Nationhood and Identity in Indian Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1989–2020
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A01=Taarini Mookherjee
Adaptation
Author_Taarini Mookherjee
Category=DSBC
Category=DSBJ
Diaspora
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
Global Shakespeare
India
Nation
Postcolonial theory
Race
Product details
- ISBN 9781399554343
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Investigating an increase in the visibility of Indian adaptations of Shakespeare in film, theatre and fiction between 1989 and 2020, Taarini Mookherjee suggests that this popularity reflects the political affordances of adapting Shakespeare in contemporary India. A foreign, yet familiar, text, Shakespeare provides both opportunities for radical reinvention and subversive political critique. Mookherjee mobilises the term desify, a bilingual portmanteau popular in the South Asian diaspora that simultaneously references the abstract and aspirational nation (des) and the quotidian process of making local or native in popular culture, to argue that these self-consciously Indian or desified Shakespeares disclose contemporary Indian ideas and inquiries of the nation. Precisely because they are self-proclaimed ‘Indian’ adaptations of Shakespeare, these works provide us with a unique corpus of material that is both constitutive and representative of contemporary public contestations around identity, belonging and what it means to look and sound Indian.
Taarini Mookherjee is a literary scholar and educator whose primary research fields include global Shakespeare, postcolonial theory, early modern drama, and theatre and performance studies. She has previously worked as a researcher and lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, Columbia University and SUNY, New Paltz. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and holds a Master's in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London and a BA in English from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.
