Punjab, and Shakespeare

Punjab, a postpartition state in India and Pakistan, has a rich history of engagement with Shakespeare’s plays spanning over a century. However, the field of Indian Shakespeares has remained relatively silent about it, highlighting the presence of linguistic barriers and limited access to or lack of knowledge about the archives holding collections on Shakespeare and Punjab. This entry offers a chronological history of the students and theater and film practitioners’ interactions with Shakespeare’s plays in Punjabi from the late 1800s up to now, along with summaries and brief analyses of some texts and performances. In doing so, it seeks to illuminate the unique historical, cultural, and political forces, like the Kirti Kisan Movement, and not just British colonialism as the enabling factors. As one of the first critical works on Shakespeare and Punjab, this entry tries to show how Shakespeare moves away from concerns about fidelity to investigations of new ideas and art forms while reframing narratives of tension, distortion, omission, contradiction, erasure, and silence—concepts fundamental to the process of research—to create a space for learning methods from feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial scholars from the Global South.