Teaching Macbeth in “Other” Places

My paper arises out of my pedagogic experiences of teaching Shakespeare plays to first-generation un-dergraduate students in classrooms where the teaching of English literature must necessarily proceed in a bilingual mode, with the help of Bangla/Bengali. What does it involve to navigate between Shake-speare’s English and Bangla as it is spoken in the present times? What does it involve to bring alive a Renaissance play to the imagination of those whose only experience of theatre (if at all) is witnessing seasonal yātrā performances of touring city-based troupes on makeshift stages erected for the show? In other words, how does the site of pedagogy—in this case, the periphery of the periphery—inform the study of a Shakespeare play? Pedagogy in such a situation must obviously involve a good deal of linguistic translation. But what other kinds of translation are called for? I invoke ‘translation’ in sev-eral senses in my paper, starting from the broad problematic of translation that informs postcolonial studies—a translation from objecthood to subjecthood—to linguistic translation, to a translation of context. I explore possibilities of comparatisim, of juxtaposing the Shakespeare text with culturally proximate material, like the Mahābhārata, in making Shakespeare more accessible. What might be the pedagogic implications of such a multimodal approach for Shakespeare pedagogy in particular, and literary pedagogy in general? How ‘local’ is such pedagogy, and what does it imply about the portabili-ty of Shakespeare pedagogy? If the object of pedagogy in Paulo Freire’s classic formulation in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is to translate the student from object to subject, what is at stake in teaching Shake-speare, and more generally, literature in English(es), at the periphery of the periphery?