On fluid words, lives and identities

Recently I had the good fortune of attending a talk by Prof. Jonathan Gil Harris titled Shakespeare and Bollywood where he tried to explore if there are any similarities between Shakespeare's work and staple Bollywood fare.

He was of the opinion that Shakespeare wrote for an audience that ranged from the English gentry (who were relatively erudite) to the masses (who were largely illiterate). That is the reason why scholarly exploration of themes like Hamlet's existential crisis get juxtaposed with limericks replete with puns and double entendres. He further believes that Shakespeare's language fluidly navigates across classes by borrowing words from a variety of languages including Latin, French, Italian, etc. According to him Shakespeare's language, wordplay and puns are the original item numbers designed to entertain the masses. In that Shakespeare's work is very closely related to the ethos of Bollywood and hence it lends itself to be creatively re-imagined in the genre a thousand times over.

This really insightful and entertaining talk (in the middle of which the venerable professor broke into an item number routine more than once) got me off my butt and reading again. I was procrastinating picking up Prof. Harris's non fiction work, The First Firangis. It has been such a rewarding read that it takes all my will power to not abandon the world and immerse myself in the book completely.

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In the book Prof. Harris tries to tease out what was life like for Europeans who came to the Indian subcontinent roughly two centuries before the set described by William Dalrymple in his work The White Mughals lived out their aristocratic lives and The English East India Company was already an imperial force to reckon with.

While I haven't read The White Mughals, I have read The Last Mughals which is an account of Delhi during the First War of Independence on 1857. Dalrymple's account of life in that time was absolutely masterful and led me to read the fictitious account The Last Mushaira at Delhi (in translation) and a better appreciation of the Ghazal poetic form. So I guess The White Mughals moves up on the To Do list after this book.

Coming back to The First Firangis, Prof. Harris intersperses it with his trademark odd ball humour and insights in equal measure. The white man's burden also includes falling violently sick in foreign locales and he quotes historical evidence of the same:

"Is the Bottom falling out of your World? Eat a Vindaloo and the World will fall out of your Bottom!".

In another section he talks about Ladino - a vernacular mixture of Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic that was used by Sephardic Jews fled persecution from the Spanish and later Portuguese Inquisition. 

"And the Ladino word for freedom is not the Spanish 'liberdad', but 'alforria' - derived from Arabic 'hurriya'. Make what you will of that, but clearly Sephardic Jews did not associate the idea of liberty with Spanish Christian rule."

Right now I'm reading about the life of Garcia Da Orta, Portuguese National Hero, Quit-rent master of Bombay, Firangi Physician in the court of Burhan Nizam Shah (Sultan of Ahmadnagar 1503-53), author of Colóquios dos simples e droga da índia (Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India), and subversive questioner of classical system of Greek medicine.

More about this later.