Shakespeare in Swahililand
Page 10
An unidentified group of Indian railway workers, from an uncatalogued photograph found in the archive of the Nairobi Railway Museum. (Nairobi Railway Museum)
The task assigned to this workforce from 1896 onwards was to lay heavy steel rails and sleepers in a relatively straight line up the 5000 feet of the central African plateau, and the wilfully ungeometrical landscape required cuttings and bridges that made this an even more fraught business than usual. These labour parties suffered the same deprivation, malaria and tribal attacks which the explorers had during their treks along the same routes, but their size and slow movement also created new dangers. A pair of man-eating lions besieged the railhead party for ten months in 1898 as they built a bridge over the Tsavo River, probably taking over 120 from the party and creating in their decimation a climate of crazed fear which a parade of sportsmen-hunters from Europe and America could do nothing to end. When the lions were eventually shot, each measured a monstrous ten feet from nose to tip of tail. (Their hides can still be seen today, stuffed and slightly moth-eaten, at the Field Museum in Chicago.) The railhead manager and successful stalker, John Henry Patterson, was celebrated by the workers in a lengthy Hindustani praise-song.
Bones, flesh, skin and blood, they devoured all, and left not a trace behind them. […]
On all sides arose weeping and wailing, and the people would sit and cry like cranes, complaining of the deeds of the lions. […]
And after seeing what the animal had done, the Englishman spoke, and said
‘For this damage the lion shall pay his life.’ And when night came he took his gun and in very truth destroyed the beast.
Patterson Sahib is indeed a brave and valiant man, like unto those Persian heroes of old – Rustem, Zal, Sohrab and Berzoor […]3
Though the poem truncates the siege into a matter of weeks, the long-lasting reality left plenty of time for less affectionate feelings to develop against Patterson Sahib, leading eventually to an ambush and a mutiny which saw most of the workers on their way back to Mombasa on a hijacked goods train.*
Although accounts of the railway’s construction have tended to focus on the many dangers faced by the work parties, I wondered as I drove through Tsavo East whether their solitude among the animals might also have had its consolations. The modern Tsavo game reserve covers an area roughly the size of Wales or New Hampshire, large enough for one often to encounter elephants without a trace of human life on any horizon, as I did several times during my drive. Anyone who has done this knows that it is an experience with almost unparalleled spiritual resonance. The massive solidity of the elephant and the otherworldly quality of its skin, somewhere between stone and leather, combine with the delicacy and grace of its movements, and the profound stillness of the eyes between its filament-like lashes, to deliver a silencing riposte to human self-importance. There is nothing quite so calming as being faced with a thing for which your very existence is wholly trivial; both Lear and Hamlet are changed men after facing just such sublime grey objects – a storm for Lear and the sea for Hamlet. It is easy to see why the elephant-headed Ganesh might figure so highly in the Indian pantheon.
The Indian community brought with them the noises and tastes and patterns which became characteristic of East African urban life, and with which I became intimately familiar from the houses of my schoolmates and from the dukas of Nairobi, small goods stores which were almost without exception owned and run by Indians. The sacks of turmeric and cloves and cumin, shops with rolls of fabric like a parchment library, flour cooking in hot ghee, the translucence of paper bags holding oily samosas; the clatter of heated discussion in a palette of tongues and later raucous laughter, and later still the Bollywood showtunes on a battery-powered radio. But the Indian settlers also brought with them their love of Shakespeare – or rather, it should be said, their two loves of Shakespeare, each equally intense but not quite the same. The first of these, which would come to East Africa later, was a scholar’s love of Shakespeare, which came about through long hours of intensive reading of the works and which led to a nineteenth-century cult of Shakespeare that placed him on a level with the Sanskrit poet Kalidas and saw him venerated by (among others) the Bengali poet and novelist Rabindranath Tagore. Whether or not this would have developed naturally on the subcontinent, where a culture of storytelling and respect for literary traditions might have made Shakespeare welcome, we will never know. As it was, knowledge of the works in India became for some a matter of survival after the Governor General of India, Hardinge, declared in 1844 that the highest places in the colonial service would be reserved for Indians who had distinguished themselves in the study of European literature – which, as we have already seen, meant Shakespeare above all else to the Victorian colonial class. This same idea was to make a home in Kenya Colony and in Uganda in the early twentieth century, but that belongs properly to a later part of this story.
The other love of Shakespeare, the theatregoer’s love of his plots and characters, developed alongside the official culture in the popular theatres of northern India, beginning with the Parsi theatres in Maharashtra and accumulating (according to one commentator) 6000 different versions of Shakespeare plays in Indian languages. These productions were known, as one historian of Indian Shakespeare puts it, for their ‘flamboyant manner of acting, grandiloquent speeches, loud and titillating music, gorgeous backdrops, dazzling costumes, and illusion-creating stage props’.4 It was this Shakespeare that arrived with the travelling theatre troupes, who began including Mombasa and Zanzibar on an itinerary which had already included stops in other British colonial hubs such as Aden, for wherever the Empire went it took with it the blueprint of its Indian masterwork and (more often than not) the ready-trained personnel who worked there.
The story of the Indian settlers of East Africa is still surprisingly untold. Indians appear on the margins of European accounts of the region, usually as uninspiring functionaries who serve as comic bourgeois counterparts to the white aspiration for aristocratic primitivism in the African wild.5 There have been some recent attempts to gather oral histories from now ancient early migrants, accounts which sway charmingly between minute personal details and vague truisms about major historical events and figures. Sadly no one alive now is old enough to remember the period in which I am interested, a period during the Great War when the paranoia meant that every theatrical production was required to be licensed by the Protectorate authorities. Even these records are rather patchy, but a few spare and dryly bureaucratic lines in copies of the official organ of the administration, the Kenya Gazette, give some idea of the richness of this culture. In the eighteen months after February 1915, the Gazette records licences for at least forty-three separate productions of plays in a range of Indian languages, especially Hindustani and Gujarati.6 These plays are given licences beginning at number 793, suggesting that hundreds of other productions had been licensed by the Protectorate since 1895 but not recorded in the Gazette. The sheer volume of plays, each of which was supposed to be ‘passed’ by a government censor as not having objectionable (presumably seditious) content, seems to have quickly defeated the Protectorate’s will to control this flourishing culture, and the record of licences peters out abruptly after this. Similarly, the insistence that an English-language copy of each of the plays should be presented for inspection seems to have proved unrealistic, for while a few of the plays list English titles – The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Hamlet – the vast majority of them are poorly transcribed versions of their titles in Indian languages. Providing as it does only misspelled words in a wide range of tongues, the list required some decoding; but blended in with the tales of Persian heroes (like those to whom Col. Patterson was compared) are at least fifteen separate productions of Shakespeare plays in this eighteen-month period. This made these Indian communities in those years a considerably more concentrated centre of Shakespeare performance than London’s West End, and not too far behind Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, home of the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (which would one day become the Royal Shakespeare Company). It is also clear that, while the first performances were given by touring theatre troupes, the Indian settlers eventually established their own companies, such as the Eastern Art Theatre Company, the Indian Amateur Dramatic Society and the Mombasa Shakespeare Group.7
Among these productions was an anonymous adaptation of Othello (Saubhagya Sundari), a play of such fame in India that one of the most celebrated actors of the age (Jayshankar Sundari) took the stage name Sundari (Desdemona) for his trademark performance of that role, a role that according to his autobiography made him both a pattern for women’s fashion and an object of women’s desires.8 The largest number of the Shakespeare translations performed in Mombasa, however, came from the pen of the most revered playwright of the age, Agha Hashr Kashmiri, who translated at least five of Shakespeare’s plays and had been honoured as the ‘Indian Shakespeare’ at a public ceremony in Delhi. Licences were issued in 1915 for Agha Hashr’s Saidi Havas (a play that blends Richard III and King John), and his versions of King Lear (Sufed Khun) and Macbeth (Khwabe Hasti), as well as for a Hamlet likely to be the Khun Nahaq of Mehadi Hasan, whose Twelfth Night (Bhul Bhuliyan) also features on the list.9
The vast body of Indian translations is a treasure trove for the aficionado of Shakespeare, showing the plays richly refracted through the eyes of a place and time wholly alien to the Swan of Avon. In part this is the thrill of seeing Hamlet look for the ghost of his father on Mughal battlements, or Juliet’s sleeping draught replaced by a snake; the pleasure is like that of watching someone you love in costume, newly beautiful but still the same. Some of these changes also make interesting links in the mind – a Mughal version Hamlet makes him blur into Othello, and snakebitten Juliet edges closer to the Cleopatra she might have become if there had been men after Romeo.
Unlike early Indian critics of these plays, however, I am more interested in the versions that change Shakespeare’s plots than those that slavishly imitate the master. This is in part because the changes, irreverent as they are, pick up on mysterious loose ends in the original and provide their own readings of hidden undercurrents in Shakespeare’s writing. The Marathi version of Romeo and Juliet (Mohana-Tara) senses that something is amiss when Romeo’s first love, Rosaline, is passed over for Juliet and then simply disappears from view, and so it resurrects her, marries her to Romeo’s nemesis Tybalt, and has her to blame for Romeo’s failure to receive Friar Lawrence’s message that Juliet’s death is fake.10 The change so economically repairs two odd fractures in the play by fitting them together that one is tempted, like Burton correcting the Sonnets, to rewrite this part of the play.
Eyewitness accounts of Mombasa’s rich theatrical culture in this period are not easy to find. As is so often the case, in the rush to record what seemed important at the time much that must have given the fledgling city its flavour was simply treated as unimportant and ephemeral, leaving future ages with a somewhat sterile version of the lives lived by these early settlers. The visitor to today’s Mombasa can still find traces of each of its historic cultures – Arab, Portuguese and Indian, as well as the coastal African tribes – laid out as if an archaeological dig on its side, each stratum a little further from the seaward edge of the estuary island occupied by the town. At that end, overlooking Port Tudor, is the Lusitanian Fort Jesus, built at the behest of Elizabeth I’s chief rival, Philip, where Renaissance sailor graffiti abuts on the markings made by prisoners who were interned here when it was repurposed by the British colonial regime. Working inland from this, there is a slim band of Arabic streets like those in Stone Town, which are kept pristine for the docking tourists who are nowadays unlikely to venture further into the town than this before heading back out to the private beach resorts strung along the coast on either side. Beyond this is a wide swathe of Mombasa which once would have been the preserve of the colonial elite, with the small-gauge local tramway moving past grand institutions, from the Metropole and Castle Royal hotels to the law courts and Mackinnon Market. Now the tramway and the white colonials are gone, and the genteel repose of this part of town buzzes with tuktuk rickshaws moving past Indian dukas, shops where the age-old dried goods in sisal sacks sit next to wall-racks of mobile-phone accessories. At the top of the island, at the point where the railway crosses Kilindini Harbour, the residential districts give way to a modern industrial zone, which looks across a narrow strait to where, atop a teetering landfill, the poorest residents of Mombasa watch the trains enter from the mainland. In this palimpsest of history, where each subsequent age squeezes out the one before it, destroying all but the most robust of structures, there seems little chance of recovering the flimsy world of working-class evening entertainment.
In another of the common ironies of history, however, the fullest picture of Mombasa’s Shakespeare that we are able to piece together comes not from admirers of the Indian stage but from occasional (usually unsympathetic) reviews in the English-language newspapers of the day. The East African Standard of 22 August 1908 contains one such report from a bemused English witness of a Merchant of Venice put on by the Shah Company at the New Indian Theatre in Mombasa. Though much of the article is given over to titillating the English reader with stories of transvestite actors and gently mocking the fact that the handbill actually read ‘The Merchant of Venus’, we also learn a good deal about the production. The 3½-hour performance was accompanied (as was standard) by drums and a harmonium, and acted out (as was also conventional) against a backdrop featuring full-length portraits of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. We are able to identify the specific translation as another of Agha Hashr’s, Dil Farosh, by the reviewer’s mention of a ‘drunken brother’ for Bassanio, an addition by Agha Hashr who provides comic and unsuccessful competition for the hero while ‘indulging in wine and women and coarse songs to the glory of “English Brandy” with his boon companions’.11 We also learn that Dil Farosh played to a full house, consisting of ‘96 people in the gallery at 50 cents, 162 in the pits for a rupee, 72 in the second stalls at 2 rupees and 42 in the first stalls for 3’, making 372 people and 478 rupees in total, a princely sum when one considers that the unskilled railway labourers were only receiving 15 rupees a month in wages. The proprietor of the company, a Mr Yakubaly Jumlay, also reports that he spent a year at Aden and a month in Zanzibar before arriving in Mombasa, where he planned to stay a month and expected to play to sell-out crowds every night.
Though Jumlay and other Indian theatre impresarios evidently made efforts to attract Europeans to their productions, inviting reviewers and offering gala nights specially reserved for white audiences, these seem to have been for the most part rebuffed. Another review in the East African Standard (6 June 1914) seems surprised to find that two Indian theatrical companies – the Rising Star Company and the New Indian Opera and Theatrical company – have been performing in Mombasa for some time and ‘commanding full houses’.12 The Rising Star Company, which the reviewer visits, is resident in a galvanized-iron building with terrible ventilation and acoustics, causing the players to bellow in a way which the reviewer compares to Victorian music hall parodies of Shakespearean actors. The musical accompaniment to the play is assessed by the reviewer in terms which manage to be dismissive of not one but two cultures, all while asserting his open-mindedness: ‘To the European ear these interminable Indian melodies become as monotonous as an African n’goma, though, of course, it must be classed as music – music of an arrested development.’ The assessment of the acting is similarly belittling:
Most of the acting is melo-dramatic and the elocution a rant, giving no place to the softer inflections of the tongue, which enable it to portray the subtleties of the human passions, or to give lightness, spirit, and dynamic force to dialogue. Passion and character are thus dwarfed, and it may be safely sworn that these Indian players could not delineate Shakespeare’s characters.
The reviewer was invited back a week later to see another play – Agha Hash
r’s Khubsurat Bala, a version of Macbeth – which he dismisses with equally magisterial lack of understanding.13 The very failure of these performances to appeal to the European reviewers is, however, in one sense encouraging. Unlike those studying Shakespeare to pass exams for the Colonial Service, these Indian troupes were performing Shakespeare’s plays without any encouragement or hope of reward from the colonial masters; although they seemed to think that they might be offering the Europeans something in an idiom they would understand – enough to merit one evening a month for ‘European night’ – this seems to have been of slender importance to them, and the white settlers’ failure to sense what they were missing did nothing to diminish this popular love of Shakespeare. In fact, the use of Indian titles in the licensing applications suggests that often these troupes, like the Zanzibari villagers performing Steere’s version of The Merchant of Venice, were unaware that what they were performing was Shakespeare. In a way, their confident act of taking over a foreign culture is rather like Shakespeare’s own. If Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt is worried that the English love for Italian fashions might open the way to foreign conquest, Shakespeare himself showed no hesitation in borrowing from foreign cultures, and he based many of his own works on stories derived from the Italians and French as well as from classical Latin and Greek culture. Just like the popular Indian performances, however, Shakespeare did this with a blithe lack of reverence for the original texts, and he was also roundly mocked in his day for this arrogance, and dismissed by his fellow playwrights as an ‘upstart crow’ with ‘small Latin and less Greek’.14