The Sounds of India in Supple’s Twelfth Night

Abstract

The concept of “Bollywood Shakespeare” almost invariably suggests adaptations of Shakespeare’s works into which traditional large-scale song and dance numbers have been interpolated, a hybrid film of dramatic and musical performance that appeals to multiple audiences. Two recent examples include director/writer/composer Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara (2006) and Maqbool (2003), adaptations of Othello and Macbeth set in the Indian criminal underworld. While these two films follow the plots of Shakespeare’s plays fairly closely, they also each contain the several song and dance spectaculars that would be startling to unsuspecting audiences but are expected by fans and serve as universal signifiers of a Bollywood production. Indeed, Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti claim that for a movie to be a true “Bollywood film,” “the song-dance sequence is the dealmaker.” ¹ They further note that “Bollywood cinema survives for its viewer as a song or fragments of a song,” offering examples of the use of tunes from one film in a separate film, creating an extradiegetic musical world that encompasses both the characters of the films and audience members. ²