Paper Details

Name: Ritushree Sengupta
Country: India

Year: 2016
Volume: Volume-3, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 87-92

Macaulay’s Education act of 1835 was contrived to create a section of Brown Sahibs to assist the British Empire born out of a culture in which Shakespeare was invincible. Since the foundation of the Calcutta Theatre in 1775, Bengal saw the rise of “bhadraloks” appreciating Shakespearean works and giving them their share of recognition. It further resulted into a creation of a number of indigenous texts which quite powerfully posited the Shakespearean texts into totally different socio-cultural contexts, at times remaining faithful to the plot while at times craftily diverting from it. One of such texts is Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s Bhranti Bilas (1869), which has a plot very close to that of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and one might accurately consider it to be the first “translation” of Shakespeare into Bengali. Vidyasagar’s text finely deals with the plot keeping it almost the same but transforms its dramatic form into a story. Interestingly, this text is further adapted into a play in 1888 and into a commercial film in 1963 directed by Manu Sen.