Collection Connections: 'Dating Dr. Dil' by Nisha Sharma

India has a long history of engaging with Shakespeare due to British colonial rule. One of the first sites of this negotiation was Bengal, and others have written about the performance traditions, Shakespeare’s family connections to Bengal  and translating Shakespeare into Bengali.

My work has focused on Hindi Shakespeare, and as Dating Dr Dil is set in a North Indian community signalled using words like Rishta, Jeevansaathi and even Dil, I situate Nisha Sharma’s work in a long line of South Asian re-writings of Shakespeare.

Anuvad, the word usually used as the Hindi equivalent of the word “translation” can mean “translation, interpretation, repetition”. If we go back to its Sanskrit roots, it can also refer to “echo, explanatory repetition, comment”. Harish Trivedi has written about the temporal dimension of this word. And if we think of repetition, or translation or adaptation through time, we can think of Nisha Sharma’s re-writing of Taming of the Shrew to be in the same lineage.

While most translators and adapters of Shakespeare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when this practice began, were male, one of the interesting books in the Folger’s collection is an 1888 translation of Merchant of Venice as Venice Nagar Ka Byapari by a woman who uses the pseudonym Arya. I have talked about this translation elsewhere but it is worth looking at the title page of this translation here.

There are two things of note here, one is that it is a prose translation, and two is the fact that the title page includes two languages in two scripts: Hindi and English, in Devanagari and Roman scripts respectively. If we look at the cover of Dating Dr. Dil , it too defines the genre (“novel”) and contains two languages, albeit in one script. After all, “Dil” means heart in Hindi.

Perhaps, that’s where the similarities end.  In her preface, written in English, Arya’s target audience is “Hindu students” (See image 3), and we can assume the intention was pedagogical. In contrast, in her acknowledgments Sharma describes wanting to “use Shakespeare’s plays as a vehicle to focus on the nuance in my American desi culture” in her “Shakespeare-inspired romances” (363).

While Arya might have translated Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s comedies, particularly The Comedy of Errors, have been immensely popular in terms of Hindi translation and adaptation. Jagadish Prasad Mishra in his analysis of the impact on Shakespeare on Hindi literature, notes that The Taming of the Shrew has not been translated often in Hindi (43). Indeed, when I searched “Taming of the Shrew India” in the Folger database, the only item that comes up is this poster advertising the Hollywood adaptation of the play starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford at an Indian cinema in the 1930s.

Upon doing some research on Wellington Talkies (Talkies was the name given to a cinema that played a sound film as opposed to a silent film), I found this blog about the establishment of Wellington Talkies in Madras, where it says that the same family also founded a cinema in Bombay. Whether this poster is from the Madras cinema or the Bombay cinema, it goes to show that there was an audience for Shakespeare in colonial India – be it as a translation or as film.

Dating Dr. Dil transposes Shakespeare to a diasporic Indian audience and in doing so uses some of the same strategies as earlier translations as it Indianizes Shakespeare while also subverting some elements to adapt the play for the twenty-first century.