Revenge, grief and Kathak in 'Hamlet'

Aneil Karia's 'Hamlet' reimagines Shakespeare through a South Asian lens, merging classical text with cultural memory

- Pahull Bains

There are obvious parallels to be drawn between the works of Shakespeare and India's own literary canon. Themes of family obligation, betrayal, love, revenge and sacrifice have defined much of our storytelling for centuries, from Mahabharat to Mirza Sahiba, so it's no wonder that Bollywood adaptations of the Bard's work have been so successful in the past (most notably Vishal Bhardwaj's trilogy).

It's what helped both Riz Ahmed and Aneil Karia, the actor and the director, respectively, behind this year's Hamlet, feel connected to a genre of literature they'd once assumed to be exclusionary. Encouraged by one of his school teachers, Ahmed read the play for the first time at the age of 16 and was surprised by how much he connected to it.

"I thought 'this is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't belong to me and I don't belong in,' but then I read it and I found myself in it," explains Ahmed at the film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 5 September. "A lot of the story points in Hamlet were a part of my lived experience as a British Asian. You can't marry Ophelia, she's from the wrong family. Your father's ghost has turned up and he's pissed—a lot of the Brown people in the audience know what I'm talking about. And there's actually a cultural tradition of marrying your sister-in-law if your brother dies, to protect the children. So there were a lot of things that made me see myself in a new way and I would like to help people see this play in a new way."