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Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang, Borrowers and Lenders 4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).
Freud claimed that in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Macbeth is not grossly concerned about his personal political ambition; Macbeth is perhaps primarily preoccupied with his future dynasty. "Macbeth is incensed by this decree of destiny," Freud writes. "He is not content with the satisfaction of his own ambition, he desires to found a dynasty and not to have murdered for the benefit of strangers" (Freud 1991, 32). Freud's proposition that Macbeth acts mainly, but not exclusively, out of concern for his future dynasty is present in Shakespeare's play, albeit in rudimentary and marginal form. But in Maqbool, Vishal Bhardwaj's unusually perceptive and seminal retextualization of Macbeth, an emphasis on Macbeth's future dynasty is conspicuously developed and reinforced. Poonam Trivedi claims that the film is a "retextualization" because it not only augments Shakespeare's play by reimagining critical scenes, but also because the film, though admittedly still an appropriation, sufficiently mimics or contains much of the mythos, character, and imagery of Shakespeare's play: "For what is strikingly significant about the film is how much of the original text is retained, and engaged with, within the adaptation, in terms of the plot, character, imagery and not just theme and atmosphere" (Trivedi 2007, 153). She points out that the film's retextualization comments on a "festering urban culture"; that the film too aligns itself with postmodernist, self-conscious filmic practice by alluding to the realities of Bollywood cinema and its ostensible nexus to the Mumbai criminal underworld; and, moreover, that the film aligns itself with the genres of both the "Bollywood gangster and the Muslim social film" (154).
Beyond these themes, I think, Maqbool develops a different dimension of Macbeth by positing a fecund, pregnant Lady Macbeth alongside the curious conception that Macbeth could probably, if ironically, be "selfless," insofar as he seeks to secure his future dynasty at his own peril. Murder and betrayal are not of much consequence in the Mumbai criminal underworld; these activities are simply part of the Mafia trade, and Maqbool is from the start an ignoble, cold-blooded murderer. Instead, sexual desire is the predominant transgression in Maqbool. The transgressive love affair between Macbeth/Maqbool and Lady...