Why Art Thou Romeo?

One thing is immediately clear: the chief minister’s understanding of “Romeo” is rather different from Shakespeare’s. The original Romeo is certainly interested in women, but he is not a would-be molester. When we first meet him, he is something of a ridiculous character, but that’s because of his serious devotion to a lost cause. He is immersed in the clichéd love poetry of the Italian sonnet-writer Petrarch, who spent his entire adult life loving a woman who was unattainable, first, because of her higher class and, later, because she had somewhat inconveniently died. Romeo likewise pines for his first love — Rosalind, a woman we never see — rather than scheming about ways to “eve-tease” her. And when he does eventually interact with a woman who is physically present, the love he experiences is entirely reciprocated. Juliet, like Romeo, has the soul of a poet: upon meeting, she and Romeo speak together an entire love sonnet, completing each other’s rhymes into the bargain, in what seems like a holy rite (they call themselves “pilgrims”) that anticipates their later marriage by Romeo’s spiritual advisor, Friar Lawrence.

In sum, Romeo and Juliet is a story of mutual and consensual love. It is also a story of love foiled by a larger, communally polarised society that cannot tolerate it. After all, Romeo and Juliet are not just teen lovers. They are also the scions of warring clans, who seek to control the sexual relations of their children and cannot tolerate the idea that they should act upon their own desires, especially if it leads to inter-communal romance. It’s hard not to see Uttar Pradesh’s squads as emerging from a similarly polarised, controlling and intolerant society, even if their vision of Romeo has been distorted beyond recognition.

How has this distortion happened? One of the unexpected legacies of the British Raj has been the absorption of Shakespeare into vernacular Indian languages and cultures. Initially, the British introduced Shakespeare in the hope of furthering Thomas Macaulay’s aim of “civilising” the natives by immersing them in English literature and culture. Children’s versions of Shakespeare’s stories, especially Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, resulted in his characters becoming widely known throughout the subcontinent, even as the play-texts themselves were often disregarded. These characters became iconic — to the point where they began to be dissociated from Shakespeare and acquired Indian lives of their own. This is particularly so in the case of Romeo.

Predictably, Romeo’s name has entered many Indian languages as a term for a young would-be lover. In Marathi, for instance, “Romeo” is a synonym for the object of a woman’s affection: a website that offers a crash course in romantic Marathi lines includes “tu maza romeo (you are my Romeo/darling)”; it also prescribes “tu mazi juliet” for those who wish to answer in kind. So far, so mutually Shakespearean. This is, in fact, a rare and perhaps isolated instance of the word “Romeo” acknowledging the desire of an Indian woman. It is an equally rare instance of “Juliet” becoming absorbed into an Indian language: in India, the dominant understanding of who is allowed to have sexual desire tends to exclude “good” women. But young Indian men are granted a certain sexual entitlement in the form of the Romeo, who has become a synonym for a swaggering, street Casanova. This Indian Romeo’s love is not lasting, nor is it reciprocated. Yet, his behaviour is tolerated more often than not as a harmless, “boys-will-be-boys” archetype of Hindu masculinity.

We find this newer meaning of Romeo in the titles of many recent Hindi and Bengali films that have little to do with Shakespeare’s play. Roadside Romeo (2008), an animated film about street dogs, features Saif Ali Khan doing the voiceover for a bratty, smooth-talking hound whose theme song announces that “Main hoon Romeo, loving lovin’ mera kaam/ Main hoon Romeo, I got these gals in my arms.” This may be an animated dog, but the lyrics of his song typify a version of cocky masculinity that we see in many other films. In the Bengali film Romeo (2011), Dev plays Siddhu as a Casanova who also has “gals in my arms,” though he eventually reforms, finds a wife, and becomes an adept marriage counsellor to his separated parents. Another Bengali film, the tellingly-titled Romeo v/s Juliet (2015), depicts its Romeo as a small-town boy who rejects marriage to his fiancée (she is dark and fat) and then stalks a beautiful, rich Bengali girl whose picture he has seen on Facebook. If this sounds creepy, even creepier is that the rich girl falls in love at first sight with her stalker.

Equally creepy, R… Rajkumar (2013) features Shahid Kapoor as a brawling ladies’ man whose first name is Romeo, and who spends most of the film baring his bloodied buff pectorals and bulging biceps. Revealingly, Romeo Rajkumar was originally named Rambo Rajkumar; his name was changed only when the filmmakers realised Rambo was under copyright. But, as Shakespeare’s Juliet asks, “what’s in a name?” A Rambo by any other name would still smell as sweaty — and be as much of a blood-covered goonda. What this film makes clear is that Rambo and Romeo are somewhat interchangeable types in Hindi cinema’s imagination: look at the gangster Romeo Suraj of Shortcut Romeo (2013, starring Neil Nitin Mukesh), a good-for-nothing charmer who sexually blackmails women and resorts to extreme violence on his path to individual success. Each of these Romeos, the films tell us, is in need of a little reformation; but the Romeos and the films in which they appear reassure us that Hindu boys simply have to pass through this bad-ass phase as part of their “development,” in both psychological and economic senses.

The leading men populating Hindi film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet also play Indian-style Romeo Casanovas more likely to break than to make a woman’s heart. Think of Arjun Kapoor in Ishaqzaade (2012), who “scores” with his Juliet before dumping her; or the tattooed Ranveer Singh in Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013), who only has to scratch his dandruff in the town market with his shirt off to send all the women into a swoon.

These macho Hindu swaggerers, adorable rogues who behave badly, but basically have hearts of gold, depart quite decisively from Shakespeare’s comparatively effete Romeo.

So, on the basis of these films, we might ask: shouldn’t we cheer the anti-Romeo squads? If the Indian Romeo has lent justification to a version of Hindu masculinity that depends on demeaning women, treating them as rungs on the matlabi ladder to individual success, shouldn’t we celebrate a concerted campaign to curtail his entitlements? But the anti-Romeo story is considerably more complex, because it entails several other elements that are equally recognisable from Shakespeare’s play. First, there is the utterly irrational scandal of inter-community romance; second, there is the denied agency of women in love whose will must be dictated by parents and community; and, finally, there is the dubious insistence on religion as a means of both sanctifying and controlling desire.

Arjun Kapoor in Ishaqzaade is nothing like the Montague scion in Romeo and Juliet.

The first of these three elements has become an obsession for the Hindu right. Saffron groups such as the Karni Sena, who recently got agitated about Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s forthcoming film Padmavati, may claim to be offended by its alleged presentation of historical events that don’t mesh with their ideology. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that what the Karni Sena really objects to is the depiction of inter-communal Hindu-Muslim romance in a popular medium like film.

Inter-communal romance is the theme of recent Hindi and Bengali film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, too. Earlier Hindi adaptations had presented the play’s warring clans in less controversial terms: Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981) presented Romeo as a Tamil and Juliet as a north Indian; and in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), the family feud that makes star-crossed lovers of the leading couple is born not of religious, communal or caste hatred, but a long-ago act of violence. By contrast, Ishaqzaade presents us with a Hindu Romeo and a Muslim Juliet, as does Aparna Sen’s Bengali/Urdu film Arshinagar (2015). At face value, the two films celebrate inter-faith romance. Yet, we might ask: why do these movies not give us a Muslim Romeo and a Hindu Juliet? Can Indian cinema not imagine such a jodi?

I would argue that this jodi is precisely the spectre haunting such films. Arshinagar imagines that the Muslim father of Juliet and the Hindu mother of Romeo were once in love — but, tellingly, this is a romance that was never allowed to develop. If the Hindu Romeo is embraced as a figure of eve-teasing fun, the Muslim Romeo is a clear and present threat. This much is evident in the political panic created around the alleged figure of the Muslim “love jihadi” who schemes to seduce Hindu women. The “love jihadi” haunts the anti-Romeo discourse as well. Just as the recent attacks on the “anti-nationalists” provide an easy cover for the expression of Hindu antagonism against Muslims, so too does the discourse of the anti-Romeo, which targets the “love jihadi” without having to name him. During the recent election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath repeatedly mentioned “love jihad” as a major menace in the state. It is surely no accident that, since instituting the anti-Romeo squads, he has not needed to refer to it anymore.

The second familiar element from Shakespeare’s play that complicates the anti-Romeo discourse is the denial of women’s agency in love. Juliet’s parents refuse to accept that she can love someone she has chosen. In the name of protecting women, and in quietly targeting the figure of the Muslim Romeo, the anti-Romeo squads also deny Juliet. They deny Juliet agency in love; they deny her the possibility of loving a Romeo from another community; they deny that such love can be anything other than the will of a predatory Romeo from whom Juliet must be protected. This paternalist protectionism reeks of the Hindu nationalist discourse of safeguarding Bharat Mata from rapacious male Muslim outsiders. In both these scenarios, sexuality belongs to men alone. Predatory male sexuality is redeemable if the Romeo is a Hindu character in a film. But this position suddenly becomes unredeemable when there is a political compulsion to demonise Muslim men. They, too, get called Romeos, but these Romeos are no longer lovable rogues but “love jihadis.”

It’s not just that the anti-Romeo squads ignore Juliet and communalise Romeo. Their very existence proves that they are doomed to repeat the conditions that make Shakespeare’s play a tragedy. Romeo and Juliet is a play about communal intolerance and hatred unleashed by the spectre of inter-communal sexuality. And this is where a third element from the play intersects with the anti-Romeo phenomenon. It is not just the warring families’ hatred that leads the lovers to disaster. A celibate older man of the cloth, who sees himself as Romeo’s spiritual advisor and counsels him strictly against his “violent passions” (in this, he is something of a one-man anti-Romeo squad), ends up ensuring the lovers’ deaths. Religious advice in matters of love is presented in the play as a path to disaster.

I don’t know if Yogi Adityanath would recognise himself in Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence. But, if he were actually to read Romeo and Juliet, then he would learn that Friar Lawrence says something profound, even though he doesn’t heed his own advice. A dabbler in herbal medicine, the Friar points to a flower in which “poison has residence and medicine power.” With this line, Shakespeare illuminates one of the most important themes of the play. The tragedy of the lovers stems in no small part from the fact that “poisonous” remedies are imposed on their love in order to “medicinally” control it. From a flower such as this, Friar Lawrence extracts a “poison” that will allow Juliet to pretend she is dead. The Friar hopes that this poison will serve a medicinal purpose. But the profound insight of the play is that this poison can only have deadly consequences.

Jonathan Gil Harris is professor of English at Ashoka University, as well as president, Shakespeare Society of India.