Shakespeare and the Bengali woman

Abstract

The strange appearance of a bust of Rabindranath Tagore in Shakespeare’s Birthplace garden provokes the question of Bengal’s relationship to Shakespeare in contemporary world-views. This thesis uses the tropes of hospitality and Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of influence to explore the historical connection between Shakespeare as English cultural imperialism, on the one hand, and Tagore as Indian nationalist response on the other. Unexpectedly, but also crucially and centrally, the relationship between Shakespeare and Bengal concerns arguments about Bengali femininity. Both literally as women and figuratively as counters for a political conversation, women repeatedly emerge in Bengali nationalist responses to Shakespeare. Shakespeare was received as a sublime poet in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and his literary power was symbolic of both imperial order and natural cataclysms in the Bengali psyche. Bengal’s encounter with this poet of beauty and terror was facilitated by the essentialisation of Bengaliness into a female ideal, the daughter of the Bengali House of Culture, whose duty was to welcome the guest. The ambivalent calibrations of metaphor around that confrontation expressed in literary responses to Shakespeare by the Bengali male élite contradict and overshadow the role of real Bengali women in the history of this cultural transaction.