Rosalind and "Śakuntalā" among the Ascetics: Reading Gender and Female Sexual Agency in a Bengali Adaptation of "As You Like It"

Abhishek Sarkar

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.18.07

Authors

Abhishek Sarkar Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.18.07

Keywords:

As You Like It, 19th-century Bengali theatre, cross-dressed heroine, female sexual agency, Kālidāsa, classical Sanskrit drama

Abstract

My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor’s embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare’s play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind’s flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into account how the Bengali adaptation of As You Like It may be influenced by the gender politics informing Abhijñānaśākuntalam and by the reception of this Sanskrit play in colonial Bengal.

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Author Biography

Abhishek Sarkar, Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India

Abhishek Sarkar is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. His areas of specialization are the literatures and cultures of early modern England and colonial Bengal. He jointly co-ordinates a state-funded multimedia project for archiving the reception of Shakespeare in Bengal. He has received the Charles Wallace India Trust (CWIT) Fellowship for research-related travel in the UK. His articles have been published in The Byron Journal, South Asian Review, Literature Compass, Actes des Congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare and Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies (University of Warsaw), apart from several journals of leading Indian universities

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