Vishal Bhardwaj, a filmmaker and composer of Bollywood scores, has achieved considerable popular and critical success worldwide with his two adaptations of Shakespeare,Maqbool(Macbeth) andOmkara(Othello). Both films are very different from those postcolonial adaptations that tend to "talk back" to Shakespeare; instead, Bhardwaj represents the strain of a transcultural adaptation of Shakespeare whose beginnings lay in the nineteenth-century Parsi theater's first forays into indigenizing Shakespearean plays for local audiences. WithMaqbool, Bhardwaj creates a film that is unique among those few global cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare that have successfully indigenizedMacbethat the level of setting, plot, language, and generic conventionswithout diluting the complex issues raised by Shakespeare's play.Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue, edited by Alexa Huang,Borrowers and Lenders4.2 (Spring/Summer 2009).Vishal Bhardwaj, who began his career as a composer of Bollywood film scores, is now regarded as one of India's most innovative young directors.1Based onMacbeth,Maqboolis Bhardwaj's second film and his first adaptationof a Shakespearean play. Although it is set in themurky underworld of Bombay (Mumbai), featuresBollywood actors, and draws freely upon the conventions of the Bollywood film, the film remains close to Shakespeare. In its extremely complex and successful reworking ofMacbethin a different medium (film), language (Hindi/Urdu), time and setting (present-day Bombay), Bhardwaj's adaptation is comparable toThrone of Blood, by Akira Kurosawa, who is one of Bhardwaj's favorite filmmakers.India has a longstanding but, as of now, little-known tradition of adapting Shakespeare into film in its vernacular languages. The Bombay filmindustry grew out of the Parsi theater, whose repertoire included several Shakespeare plays that were indigenized to suit local performance traditions. This led to several film adaptations ofShakespeare in Hindi and Urdu by the erstwhile members of the Parsi theater in the early years of the twentieth century. After Indian independence in 1947, this tradition took a back seat, but the late 1990s saw a resurgence of interest in Shakespeare adaptations, no doubt partly because of the success of English-language adaptations by Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann, and others. Bhardwaj's films ride on the crest of this new wave of film adaptations ofShakespeare in India. Bhardwaj himself has stated in an interview that he aimed to go beyond Indian audiences: as he says, he"wanted to touch a chord with international audiences, so there were many commercial considerations"in adapting Shakespeare (interview with Raja Sen, "TodayOthello" 2006). In this, he has succeeded very well, indeed:Maqbool(2004), based onMacbeth, andOmkara(2006), based onOthello, are the first Indian film adaptations of Shakespeare to have gained international recognition; they have been screened at several international film festivals and are discussed in Daniel Rosenthal's100 Shakespeare Films(2007), published by the British Film Institute.Maqboolis set in the criminal underworld of modern-day Bombay (now called Mumbai).2Two corrupt policemen (the equivalent of the weird sisters) predict Maqbool's rise to power by meansof horoscopes, which Maqbool manages to do by killing Abbaji (the Duncan figure), the head of a crime family who treats Maqbool as if he were hisown son. Additionally, Maqbool is deeply in love with Abbaji's mistress, Nimmi, who successfully instigates Maqbool to kill Abbaji after the latter gives the hand of his daughter, Sameera, to Guddu (Fleance), the son of one of his lieutenants, Kaka (Banquo). The policemen predict that Maqbool will be safe as long as the sea does not enter his house, but this is what happens, so to speak, as customs agents foil a vital smuggling deal at the port and raid Maqbool's home with the intention of arresting him. Instead, the customs agents find the dead body of Nimmi, who has, in the meanwhile, given birth to a child; whether it is Abbaji's or Maqbool's remains uncertain. When Maqbool, attempting to take his newborn son and flee the country, sees the child being taken care of by Guddu and Sameera at the hospital, he decides not to continue this life of violence and vengeance. Instead, as he emerges from the hospital, he is killed by Boti, another gangster who has joined with Guddu against Maqbool as their common enemy. In the memorable final shot, Maqbool's dying impressions are conveyed by a gradually reddening screen, as noises of commotion gradually fade into nothingness.3Critical reception of the film has ranged from qualified admiration to generous enthusiasm. Poonam Trivedi (2007) and Douglas Lanier (2007) have found qualities in this adaptation ofMacbeththat make it stand out among the film adaptations of Shakespeare's play — its economy of narration, its focus on the Abbaji-Maqbool (i.e., Duncan-Macbeth) relationship that makes Abbaji's murder even more loaded than would be the case if Abbaji were not a father-figure to Maqbool, its ingenious recasting of the weird sisters as a pair of corrupt policemen having connections with the underworld, and, perhaps most significantly, the recasting of the love between Maqbool and Nimmi(Macbeth and Lady Macbeth) as a forbidden romance. Indeed, Maqbool, Abbaji, Nimmi, and the others are all caught in a web of ambition, as well as of sexual desire. Maqbool is driven to kill Abbaji as much by his love for Nimmi as by his resentment at the idea of having to serve under Guddu, who would become the heir to Abbaji's gang through his marriage to Sameera. Such complex motivation leads to Maqbool's murder of Abbaji on the night before Guddu and Sameera's wedding. On the other hand, Nimmi's hatred of Abbaji is triggered by their age difference — Abbaji is old enough to be her father, and she feels repelled by his appearance — and also because Abbaji has acquired a new mistress. Furthermore, Maqbool is strengthened in his resolve to kill Abbaji once he learns from the corrupt policemen that in all likelihood, Abbaji himself killed his mentor in order to head the gang. Consequently, after Abbaji himself is murdered, there is little doubt in anyone's mind that Maqbool is the killer, and the members of the gang soon regroup, isolating Maqbool in the process.The murder of Abbaji more than halfway after the film begins and the relatively quick move to the denouement have been seen by some as creating a structural imbalance (Rosenthal 2007, 123); but this can be understood as the consequence of the radical reworking of the relationships tying Abbaji, Nimmi, and Maqbool. In fact, as Lanier has observed, the second half of the film, following Abbaji's murder,"closely parallelsMacbethin plot, motifs, and character" (Lanier 2007, 217). Those who seeMaqboolwith Shakespeare in mind will note the ingenuity and thoroughness of Bhardwaj's adaptive approach. For example, the banquet scene is replaced by a meeting of Maqbool's gang, from which Guddu and Kaka (Fleance and Banquo) are missing. When Kaka's dead body is brought back, only Maqbool thinks that Kaka is alive and looking at him and so becomes visibly disturbed. Maqbool's fear of Kaka's gaze is tied to Abbaji's murder scene, in which Abbaji dies looking at Maqbool. His blood splashes over Nimmi, who like her Shakespearean counterpart, becomes increasingly obsessed with imaginary bloodstains. Another brilliant reworking is the recasting of Macbeth's downfall with the foiling, by the port authorities, of Maqbool's attempt to offload contraband and the subsequent raid of his home. The coming of the sea is the film's suggested parallel with Birnam Wood, a parallel that, given the setting in Bombay, would have had to be abandoned if any literal transposition had been attempted. Shakespeare's supernatural dimension is interestingly recast in metaphorical terms, even as the very real setting of crime and criminalized politics is conveyed through a realist idiom.4Adapters ofMacbethhave often reworked the play's ending. While some (such as William Davenant and Giuseppe Verdi) have emphasized areturn