This chapter analyses the film Ram-Leela using rasa theory, examining the dramatic ways in which the film evokes emotion – for example, through the use of colour, cinematography and music – and conveys meaning through direct and indirect references to Hindu mythological figures and narratives. Rasa theory, and its religious referents, are especially efficacious for approaching Ram-Leela as its title, which literally names the two main characters Ram (Romeo) and Leela (Juliet), is also the name of one of the most significant sacred celebrations in India’s Hindu calendar, Ramlila, an annual autumn festival during which plays are performed that present the life of the god Rama from his birth. Many scholars have discussed the key importance of the story of King Rama and his wife Sita in the narratives featured in Bollywood cinema. Ram-Leela plays with these conventions, participating vividly in the impassioned expression of emotion called for in rasa theory, performing far outside the boundaries of realism, whilst also departing in significant, telling ways from both the narrative of the Ramayana and that of Romeo and Juliet.

This chapter looks at emotion in Shakespearean cinema by considering two Bollywood adaptations through the lens of Indian aesthetic theory and narrative traditions. Filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj adapted Macbeth and Othello as Maqbool (2003) and Omkara (2006). Both include a masala mix of genres characteristic of Indian popular cinema (melodrama, romance, tragedy, comedy, gangster film), and both break down the boundaries of genre established in the western narrative tradition by Aristotle. Bhardwaj adapts Shakespearean tragedy into tragic tales of contemporary India that traverse quickly between different Hollywood-defined genres and affective tones, pulling the audience through intense emotional terrain evoked by vivid audio-visual stimuli. Bhardwaj’s work can usefully be approached through the co-ordinates of ancient rasa theory which has dominated aesthetic approaches to the arts in India for over two thousand years. The rasas, or emotions, offer an important lens through which to understand how Indian popular cinema communicates powerfully to its enormous global audience, both resident and diasporic, many of whom are drawn to Bollywood’s emotional intensity and generic hybridity. Rasa theory sheds light on Bhardwaj’s achievement, then, but also provides a valuable and fertile apparatus through which to explore Shakespeare’s works more generally on page, stage, and screen.

Akira Kurosawa spent fifty years, from 1943 to 1993, making films that attempt to look at life and its complexity ‘straight on’, in an unflinching, uncompromising way. However, none of his films forces us to stare into the potential for humans to create hell on earth quite as formidably as one of his final masterpieces, Ran (1985). This chapterfocuseson Kurosawa’s troubled humanism, alongside his didacticism. It is no accident that three such Kurosawa films are his adaptations of Shakespeare tragedies: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and Ran, adaptations of Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, respectively. Kurosawa uses Ran to express his belief in the compelling need for individuals to transcend the unending cycles of violence that plague this world, rather than embrace the dubious otherworldly salvation provided by supernatural powers, such as Amida Buddha, who appears as a helpless symbol in Ran. The film is a majestic pageant full of symbols and abstractions – including many elements of the Buddhist Noh theatre – which ironically signify unity and harmony in a collapsing world where icons have lost their power to cohere. Ran, in all its beauty and horror, tells us that we have the power to face the inevitable hells on earth and choose not to perpetuate them.

On many levels, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play about acting. When considering styles of theatrical performance, our eponymous Prince exhorts the players to perform their parts ‘gently’, with ‘temperance’ and ‘smoothness’, ‘hold[ing] … a mirror up to nature’ (3.2.5, 8, 22). This acting philosophy has been theorized and realized in diverse ways on stage and screen in the Eurocentric West, but it stands in stark contrast to one of the foremost ancient aesthetic theories of India – that of rasa, which refers to the emotion an audience member experiences during a performance, be it drama, dance, poetry or music.