All the King’s men and all the King’s women: reading Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool as a “creative mistranslation” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Abstract

This article attempts to read how Shakespeare’s Macbeth lives in twenty-first century India in the form of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool. The article takes the recurrent tempests of religiously generated animosity in the Indian subcontinent as a textual field within which Macbeth, under the garb of Maqbool, resides. The centre/margin construct that forms the core of Maqbool provides us with an opportunity to ponder over our own historical moment, a moment fraught with interminable violence and hatred inspired by the politics of difference. Bhardwaj provides us with the possibility, in both Maqbool (based on Macbeth) and Haider (based on Hamlet), that Shakespeare could be directly related to the saga of relentless religious violence that plagues some South Asian countries to date. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool reimagines Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a struggle for power within the hierarchy of organized crime in Mumbai. The film, however, may also be seen as a glimpse into a fiercely patriarchal Islamic set-up by an equally fierce Hindu gaze. This tale of Shakespeare in a twenty-first century setting creates a sense of all-consuming foreboding whereby the polarization of Hindus and Muslims becomes more than a power game: it becomes symptomatic of Indian society where wily politicians and shrewd policemen, render a state’s law machinery into a den of horrific violence. This article attempts to show that beneath the overt narrative difference between the play and the film lurks a similar political reading of both the texts. The film opens with the illusion of “other” as the “center”. But gradually with numerous instances of illegitimacy like the mock-family structure, the half-caste protagonist, the illicit relationships, and above all, the entire space of the film peopled predominantly by the Muslims made illegitimate by consigning it to the mafia world, we realize that the “other”, initially projected as the “center” here is not merely castigated, but defeated, defeated not from without, but from within. This article is published as part of a collection to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.