Title: Shakespeare in Bollywood : Adaptation, Transcreation, and the Indian Cinematic Imagination Download

Author’s : Dr. Leena Pundir

DOI :-10.71037/gyanvividha.v1i1.13

cite this article:
Pundir Dr. Leena. ”Shakespeare in Bollywood : Adaptation, Transcreation, and the Indian Cinematic Imagination”, Published in GYANVIVIDHA, ISSN: 3048-4537, Volume-1 | Issue-1 , Jan 2024, Page No. :-24-38. URL : https://journal.gyanvividha.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dr.-Leena-Pundir-Gyanvividha-Vol-1-Issue-1-January-2024-pp42-48.pdf

Abstract :  Although the plays of William Shakespeare are products of a distinctly Elizabethan English culture, they have travelled across linguistic and cultural borders to acquire vibrant afterlives in world cinema. Few film industries have engaged with the Bard as energetically as Bollywood, whose own theatrical genealogy in ninet-eenth-century Parsi theatre had already domesticated Shakespearean plots, characters, and rhetorical conven-tions long before the advent of sound cinema. This paper traces Bollywood’s long conversation with Shakespeare, from Sohrab Modi’s pioneering Khoon ka Khoon (1935)—the first Hindi-Urdu sound adaptation of Hamlet—and Kishore Sahu’s Hamlet (1954) through the romance and comedy adaptations of Bobby (1973), Angoor (1982), Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), Saudagar (1991), Ishaqzaade (2012), Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013), and 10ml Love (2012), to the auteurist trilogy of Vishal Bhardwaj—Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014). Drawing on the scholarship of Trivedi and Chakravarti (2018), Sen (2009), and Chatterjee (2020), the paper argues that these films do not merely “borrow” Shakespeare; they transcreate him, refashion-ning the plays in light of caste, communal politics, regional violence, family melodrama, and the song-and-dance economy of mainstream Hindi cinema. The persistence of Shakespearean adaptation in Bollywood, four centuries after the playwright’s death, attests not only to the universality of the source texts but also to the generative power of Indian cinematic idioms to inhabit, interrogate, and reanimate them.

Keywords : Shakespeare, Bollywood, adaptation, transcreation, Vishal Bhardwaj, Parsi theatre, Indian cinema, comedy, tragedy.

Publication Details:

Journal : GYANVIVIDHA (ज्ञानविविधा)

ISSN : 3048-4537 (Online)

Published In : Volume-1 | Issue-1, Jan 2024

Page Number(s) : 24-38

Publisher Name :

 Mrs Anubha Chaudhary | https://journal.gyanvividha.com | E-ISSN 3048-4537