Shylock became Shailaksha:Indian Vernacular Appropriation of Shakespeare

Vishnu Moreshwar Mahajani’s Marathi translation of Cymbeline as Tara was perhaps the first Indian translation of a Shakespearean play. It was staged in Baroda (now Vadodara) in 1880 before an audience of about five hundred that largely spoke Gujarati and Marathi. The occasion was the royal marriages of the then Gaekwar ruler of Baroda to a Tanjore princess, and of his sister, Tara Bai,to the prince of Sawantwari. The Macmillan’s magazine of the time reported it as ‘Cymbeline in a Hindu Playhouse’. To get a feel of the ‘Indianisation’ of Shakespeare here it is worthwhile to quote from that report on the staging in some detail: The stage, ‘a whitewashed sandbank forming an oval about three feet in height, twenty feet in breadth, and forty feet in depth, was partly concealed behind a drop-curtain on which an elephant and tiger fight was depicted, and by a proscenium of canvas adorned with full length portraits of three-headed gods and mythic heroes in strange attire. Three uprights —— one of them a growing tree on either side of the stage, sustained the ‘footlights’ —— some twenty kerosene lamps’....The sutradhara (stage manager) introduced the play along with the ‘god Ganpati, a vermilion-faced, elephant-trunked monster, with golden turban, blue and gold tunic ,and white legs, seated on a very terrestrial-looking, cane-bottomed chair, in front of an Indian house’(Littledale:1880).