Meri Kahaani 1.3 : Putting it in Context

Here's the last post in Meri Kahaani series. The three parts already posted are:

Credit: Star Campus

• Ariel's Story 
• Transient yet Eternal 1.0 
• Transient yet Eternal 2.0 

If you have read The Tempest, here is the explanation of how Meri Kahaani is a re-imagination of the play. Prospero, Caliban and Sycorax are spread across many characters like in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. This novel by Tayeb Salih is a re-imagination of The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, another play by Shakespeare. The British rulers are Prosperos while the Mughal rulers are Sycoraxes. Caliban corresponds to Maharana Pratap in the Mughal era and Subhash Chandra Bose in the British period. There is no back-story of deception to Prospero’s arrival as in the play so, the characters of Alonso, Sebastian, Gonzalo and Antonio are absent. Stephano and Trinculo are visualised to a certain degree as the Germans and Japanese in the sense of Caliban’s collaborators in the British period.

As Ariel is a spirit, he can learn any language from the people he comes across. But, as a spirit existing on an island, he would not have spoken all human languages. When Sycorax came to the island from Algeria and then Prospero from Milan, he had to learn their languages in order to communicate with them. Taking Sycorax as Arabic influence and Prospero as European/English, I have drawn a parallel between Ariel's life under Sycorax to Mughal era and Prospero's regin over Ariel to British Raj in India.

Correspondence between The Tempest and Meri Kahaani

Bhadrapada Shukla Navmi is a date, the ninth day of the month of Bhadrapada in the Hindu calendar, Vikram Samvat. Bhadrapad Shukla Navmi in Vikram Samvat 2063 would be 22nd August 2007 in the Gregorian calendar. Since the Gregorian calendar was not used in Akbar’s time in India, Ariel has only the Hindu date as reference. 

Lastly, Ariel is unnamed in the blog posts for two reasons: first, they are written in first person and second, his identity keeps changing with time, so there is no single label to put on him.