Shylock is living in Masjid Bunder, Cleopatra dresses as a Koli woman and Othello smokes a cigarette wearing the half- bewildered, half-afraid look of smack addicts on a Mumbai street. They aren't the hallucinations of pot-addled imaginations, but real people who seem to fit the bill of Shakespearean characters, captured on camera by the students of IIT Powai's Industrial Design Centre and the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture.

Acting on the orders of Ramu Ramanathan, whose theatre workshop they attended last year, the students turned the city inside out looking for their quarries. "The students were told to look for people who tend to go unnoticed," Ramanathan explained. Taking his cue from these pictures, the playwright dashed off Shakespeare and She in time for Hamara Shakespeare, a three-day festival in Chennai. It plays in Mumbai this fortnight at the Max Mueller Bhavan.

Holding the play together is a pair of unlikely friends, Insomnia and Aisha. Insomnia is a rich kid who "probably had a car under her backside right from the time she was born", said Ahlam Khan, who plays the character. Aisha, on the other hand, comes from a poor, conservative Muslim family. The glue that keeps them together, Insomnia explains to her shrink, is Shakespeare. Aisha, who refers to the bard as Sheikh Sahab, triggers Insomnia's insight that Shakespeare is not the preserve of the South Mumbai theatrewallahs who take pride in speaking Queen's English; he belongs to everyone. Shakespeare "could have easily been inspired by the normal man walking down the road", Khan pointed out. "Anybody could have been a Shylock, anybody could have been a Cleopatra."

In fact Ramanathan finds present-day Mumbai remarkably similar to sixteenth-century London. In the play, Aisha draws parallels with Mumbai and Shakespeare's London: "The clamour, the clutter. The endless jostling. Busy bastis and make-shift tradeshops. The stench and the shit. No open spaces. Immigrants and traders and their labourers arriving every day. Infectious maladies. Mosquito bites, TB, pneumonia, encephalitis, maladies, infections, exhaustion." To underscore this similarity, Ramanathan projects the photographs his students took of people on the streets of Mumbai.

The play is as much about Mumbai as it is about the universality of Shakespeare. "The invention of the city is a great invention," Ramanathan declared. "Mumbai, for me, is a place where people have come together. The roads and streets are spaces in the city where difference disappears. All these people, who are they? People who have come together with a common desire, a common vision."

It's odd he should say that. As the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena's attacks on north Indian taxi drivers in February showed, Mumbai is not the all-embracing city it's perceived to be. But Ramanathan insists that Mumbaikars are perfectly capable of living in harmony. The fact that Insomnia and Aisha transcend class barriers to become buddies proves this, he says.

The two friends in the play discover that living in India's melting pot has a price: they have to deal with Mumbai's chaos and confusion. Women have it harder as "it still is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view", Ramanathan pointed out.

Perhaps that's why Insomnia has sleepless nights and needs to see a therapist? "It could be because of the city," Khan said. "It could be because she's an intelligent woman. I think the smarter you get and the more intelligent you get the more problems and issues you start having with people and things around you."

Photography by Apoorva Guptay
Source : Time Out Mumbai ISSUE 14 Friday, March 07, 2008