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In the film Agneepath, Amitabh Bachchan, playing a mafia don and inevitable killer, comes to have a meal with his mother, who strongly disapproves of his dealings. As he washes his hands in preparation for the meal, which is meant to be a gesture of appeasement of the parent, the mother quips "all the water of Bombay will not cleanse your hands [...]!" in an obvious and succinct use of one of the most well-known lines of Shakespeare-from the sleep-walking scene of Macbeth. The message about the indelible taint of the immoral is unexceptional; it could have been said in a countless different ways. That the commercial Hindi potboiler chooses to borrow lines from as canonical a figure as Shakespeare is significant. It is this unnoticed and unacknowledged presence-a unique appropriation, intertextuality, and absorption of Shakespeare in the Indian film-which is the basis of the seemingly unholy conjugation in the title of this essay, "Filmi" or film "me" Shakespeare, that is, the conjugation of the Indian film and Shakespeare.
The popular Indian film has in the recent past been subject to considerable critical attention and exegesis, particularly in its embodiment of a public domain that is expressive of a people's desires, quests, and achievements. From being dismissed as crass and commercial, the popular film, particularly the Bombay Hindi film, has now acquired a legitimacy, even authority, as a marker in the evolution of mass culture. Indian cinema, its production and reception, is being read as a text that quintessentially articulates the space of a pan-Indian identity and nationalism. However, little attention has been paid to the hybrid genealogy, the diverse seeding sources, or the inspirational resources that have provided the ground for the growth of something that has become as recognizably indigenous as the Hindi film. To look for Shakespeare in the Indian cinema may evoke suspicions of bardolatry or even seem like a colonial throwback. Yet, a long look into the history of the Indian, and particularly the Hindi, film reveals this co-relation as neither whimsical nor contrived. Shakespeare was a leaven to the initial growth of Hindi cinema and has since nourished it in diverse forms, legitimate and illegitimate, as appropriations, recreations, relocations, and as "after life" or presences. To trace this varying...