"MACBETH" by William Shakespeare
After completing the unit of “MACBETH" by William Shakespeare our prof. Dr Dilip Barad sir gave us task as our thinking activity. This blog is response for that.
1.Compare various film adaptations on ‘MACBETH’.
Many films have been made from the plays of William Shakespeare. When a literary work or a part of a literary work is used as a base for a film and TV series, it is called film adaptation. Here written text is turned into visual text, linguistic signs are replaced inti visual signs. Few of Shakespeare's works have been adopted in Indian films too.2003 film ‘Maqbool’ by Vishal Bhardwaj is an adaptation of Shakespear’s one of the best tragedies, ‘Macbeth’.
So friends, here I would like to compare ‘MACBETH ’by William Shakespeare with the film ‘MAQBOOL’ by Vishal Bhardwaj.
When we are trying to compare ‘MACBETH’ with ‘MAQBOOL’ we find so many similarities as well as contrasts in both of this. Maqbool was Vishal Bhardwaj’s second film as a director. The film had its North American premiere at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. And it was also screened in the Marche du Film section of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
The film has a great star- cast: Pankaj Kapoor (he wins two awards for this role), Irfan Khan, Tabu, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, and Piyush Mishra. The screenplay was developed from the drama by Vishal Bhardwaj and Abbas Tyrewala.
The most significant turn in the adaptation is that the film is about Mumbai Underworld. The king Duncan of Scotland is actually an underworld don, Abbaji.Macbeth (Maqbool) and Banquo (Kaka) are two of his goons who look after his business. And Lady Macbeth (Nimmi) is actually a mistress of Abbaji and not a wife of Maqbool.
If we talk about the role of three witches in this film ‘Maqbool’ two corrupt policemen predicts the reign of Maqbool on Abbaji’s kingdom. It means the role of witches from the drama is taken by these two corrupt policemen: Pandit and Purohit. But unlike drama, they are not passive fortune tellers. In fact, they are active in manipulating the future events. These ’witches’ believes in the ’balance of power’. And they act according to increase the rivalry between the gangs and within the gang.They are the first to ignite the lust for power in Mqbool and psychologically prepared him to question his loyalties to Abbaji.Second deciding factor is Nimmi, mistess of Abbaji.Abbaji who secretly falls for Maqb ool and contrives him to be the next head of the gang and also helps him to achieve the motive.
🔶Prophecy:Role of witches:
Significantly, these two police inspectors are projected as quite prominently Hindu. Their eager zest for astrology, the wearing of their hair in “shikhas”, their elaborate discussions on the power of “Shani”, “Mangal” and “Shukra”, and their repeated references to the ill-effects of “grahan”, gives us an uneasy sensation that we are after all dealing not with intra-communal, but inter-communal violence. A shot of red-turbaned Hindus confronting Maqbool’s prominently Muslim followers in front of Kaka’s house; and after Kaka’s assassination, the close shot of a Hindu deity dissolving into a very pronounced Muslim ambience where Abbaji’s death ceremony is being conducted, brings forth an uneasy reminder of the cyclic storms of religiously fomented violence that plagues India even today.
When Macbeth asks about his demise ,witches tell him that the jungle arrive at Places will bring his doom.Similar prediction is used here.On Maqbool's query Policemen tells him the sea's arrival at his palace will bring his droom.Such a prophecy ,on literal level,is impossible to turn true .But the custom comes to Maqbool's palace ti arrest him,due to his smuggling from sea route.
🔶Significant Act in 'Macbeth' and 'Maqbool':
It is significant that the film, which deals mainly with Muslim characters and Islamic rituals, begins with an ominous close shot of a rectangular astrological diagram drawn on a foggy bus window, a very pronounced Hindu symbol. And this diagram recurs throughout the narrative of the film. The opening scene of Maqbool is cyclic in structure. It begins with a close shot of the astrological chart, where Mumbai’s future is predicted and ends with another close shot of the same diagram, this time spattered with the blood of a Muslim henchman, one of Abbaji’s rival gang members. We then hear a slightly irritated voice of Pandit: Saari Mumbai khoon se bhar diya.. The cyclic structure of the scene is in tune with the central concern of the policemen, that is, retaining a “balance” of forces to ensure an interminable cycle of violence. Vishal Bhardwaj, here, departs significantly from Shakespeare in the sense that the supernatural soliciting of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth has no power in itself. Any power that the “Weird Sisters” have is parasitic on Macbeth’s nature and ambition. They derive their power from their initial articulation of Macbeth’s latent desire. They rely on his response to represent whatever they are. Macbeth’s thinking gives them the significance of “evil be thou my good”. Therefore, it is not the “Witches” but Macbeth himself who allows the Witches’ utterances to enslave his mind. Just as Macbeth becomes the Thane of Cawdor without having to do much but continue being “noble Macbeth”, he could as well have become the king of Scotland without killing Duncan as he himself says:
If Chance will have me King, why, Chance/ may crown me, / Without my stir’ (Shakespeare, 2008, I. 3: 144–145).
But overcoming his own doubts, he deliberately succumbs to the temptation voiced by the Weird Sisters with all-consciousness of the evil he is embracing:
‘Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires;
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see (Shakespeare, 2008, I. 4: 50–53)
This is not the case with Maqbool. He pays no heed to the prophecies of Pandit until his first prediction (that Maqbool would control the Mumbai film industry) comes true. Even after the fulfilment of the first prophecy, the thought of acting according to the predictions of Pandit do not cross Maqbool’s mind. And yet he is annihilated. Thus the power of the two police inspectors is not dependent on Maqbool’s actions. In fact, throughout the film, Maqbool seems more a passive recipient. We find here a subversion of Macbeth’s personal tragedy, as Maqbool becomes more of a puppet in the hands of a larger political game where he is merely used as a pawn by political leaders like “Bhonsle” and “Palekar”, and law keepers like “Pandit” and “Purohit”.
The three Weird Sisters of Macbeth are shown as agents of a malevolent Fate. In Shakespeare they acquire their power by selling their souls to Satan and are controlled by familiar spirits on Earth. They have the power of foreknowledge, and may predict what fate has in store but they are not Fate themselves. Unlike the Weird Sisters, by invoking “balance” and by promoting it through their own insidious activity, Maqbool’s Hindu officers not only foresee the workings of fate, but identify themselves with it. When this tale of lust and murder, bloodshed and treachery is at its full sway, one of the officers (Pandit) warns his partner (Purohit) not to eat Saturn, when he finds him picking up a piece of sweet which has been used as a figure in the astrological chart constructed of sweets, since Saturn eats people. “Whom shall it swallow?” asks Purohit, chewing on another piece of the chart. His partner replies, smiling, “Who do you want eaten?” Thus they are not merely agents of Fate, easing the world of an imbalance ht
of evil; they are at times Fate itself.
Thus the ultimate king-makers are two police officers whose names are significantly “Purohit” and “Pandit”. “Purohit” may be defined as a sanctioned practitioner of religion with immense power wielding capacity in society. And “Pandit”, an erudite/ a producer of knowledge: one who is entrusted with the task of rationalizing and thereby legitimizing the power the purohit wields. Seen from this perspective the image of the astrological chart of Mumbai, almost obliterated by stains of the blood of a Muslim man, at the beginning of the film assumes a new significance. It is “Purohit” who washes the destiny of the city with the blood of a Muslim henchman.
🔶Contextual Comparison of Macbeth and Maqbool:
Macbeth is an upright Scottish leader (a general) dedicated in his service of the royal throne. He is naturally inclined to preservation rather the destruction of life as is his duty as a soldier. However, Macbeth desires more than just the position of general. Blinded by his unbridled ambition, Macbeth resorts to succumbing to his evil desires by killing King Duncan and every other character he considered a threat to his ascension to royalty; Banquo and Macduff's wife and children.
Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, is a strong willed lady considered even more than her husband, Macbeth. She desires nothing but to see her husband rise to the position of King. For this reason, she would stop at nothing to ensure her desired plans are realized. Lady Macbeth was responsible for persuading her Macbeth to accomplish the murder of King Duncan. Her unwavering determination even with Macbeth’s hesitation to commit cold-blooded murder led to Macbeth’s submission. However, Lady Macbeth’s ambitious nature seems to dwindle after Macbeth’s ascension to the royal throne. She is perturbed by her husband’s string of murders afterward.
Maqbool, however, is an Indian crime/drama film based on Mumbai’s world of organized crime. The movie features the boss of the underworld, Jahangir Khan, and his right-hand man Maqbool. Maqbool happens to fall in love with the boss' mistress, Nimmi, who persuades him to revolt against Jahangir and take control of his empire. Nimmi encourages Maqbool to be ambitious, and he does so eliminate all possible competition. Ultimately, Maqbool succeeds in overthrowing Jahangir by killing him in his sleep. However, Maqbool and Nimmi live dreadful lives tormented by the ghosts of those they murdered.
Maqbool’s plot is quite similar to that of Macbeth though several components have been altered such as the cultural setting. Macbeth is set in Scotland while Maqbool is based in Mumbai, India. For this reason, the characters had to be altered, and plot twisted to match the cultural surrounding. In Macbeth, the price was the king’s power while in Maqbool; the price being fought for was the love for a woman and subsequently the power over the criminal underworld.
Similarly, Nimmi also manipulates Maqbool into fulfilling her wishes as Lady Macbeth did Macbeth. However, instead of exercising authority, she infuses Maqbool's mind with ambitious ideas. Nimmi eventually gives Maqbool the ultimatum of killing either her or the boss. Maqbool's love for Nimmi pushes him to execute the crime boss instead.
The content changes whereby unlike in Macbeth; Maqbool initially has no earnest desires to overthrow the criminal boss and take over the criminal underworld. It is when he falls in love with the criminal boss' mistress that he is manipulated into desiring more. Maqbool wishes to take over the criminal empire so as to satisfy Nimmi. In this film, Maqbool's ambition is motivated by his love for a woman as opposed to Macbeth's natural ambitiousness.
The film also differs from the play where unlike Lady Macbeth, Nimmi bears a child under unclear circumstances of whose child it is (Jahangir/ Maqbool). In Macbeth, the Lady Macbeth does not bear any children. In Macbeth, the Lady Macbeth ultimately commits suicide while in Maqbool; Nimmi dies in Maqbool’s arms.
🔶Lady Macbeth And Nimmi:
Both Lady Macbeth and Nimmi, separated by an immense temporal and spatial gulf, nevertheless share the same fate—insanity. By problematizing the accepted and sanctioned role-playing of a passive female, by actively seducing their men and coercing them for murder, they come dangerously close to shaping their own destiny, menacingly close to controlling the narrative- and hence should be shown their proper place. Patriarchy can return to its comfort zone only after these women become the acquiescing victims of their own untamed desires. The two weapons used by the women to enter and exploit the male world—mind and body- need to be destroyed. While Lady Macbeth sleepwalks in a white gown amid the dark sterile castle walls, her body open to the stark gaze of the Doctor and the Gentle woman (more starkly represented by Polanski where she is shown as completely naked); Nimmi is a bloated woman confined within the four walls of the house. Rather than becoming a symbol of fertility, she is reduced to a kind of pitying object to be humiliated and abused by Guddu and Sameera. The very weapons the women use to manipulate the narrative become objects of contempt and disgust. They are emptied of all strength to the point that they have nothing left to contribute to the narrative: a sterile empty shell for a body and a devastated mind unable to cohabit any longer with sanity.
Patriarchy closes ranks by marginalizing these fearsome femme fatales by driving them to insanity, often constructed as a “female malady”. It denotes a clear shift in the understanding of madness as a gendered disorder, because Elizabethan constructs of madness as a form of sanity had been cast in male form. As any Shakespeare critic worth his/her salt knows, madness is an attenuated state of existence only for the privileged male (vis-à-vis King Lear and Hamlet). In women it is always shown as a contemptible disease, a means of reducing them to objects under the scrutiny of a hypercritical male gaze.2
Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking and Nimmi’s descent into madness are shown neither as mere pathological conditions, nor as higher states of existence where they gain a heightened insight, but rather as moral states—a marker of incipient damnation. Bhardwaj remains faithful to the Elizabethan construct of insanity. Nimmi’s madness at best may evoke pity and at worst contempt. In a marked departure from her prototype, Nimmi becomes a mother, at least fulfilling one set role of a woman, giving birth to a male child who ultimately becomes a trophy won by Guddu and Sameera, a final marker of the triumph of the mainstream. While the woman, during and after her pregnancy, groping for her ever-receding sanity, remains confined both literally and metaphorically. The feisty woman who could hold her own with her innuendoes among her male peers, vanishes, and is replaced by a creature pathetic in her obsessive, compulsive post-partum insanity. In her final descent into madness, we see Nimmi trying to wash the invisible blood stains from her bedroom wall. Vishal Bhardwaj executes this scene with a dual perspective. We watch Maqbool as he watches Nimmi cleaning those “damned spots”, and simultaneously see her reflected in the wardrobe mirror. Madness witnessed and shaped by such a plurality of gazes, therefore, becomes easily replicable as the fate of any Indian woman transgressing her given boundaries. The last we see of this woman who problematizes the male/female binary is her corpse covered by her own dupatta, a conventional symbol of modesty and honour of an Indian woman transformed into her own “kafn” (shroud).
🔶Common themes in Macbeth and Maqbool :
Several themes are also addressed in both Macbeth as well Maqbool; ambition, power, violence, the conflict between fate and free will, guilt, and gender. However, one theme seems to stand out in both Macbeth and the movie Maqbool; power. Power, in this case, is the authority or capacity to act in a particular way, carry out particular activities and direct people to behave a particular manner. In both of the works, the main characters Macbeth and Maqbool’s thirst for power is apparent. Macbeth thirsts for royal power that comes with sitting upon the royal throne. He desires nothing more than to ascend to King as quick as possible. Maqbool yearns to take control of the criminal underworld empire to prove his worthiness to a woman. Though motivated by different reasons from each other, the two character’s ambition for power played a great role in instigating them to commit murder. Both characters’ ambition of power is so strong they are willing to kill whoever stands as an obstacle in their path. While Macbeth’s acts of murder derived from pure ambition and instigation from his equally ambitious wife, Maqbool acted by romance. His love for Nimmi (with whom Maqbool was forced to share with his boss) was his main driving force. Therefore, his grand plan was to murder Jangahir Khan the crime boss to win over Nimmi’s love and in the process take over Jangahir’s criminal empire as well (as a bonus). Nimmi’s shrewd manipulations played a great role in goading him to yearn for power.
In the play, Macbeth, the treacherous murders of King Duncan and his chamberlains, Banquo and Macduff's wife and children is a clear display of the gruesome vices a corrupt leader (Macbeth) is capable of committing. Macbeth’s undying desire to sit upon the throne blinded him to reason. He was prepared to do whatever it took to be king. The following instances illustrate his fiendish intentions. Quoting him-
‘My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man. That function is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is but what is not. (Act 1 scene 3 line 52-55)
He declared that murder was no more than a duty he felt compelled to fulfill in order to realize his dream of being king.
'If't be so, For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind, For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered, Put rancors in the vessel of my peace
Only for them, and mine eternal jewel Given to the common enemy of man, To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings.Rather than so, come fate into the list, And champion me to th' utterance!' (Act 3 Scene 1 line 69-77)
The above quote depicts Macbeth's call upon fate to infuse bitterness in his peace that he may not lax but fight against Banquo lest he lost his throne. Macbeth resorted to using his position as king to fight against all individuals he considered threats to his seat. Macbeth abused his power in summoning murderers to kill his friend (presumably a felony), Banquo, under the impression that Banquo may be a threat to his reign.
‘From this moment the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand. And even now, To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done: The castle of Macduff I will surprise, Seize upon Fife, give to th' edge o' th' sword His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls That trace him in his line.' (Act 4 Scene1 line 166-174)
In his blinding rage, Macbeth stated in the quote that from henceforth, he would act at his heart's first desire. His heart's desire was to get back at Macduff in the worst way possible. As a result, he ordered the killing of Macduff's wife and all his children. Even his castle's working staff was not spared.
The Maqbool film similarly displays the corruptive way the character Maqbool attains power and the heinous acts that follow in his rule. By murdering Jangahir, Maqbool chose his sexual love (for Nimmi) over filial affection (from his don). Maqbool disregarded the filial affection between and his Abbaji (Jangahir Khan). The Abbaji was very fond of Maqbool. He was the one responsible for bringing up Maqbool into the man he was. He repeatedly treated him with kindness and tenderness as if Maqbool were his son. Maqbool had earned the Abbaji's complete trust. However, the Abbaji was blinded by his utmost affection for Maqbool to the extent of not recognizing the love affair between him and his mistress. Maqbool was only to receive such affection from the Abbaji, and yet he betrayed and murdered him on the basis of love. The heinous act of murder is a clear desperation not only Nimmi’s part but on Maqbool’s part too. He was so eager for Nimmi’s approval that he was capable of murdering the father-figure in his life.
Maqbool also resorted to murdering Kaka, Abbaji’s loyal counterpart, who suspected that it was Maqbool who had killed Abbaji. Fearing that Abbaji would appoint Kaka’s son, Guddu, as his heir to criminal empire (due to his romantic relationship with Abbaji’s daughter) Maqbool made Guddu his sworn enemy. Maqbool needed to prove to Nimmi that he was not weak. He was corrupted by love and desperation, and it drove him into committing the treacherous murders.
Maqbool attempted to acquire power by betrayal and murder. As a result, the people of Mumbai suffered under increased violence, crime, and gore. However, he eventually lost it all: family, friends, colleagues and love. He no longer had his mentor, Abbaji. Due to the violence and mayhem, he caused he had no allies left. Even Nimmi had betrayed him by deceiving him into believing he was the father of her unborn baby. Nimmi eventually died and left him all alone to suffer the repercussions of their sinful deeds.
Maqbool is more than just a murder film; it is a representation of Shakespeare’s message to the society. The director of the film, Vishal Bharadwaj, presents the film in the great profundity of Shakespeare being careful to highlight the moral lessons reflected in his works.
🔶Theme of guilt:
The scenes of hallucination and fright of blood have been portrayed very powerfully. Both Maqbool and Nimmi were guilt ridden and hallucinating the blood and dead-bodies of the people they’ve killed. In drama, Macbeth had hallucination of Banquo during a meet at his castle. Lady Macbeth saved him by asking other guests to leave. In the movie, the scene was well-incorporated. It was a time of one of the death rituals of Abbaji, everyone was there. And the policemen bring the dead-body of Kaka. Maqbool, here, hallucinates that Kaka wakes up from death and discloses his evil intentions.
🔶Some dialogues from the film Maqbool:
"Aag ke liye paani ka dar bane rehna chahiye"
"Shakti ka santulan bahut zaroori hai sansar mein"
🔶Conclusion:
Thus, the film becomes a great work of art which combines a classical tragedy with modern day scenario. It combines universally appealing issue of human ambition and local issue of collaboration of politics and criminal world. It’s a pure amalgamation of classical and cultural; of universal and local. Though movie was a gem and internationally appreciated, it did not do well at Indian box-office. This literally means that our viewers are not yet equipped for realistic cinema.
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