From Verona to Almore: Locating Cultural Hybridity in Habib Faisal’s Film Ishaqzaade

The presence of William Shakespeare in India is older and maybe more multifaceted than in any other country outside the Western world. Over the past few decades, Shakespeare's reputation has been established in India through various film adaptations of his works in different languages. Although both adaptation and appropriation involve reimagining Shakespeare's works, adaptation seeks to maintain a connection to the original material while creating something new, whereas appropriation entails repurposing Shakespearean elements to convey completely different meanings or serve alternative artistic visions. This article will examine Habib Faisal's Hindi film Ishaqzaade (2012) to unveil cultural hybridity. When adapting Shakespeare to the silver screen, Bollywood or Hindi film industry plays a dominant role, although Shakespeare has been adapted to other regional languages like Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, and so on. The regional language adaptations of Shakespeare try to capture the local colour through Shakespeare, as does the Bollywood film industry. This paper explores how Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has been converted into a prolific site for the cinematic survey of the cultural hybridity of the Hindi-speaking people of India.