Back in high school, my only proper brush with the Bard had been when Portia's monologue The Quality Of Mercy popped up without warning in the English syllabus. To us, knee-high and blissfully ignorant about the nuanced beauty of William Shakespeare's works, the whole thing sounded like an alien tongue and yet our teacher gushed affectionately and evocatively about how beautiful it was. It would only be in my adulthood, and regrettably so, that I would discover firsthand the spunky wordplay of his romances and comedies, the devastating power and poignancy of his tragedies and the stirring turns of phrase enlivening them both to a great degree.
Interestingly, in a classic inversion of the norm, it was cinema that drove me first to plunge willingly into Shakespeare's immeasurably iconoclast and brilliant oeuvre. I am not talking about Laurence Olivier's films or even what the highly lauded thespians have done on the stage and silver screen alike. I am talking about our very own Vishal Bhardwaj, a magnificent filmmaker of prodigious storytelling talents, who has proven, with three of his indisputably greatest cinematic accomplishments, the eternal and essential truth: that Shakespeare's thrilling, poignant plays are still timeless and relevant, give or take any milieu or scenario and even as little liberties can be taken with his seminal storytelling tropes and elements, the gist and the meat of the source will remain not only intact but will also be reinvigorated with new interpretations and deviations that can come only from a fiercely poetic storyteller himself.
That Bhardwaj, himself deft in both the visual, verbal and aural medium (Before directing films, he was also an eclectic composer and has continued to score even his own films with assuredly magical results on each occasion.), did get so much of the Bard right even with the notable differences that his adaptations hold, is something of a triumph. Like Akira Kurosawa moulding King Lear and Macbeth into ballads of medieval Japanese folklore, the writer-director took care to adapt the medieval setting of each of the three plays, Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet, into a contemporary and credible milieu that feels both refreshingly gritty and realistic compared to what most other directors could have done with such material ripe for pulp and also accessible enough to encourage the viewers hitherto to pore over Shakespeare's writings on their own.
The question remains, though, as to which of the three brilliantly inventive and breathtakingly beautiful adaptations, namely Maqbool, Omkara and Haider, were most faithful to the Bard. Let's find out for ourselves.
MURDER, MOBSTERS AND MASCULINITY IN MAQBOOL
Apart from the nature of foolhardy ambition and the inevitably tragic end that it leads to, one of the strongest themes in 'Macbeth' is that of masculinity. Early in the play, Lady Macbeth, when mustering up the resolve to help her husband in doing the evil deed that will ensure his kingship, pleads to God and the angels to make her a man and to drain out her feminine grace so that she would have the requisite will to carry out her murderous intent. A little later, she rebukes Macbeth's growing reluctance for the murder by asking him if he is a man at all or just a coward. It is on her steely, relentless insistence that he relents and proceeds to do it all the same and it is also at this oft-overlooked juncture when he marvels at her resolute, almost obstinate will, remarking that from now on, she should 'bring forth men-children only'.
Maqbool also explores the conflict of slighted masculinity inside its doomed protagonist' soul but it gives it a very intriguing twist. The relationship dynamic that drives the plot is tweaked; the film's Duncan is no kind-hearted, generous king but rather the tyrannical yet indulgently affable mob boss Jahangir Khan, called reverently as Abbaji by everyone who swears by his allegiance. The biggest difference between the play and the film is in one of the catalyst itself. Bhardwaj and co-writer Abbas Tyrewala recast Lady Macbeth as Nimmi, the beauteous yet neglected trophy mistress of Abbaji, himself full of decadence and depravity and yet coated with a veneer of honour and soft-spoken warmth that glosses over these ugly failings.
Nimmi is a fabulous character, one for the ages, and in the same way that Lady Macbeth is regarded as one of its creator's most sophisticated and layered creations, she too is regarded widely as one of the most compelling anti-heroines that Bhardwaj has served up in his entire career. She is not quite a typical femme fatale even though she seems to be playing the boldest strokes and her whims and fancies make even the toughest men, including her unwittingly competing paramours go weak at their knees. But Maqbool also paints her as the eternal sufferer, a seductress trapped in a gilded cage seeking some release from Abbaji's lusty attentions in Maqbool's purer, more impulsive love. Bhardwaj lingers on the latter's lovelorn turmoil throughout the narrative with both subtle touches and the soundtrack. In the song Tu Mere Rubaru Hai, sung passionately by Daler Mehndi and penned effusively by Gulzar, with lines equating love with total surrender, the film portrays the sheer level of Maqbool's obsession with Nimmi and later, his 'heat-oppressed mind', as the Bard would have put it, boils with simmering sexual jealousy as he imagines their loveless cavortings, the fantasies haunting him and compelling him to the edge of murderous intent.
Apart from Maqbool's tumultuous inner torment at betraying his master and assuming his place on Nimmi's bed of love and lust, there is also his own self-conscious insecurity about worthiness as Abbaji's true successor. In the play, Macbeth had no doubts about his inherent worth and ability, blinded as he is by the prophecy of the witches. In the film, Bhardwaj and Tyrewala pit him against another unwitting contender for the throne. That is Guddu, the fiery, frivolous and even foolhardy son of the unquestionably loyal Kaka, himself an honest version of the less-than-perfect Banquo. Guddu comes off as a swaggering protege who morphs, rather convincingly, into the hardened, bitter avenger in the film's second half, turning out to be a far better fleshed character than his literary counterpart Fleance could ever be. When Nimmi tries to nudge Maqbool into proceeding with the necessarily evil and inevitable task ahead of them, she uses Guddu's youth and enterprise as a trigger to make Maqbool doubt his own worthiness and then be swayed to a greater extent into murdering Abbaji.
Greed and guilt, ultimately, defeat romantic union and bliss, just as the same end up destroying both Macbeth and his wife, the former with superstition and delusions of grandeur and the latter with insanity.
To these increasingly darkening chapters of the play, Maqbool is admirably faithful, as we see Maqbool falling out of favour of fortune and happiness, consumed with guilt and other demons and Nimmi falling apart and cracking at the seams, unable to wash the stains of guilt from her hand and soul. The allegories that the film brings to the table are audaciously brilliant to say the least: Great Birnam Wood becomes the Arabian Sea and the final, fatal prophecy is twisted gloriously, subversively on its head on a metaphysical level.
Quite remarkably too, the streak of violence and vengeance runs strongly through the narrative as in the source; there is all of the play's impending dread and doom in each of the hard-hitting twists and turns in the film, right down to the bloody daggers and the ruthless assault on Macduff's castle while Bhardwaj's sombre background score, especially during the film's pivotal point, has the same hallucinatory power as the menacing knocking in the play or even those ghoulish screams.
For all this loyalty, however, it is the detours that Maqbool takes from the template that nail it a really special experience. The biggest of them is with the witches. In the play, they are spectral beings, supernatural manifestations of both its protagonist's treachery and overarching ambition. In this film, they become Pandit and Purohit, two crooked and corrupt cops who seem initially as pompous court fools but come off eventually as coolly manipulative in pulling the real, invisible strings in the scramble for Abbaji's leadership of the gang. They are both witty and wicked, silly and scheming and their intention to rouse the rabble has a coldly logical purpose, that to divide the world of organised crime that the film portrays by playing on petty rivalries and shallow loyalties that exist in this world.
One of the other interesting things about Maqbool is how it portrays the archetype Bombay mob as a feudal, even monarchical setup rather than the slick, smoothly oiled and even democratic working enterprise that we see so often in Ram Gopal Varma films. Abbaji rules his clan literally like a lord, holding court in his private fortress, deciding political allegiances and even insisting on recruiting the son of his own arch enemy as a member of the gang and everybody obeys on compulsion rather than out of conviction. Even the tenor feels more mesmeric and elegiac in its dread rather than the fast and furious tone that we equate with other gangster films. The latter were clearly inspired by Martin Scorsese while Maqbool belongs more to the realm of Coppola's The Godfather movies. There is also a memorable scene that doffs its hat at them and I leave it for the cinephiles to discover that.
To sum it up, there is much in Maqbool that stays so honourably true to the very essence of 'Macbeth'. But ultimately, it is in the deviations that the film's brilliance overwhelms in how they riff on the elements of the play with poetry, punchy black comedy and pathos.
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