Spicy bard

The influence of Shakespeare on Indian cinema has been so vast and has been written about so much that one would pick up the book under review with some scepticism

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the only one among his 40-odd plays in which William Shakespeare mentions India. Titania, the queen of fairies, recalls frolicking with a friend in the Indian air, and makes her son — “A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king” — the object of all her attention, and thus a cause of jealousy for her husband, Oberon.

But the Bard has been a constant obsession for Indian writers, artists, dramatists, and later, filmmakers. The influence of Shakespeare on Indian cinema has been so vast and has been written about so much that one would pick up