Ever since his advent in India Shakespeare has been a constant stimulus to the various Indian literatures in general and in Tamil the classical language in southern part of India. As an young boy I distinctly remember how I played the role of Portia in the Rosary Nursery School in Madras some twenty five years back. It is at all traditional and convention in every school in India to stage a few scenes of Shakespeare in anniversaries.
Schools and colleges in India till date bristled with activity and have got inducted to the texts of Shakespeare’s plays. At the school level stories and simplified texts were prescribed while colleges prescribed the original texts and expected the learners to be capable of a critical appreciation of the plays. When the scholars felt the impact of the Shakespearean dialogues they began to render them with gusto which gave them a feeling of mastery over the English language. As a consequence an educated Indian at the end of his academic career had a sound knowledge of the English language. Thus Shakespeare began to be widely read in the original and the appreciation that resulted from such study was very much like what he met within his own country and wherever his countrymen had settled. In due course, teachers encouraged the students to display their histrionic talents in school functions. Mark Antony’s orations, Portia’s appeal for mercy, the Seven Ages of Man, Hamlet’s soliloquy and on death and similar well known passages were set for recitation competitions, while ‘The Trial Scene’ in The Merchant of Venice, ‘The Bed Chamber Scene’ in Othello ‘The Abdication Scene’ in Richard II, the meeting between Arthur and Hubert in King John created a popular interest on the stage. Lecturers in colleges considered teaching of Shakespeare’s plays as a hall-mark of their scholarship.
We have the evidence of Norman Marshall who toured India in 1948 with a company of actors staging Shakespeare’s plays in various parts of the country. He said: Perhaps rather surprisingly, I found that in India the reaction of the audiences to some aspects of the plays was more Elizabethan than it is in England. The observation of Marshall clearly brings to focus the affinities of temperaments between the Elizabethans and the Indians.
Despite so many years of continuous efforts to propagate English education in India, it has not been possible for every Indian to have direct access to the treasures of Shakespeare. The only course left open under the circumstances has been to take recourse to translation. Accordingly translations and adaptations of all his works have been made in different Indian languages to bring Shakespeare within the reach of those who are ignorant of English.
The first translations of Shakespeare’s plays were made in Bengali by Michael Madhusudhan Dutt. It is interesting to note that a street in Calcutta has been named after Shakespeare due to the euphoria of the Bengalis for the great playwright. The first English editions of Shakespeare’s play are said to have arrived only in Calcutta when it was the Capital of the Britishers.
Fascinated over the scores of Tamil translations of Shakespeare have enjoyed and estimated the translator’s hard task in bringing out Shakespeare in Tamil. The first faltering step taken to accommodate Shakespeare within the structure of the Tamil World of letters was a translation of The Merchant of Venice which appeared in Madras in 1870. Since then not less than fifty translations and adaptations have appeared in South India and Sri Lanka. Of Shakespeare’s tragedies there are at least twenty translations, with varying degrees of success, but all of them appear in some measure flawed. It does not mean that translators were ill equipped to handle the work. It is a larger problem which involves a way of looking at life and universe. Tragedy, as Shakespeare seems to have expressed, is a alien to the Tamil world. Pammal Sambanda Mudaliar records on more than one occasion in his Nadaka Medai Ninaivukal that sometimes even after having written plays in Tamil with a tragic ending he had been compelled to alter the ending and give the impression of ‘lived happily every after’. The inflexibility of the Tamils in admitting the possibility of tragedy in the Shakespearean sense has been a major, limiting factor. This explains the absence of sustained intensity in most translations.
Shakespearean comedy seems to have been more acceptable to the Tamil audience. There are approximately twenty five translations of his comedies. Plays like As you Like it have been put on boards fairly regularly. Shakespearean comedy is neither satiric nor idealistic but tries to strike a middle path by synthesizing extremes. This aspect seems to have been generally missed by a fair number of translators. Hence certain significant but disturbing passages have either been deleted or distorted in the translations indicating that the comic vision of Shakespeare has eluded many translators.
It’s interesting to note an eminent Prof – Saint Swami Vibulanandhar, sage of Ramakrishna mission of Ceylon has made a systematic study of Shakespeare’s play. He was able to find a triad comparison, with Tamil, Sanskrit and English trimetergy.
It seems, the effort of Swami Vibulananda was to turn his research into a three-in-one form of presumable plauisibilities in a linguistic from and generic mode with a diction and the rhetoric of his discourse with figurative ‘import’. again it seems to imply that the poetics are rather constructs of language, rhetorically prescribed for having their existence in words. The text has proceeded by demonstration that Shakespeare can be brought in by transposition and then there are means other than translation in the disciplinary sense that induces Shakespeare phenomenon, Mathanga Choolamani is a break through and through that Shakespeare tended to spill in a different way.
I was very much rewarded with overwhelming joy in seeing more than 200 translations in Tamil, how the translators have had their exemplary exercise in catching the great dramatist. By reading the translations I can understand how this playwright so distant from them, in place and time and so different in historical and cultural heritage. Is yet so near to the Tamils for he has that one text of nature which makes the whole world kin.
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