with great expectations, when I was an M.A. student, having read Tillyard, I took up Whirligig of Time and I was sorely disappointed. My sole impression is that an English scholar finding an Indian writing correct English goes overboard and there is a lot of patronizing praise which is not deserved. For example The Art of Bernard Shaw by Subodh Sengupta throws no light on Bernard Shaw more than what Chesterton has already done. This is a problem we have. Another good example is Dr. Sreekumar Banerjee’s Studies on Coleridge and Keats. When we were taught Keats in the university, the first reference was to Sreekumar Banerjee. When I read the book, I found that it was simply filled with emotion. There is nothing that you can come to grips with. The same with Bhabotosh Chatterjee’s book on Keats. When you read Ernest De Selincourt on Keats, you get a real gritty insight into Keats. But it is not the case with our Indian authors, this is a major problem. And because we write good English, we get praise we do not deserve, by way of excellence. That is the difference. Except for Prof. Tarak Nath Sen’s essays on English literature, I have not come across high class Indian writers, in my times. Later Sukanta [Sukanta Chaudhuri], but none in my time.