International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

E-ISSN: 2582-2160   •   Impact Factor: 9.24

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Shakespeare's Shadow: Historical Legacy, Alienation, and Postcolonial Reception among Indian Writers and Dramatists

Author(s) G. Yadagiri
Country India
Abstract Shakespeare entered India not as a literary discovery but as an instrument of colonial governance, installed through the English education system consolidated after Macaulay's Minute of 1835 and the subsequent expansion of university curricula. This paper examines the long afterlife of that installation, tracing how Indian writers, translators, and dramatists have negotiated Shakespeare's authority across roughly two centuries. It argues that Shakespeare's Indian presence is best understood not as influence but as a shadow: a persistent structure of literary authority that simultaneously enabled and constrained indigenous creative practice. The paper is organised around three interlocking concerns. First, it reconstructs the historical mechanisms — pedagogical, theatrical, and institutional — by which Shakespeare acquired canonical standing in colonial India. Second, it analyses the condition of alienation produced by that standing, in which bilingual writers found their own literary traditions measured against an imported standard, generating what critics have described as a divided or mimic sensibility. Third, it examines postcolonial reception, where translation, regional-language performance, Parsi theatre, and Hindi cinema converted a colonial inheritance into a resource for cultural self-assertion. The paper concludes that Indian engagements with Shakespeare constitute neither straightforward derivation nor complete rejection, but a sustained practice of appropriation through which literary authority has been contested and redistributed.
Keywords Shakespeare; postcolonial reception; Indian drama; colonial education; adaptation; alienation; translation; Indian theatre.
Published In Volume 3, Issue 3, May-June 2021
Published On 2021-06-04
DOI https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2021.v03i03.85087
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CrossRef DOI prefix of IJFMR is 10.36948/ijfmr

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