Nationhood and Identity in Indian Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1989–2020

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by Taarini Mookherjee

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > India

Keywords

India, Shakespeare, adaptation, national cultures

Publishing date

2026 (September 30, 2026)

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 240 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-3995-5434-3

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Book Presentation:
Investigating an increase in the visibility of Indian adaptations of Shakespeare in film, theatre and fiction between 1989 and 2020, Taarini Mookherjee suggests that this popularity reflects the political affordances of adapting Shakespeare in contemporary India. A foreign, yet familiar, text, Shakespeare provides both opportunities for radical reinvention and subversive political critique. Mookherjee mobilises the term desify, a bilingual portmanteau popular in the South Asian diaspora that simultaneously references the abstract and aspirational nation (des) and the quotidian process of making local or native in popular culture, to argue that these self-consciously Indian or desified Shakespeares disclose contemporary Indian ideas and inquiries of the nation. Precisely because they are self-proclaimed ‘Indian’ adaptations of Shakespeare, these works provide us with a unique corpus of material that is both constitutive and representative of contemporary public contestations around identity, belonging and what it means to look and sound Indian.

About the Author:
Taarini Mookherjee is a literary scholar and educator whose primary research fields include global Shakespeare, postcolonial theory, early modern drama, and theatre and performance studies. She has previously worked as a researcher and lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, Columbia University and SUNY, New Paltz. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and holds a Master's in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London and a BA in English from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

Press Reviews:
Taarini Mookherjee’s fascinating monograph brilliantly investigates Shakespearean adaptations by, about and in the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora through its recent history and in dialogue with Global Shakespeare studies. She coins the helpful term ‘desification’, building upon the term desi (which can mean both ‘local’ and ‘global’ when used of an individual and, that as she importantly observes, uniquely includes the Sanskrit word for ‘nation’ itself) to encode the ongoing contradiction, conflict and synthesis within these adaptations as they juxtapose the foreign and the native, the local and the global, the public and the individual. Her analysis demonstrates with sensitivity and rigour the impact of Indian politics and world events over the past thirty years and the ways in which Shakespeare is used both in and out of India in adaptations on page, stage and screen to rehearse these tensions and conflicts within and beyond the nation-state. Such conflicts include negotiations over caste and skin colour in adaptations of Othello or The Merchant of Venice; religion and romance in adaptations of Romeo and Juliet; of multi-lingualism in Twelfth Night and Hamlet; of gender and maternity in Macbeth and King Lear; and many more, all thoughtfully investigated through detailed, medium- and culturally-specific close readings that include attention to lesser-known languages within the subcontinent and detailed explication of particular art forms. The book deserves the widest possible readership among the diaspora and among Shakespeare scholars, adaptors, performers and enthusiasts worldwide. -- Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia

See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press