The next three posts on this blog are going to be like a serial novel. It is a fictional, historical re-imagining of The Tempest by William Shakespeare, mapping it onto Indian history from 1526 AD to 2007 AD. The piece contains two posts from the August 2007 archive of Ariel’s blog, Meri Kahaani, which chronicles his life experiences. His blog posts are autobiographical but are considered fictional by the modern scientific world.
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| Credit: Chest of Books |
Ariel is a spirit in The Tempest who does the bidding of a European wizard, Prospero, the displaced Duke of Milan. Prospero comes to live in an island after a coup of his dukedom. Ariel is a native inhabitant of that island. The other Tempest characters which appear here are Sycorax and Caliban. In the play, Caliban is the son of Sycorax, a witch from Algeria who was exiled on the island. Caliban believes that the island rightfully belongs to him and has been stolen by Prospero. He attempts to overthrow Prospero by conspiring with two stranded servants from a ship after the tempest. In the island life, Caliban is forced to serve as a servant to Prospero and his daughter, a position he hates. Ariel also serves Prospero using his own magical powers and longs for his liberty. Unlike Caliban, Prospero has promised Ariel his freedom at some time.
If you want a summary of the play, you can find it here on Sparknotes. For the text of the entire play, you can check out No Fear Shakespeare. No Fear Shakespeare puts Shakespeare's language side-by-side with a facing-page translation into modern English—the kind of English people actually speak today.
In the re-imagination, Ariel is an immortal spirit who has lived in India forever. His outer form is that of a human who is intelligent and accomplished and, is destined to serve the ruler of the land. He changes forms with each ruler, thus nobody realises he has lived forever. For the purpose of this piece, India in any time period refers to the mainland of Indian subcontinent, even though it was not consolidated until the Mughal Empire.
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| Credit: InglesBlog |
The superimposition of the play and history was motivated by the question of Ariel’s language. His verses to Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, show that Ariel has a good command over Prospero’s language unlike Caliban who possesses only rudimentary vocabulary. Ariel is a spirit and it can be assumed that the island is his natural habitat. So he is, in effect, a native dweller of the island much before Sycorax arrives there. At the end of The Tempest, while Caliban’s freedom comes with a sense of loneliness, Ariel’s freedom is more joyful as he is free to enjoy the island as he pleases along with his kind, namely the gods – Ceres, Juno etc.
The next post will be up tomorrow. The first blog post written by Ariel.
eagerly waiting :)
ReplyDeletenext post is up :)
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