William Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Adaptation: A Cultural Materialist Reading of Bollywood Movie Maqbool

Abstract

The present research article focuses on Bollywood movie Maqbool (2004), the Hindi language movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s famous play Macbeth (1606). Shakespeare’s plays have become available in the cinematic adaptations in many different languages across the globe. All these adaptations focus on different aspects of the original texts, and come up with some entirely new movies which at times have the Shakespearean elements in them. The plots, settings and the timelines are of course different, but they make Shakespeare’s dramas available to a wider audience across different cultures. Maqbool is such a movie adaptation in Hindi, directed by Indian film-director, Vishal Bhardwaj. The movie relates to the incidents and events from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, though it has entirely new flavours of its own as a typical Bollywood movie. Like Shakespeare’s plays, these movies also have something to offer to the critics. A close analysis of such adaptations, in relation to the original textual creations, can bring forth many new critical perspectives. This article aims at analysing the movie, Maqbool from the perspective of cultural materialism where it tries to bring out that how the movie interrelates with the contemporary social and political situations of the time which it depicts. There are certain hidden structures in the movie which remain unearthed when watched without critical eyes. The paper attempts a cultural materialist reading of Maqbool to bring out such hidden aspects of the movie.