Masala Shakespeare: How a Firangi Writer Became Indian

by Jonathan Gil Harris

Masala is a word that conjures up many associations. The word derives, through Urdu and Persian, from the Arabic ‘masalih’—ingredients. To a westerner, it immediately suggests exotic eastern spices. In its most widespread metaphorical use in India, it means embellishment or exaggeration. It also means a mixture—originally a mixture of ground spices, but more metaphorically any kind of mixture, especially one of cultural influences.
While Shakespeare today is considered ‘literature’ and is taught as a ‘pure’, ‘high’ form of art, in his own day it was the quintessential ‘masala’ entertainment he provided that attracted both the common people and the nobility. In Masala Shakespeare, Jonathan Gil Harris explores the profound resonances between Shakespeare’s craft and Indian cultural forms as well as their pervasive and enduring relationship in theatre and film. Indeed, the book is a love letter to popular cinema and other Indian storytelling forms. It is also a love letter to an idea of India. One of the arguments of this book is that masala—and, in particular, the masala movie—is not just a formal style or genre. More accurately, it embodies a certain version of India, one that celebrates the plural, the polyglot, the all-over-the-place. The book is also ultimately a portrait of contemporary India with all its pluralities and contradictions.
In Masala Shakespeare, the author focuses on twelve Shakespeare plays—The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, Pericles and Titus Andronicus—that have acquired Indian lives independent of the familiar English texts of the plays. The plays are a diverse mixture whose Indian avatars—including films such as Angoor, 10ml Love, Ishaqzaade, Goliyon ki Rasleela Ram-Leela, Gundamma Katha, Isi Life Mein, Dil Bole Hadippa!, Maqbool, Omkara, Haider, Arshinagar and The Last Lear and plays such as Kamdev ka Apna Basant Ritu ka Sapna, Jangal mein Mangal, Chattan Kattu, Piya Behrupiya, Chahat ki Dastaan and Hera-Phericles—are very different from each other. In their own ways, however, they all chafe against an oppressive power by refusing the current vogue for shuddhta (purity), and singularity, and instead celebrate the plural and mixed.

Genres: Nonfiction

298 pages, Hardcover

Published December 20, 2018

Reviews

[Ayesha Verma · Rating 5 out of 5]

An especially important book to read given the current political unrest. A deep dive into Bollywood and regional Indian Cinema to find Shakespeare. An engaging read that looks at the possibility of a way of reading that involves plurality as it’s foremost lens.
This book is as filmy as it is theoretical. There’s well researched information about movies one wasn’t previously aware of, and it simultaneously brings in an academic way of reading the movies that makes it serious. The engagement with Shakespearean texts adds the third dimension to Bollywood and Theory dialogue and the well informed political commentary makes it a 4D reading experience. The book enacts what it proposes as a way of being and reading, i.e. multiplicity. This is definitely one book any enthusiast or lover of Shakespeare, Theory, Bollywood and Indian Cinema, and Indian Politics MUST read. Highly Recommend!

[Gautam Chintamani · Rating 2 out of 5]

Masala Shakespeare: How a Firangi Writer Became Indian is a celebration of the author’s exploration of Indian cultural forms that resonate with Shakespeare’s craft and how a gora author found himself at home in India. ​

Masala Shakespeare has Gil Harris focusing on 12 Shakespeare plays that have come to resonate with India in a fashion that is both independent of the English original as well as unique in its own way. Gil Harris examines films inspired by the Bard such as Angoor, Maqbool, Haider, Omkara, The Last Lear, Ishaqazaade, Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram Leela, Dil Bole Hadipaa! and 10ml Love and others to show how they all singularly revolt against the traditional purity of the original.

Early on in the book, while talking about ‘masala’ Gil Harris describes eating a golgappa for the first time. Reading Masala Shakespeare is akin to the unacquainted experiencing a golgappa—the palate doesn’t know how to react or like Gil Harris puts it, ‘couldn’t reconcile the pleasure of tamarind with the recoil induced by the double whammy of sour mind and hot chilli’. Later, the exercise seems regular, something to indulge in once in a while or depending on how you see life, even pointless.

[Pranjal Awasthi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Gil Harris’ Masala Shakespeare is not your typical book on literary adaptations. It’s part memoir, part cultural critique, and part literary analysis—an engrossing journey through India’s syncretic soul, using Shakespeare as both lens and metaphor.

Harris, a foreigner-turned-insider, explores how India’s inherent masala—its joyous blending of song, dance, fantasy, melodrama, and emotion—makes it uniquely receptive to Shakespeare. But this isn’t just about Bollywood’s Othello or Haider. Harris dives deep into lesser-known but equally rich adaptations across Gujarati, Marathi, and Parsi theater traditions, painting a vibrant, multilingual canvas of Indian Shakespeare.

What emerges is more than a tribute to the Bard. It’s a social and political meditation on why Shakespeare has thrived in India—not because of colonial hangover, but because his themes resonate with the country’s own storytelling DNA. Harris argues that India's Shakespeare boom should remind us of the power of hybridity, especially in an era increasingly dominated by calls for uniformity and cultural purity.

This is also a warm, intelligent, and timely defense of pluralism—both literary and cultural. To understand modern India, and Shakespeare's surprising relevance within it, one must embrace the masala. And Harris does so with elan.