"Hamlet", "Macbeth", Anantanarayanan’s "The Silver Pilgrimage" and A Touch of Occidentalism

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.25.05
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Keywords:

occidentalism, incongruity—cultural, philosophical, aesthetic stimulating perspective, cultural chauvinism

Abstract

The article focuses on an encounter with Shakespeare in an unusual place, a novel set in medieval India, where Shakespeare is viewed and assessed by an Indian audience, by Indian listeners, through principles of classical Indian art and thought. Such an encounter creates a sense of incongruity, an incongruity that is cultural, philosophical and aesthetic, but at the same time leads to startling perspectives and new and fresh insights. The novel does not privilege one culture over another but the listeners do and we have a brilliant piece of comic writing where the humour derives from the one-sidedness of their perceptions, their “occidentalism”, their easy assumption of the superiority of their belief system over the “other”. The Silver Pilgrimage thus provides not only a stimulating perspective on two Shakespearean tragedies from the point of view of Sanskrit poetics and Indian thought, but also a gentle expose of the limitations of this point of view, and the cultural chauvinism that lies behind it.

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Author Biography

Mythili Kaul, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

Mythili Kaul is a retired Professor of English from the University of Delhi, Delhi, India. Her doctoral work at Yale was on Shakespeare’s Romances. She edited Othello: New Essays By Black Writers (Howard UP, 1997), and her work on Shakespeare has appeared in Shakespeare the Man: New Decipherings (ed. R.W. Desai, Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014), and in several journals including Notes & Queries, American Notes & Queries, Hamlet Studies, Shakespeare Yearbook, The Upstart Crow, The Critical Endeavour, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, The Forum for Modern Language Studies, English Studies.

References

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Jouhki, Jukka and Henna-Riiki Pennanen. “The Imagined West: Exploring Occidentalism”. Suomen Antropologi 41(2), (Summer 2016): 1-10.
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Palakeel, Thomas. Review of The Silver Pilgrimage. World Literature Today 68(4), (Autumn 1994): 883-884.
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Paranjpe, Makarand. Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions in English. Delhi: Anthem Press, 2009.
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Published

2022-12-14 — Updated on 2023-12-20

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How to Cite

Kaul, M. (2023). "Hamlet", "Macbeth", Anantanarayanan’s "The Silver Pilgrimage" and A Touch of Occidentalism. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 25(40), 61–73. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.25.05 (Original work published December 14, 2022)

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