CHENNAI : As part of its year-long golden jubilee celebrations, Sishya School kicked off its Literary and Art Festival on Tuesday. It was an event that saw, apart from an interesting take on Shakespeare, a coming together of past and present students of the school, whose exhibits make up the festival, and went on display from Wednesday.
TN Minister for School Education Anbil Mahesh Poyyamozhi, chief guest for the occasion, inaugurated the proceedings with an exhortation to make art an essential part of school curriculum. “Times are changing,” the minister remarked, “and our schools must also keep changing with them.” He also touched upon the possibilities of events where government school children could interact with private school students. “There is so much that these children can learn from each other, and such interactions are only bound to be fruitful,” Poyyamozhi added.
Shakespeare and India
The keynote speaker was Prof Jonathan Gil Harris from Ashoka University, whose book Masala Shakespeare explored the bard’s enduring influence on India’s cultural fabric. For an audience comprised for the most part of young adults who would’ve expected a lecture in the same vein as most academic presentations, Harris’ presentation was anything but. Greeting the audience with namaskaram and eppadi irukkenge? Harris began by explaining that while Shakespeare was introduced to India as a result of colonial policy, the way he has influenced cultural life in India suggests a lot more.
He pointed out parallels between the bard and popular Indian cinema. “Shakespeare produced his plays at a time when English was only coming into its own as a language, and audiences at the time comprised of Germanic, French and Scandinavian tongues. He was essentially catering to a multilingual audience, like how popular cinema in India caters to speakers of several languages at the same time,” he said.
And for film aficionados, Harris threw light on Indian cinema, starting with actor-director Sohrab Modi, who made a career of Shakespeare adaptations in the 1930s amd 40s, down to Vishal Bharadwaj’s more contemporary versions and other regional adpatations, regaling the students with his own rendition of a song from the film Ishaqzaade a Romeo-Juliet adaptation from 2012.
Travel insights
This was followed by a symposium on travel writing. Correspondent Salim Thomas, who was part of the very first Indian expedition to the Antarctic in 1981, recounted his memories of the journey, and how the continent has changed since then with human intervention and climate change. Another speaker was Samit Sawhney, a 1990 alumnus who undertook a trip from India to London on foot. “Travelling dispels a lot of stereotypes one might have about countries and people we’ve only heard about or seen through depictions in popular culture,” he added.