Reframing Shakespeare in Postcolonial Bengali Children’s Literature

This article analyzes the Shakespearean adaptations for children included within the Anubad series,also known as theTranslation series of “world classics” brought out by the prominent Kolkata-based children’s publishing house Dev Sahitya Kutir in the twentieth century. These adapted Shakespearean offerings spoke to both local and global contexts of portable “literary value” and circulation. Dev Sahitya Kutir recontextualized Shakespeare within the Bengali book market in ways that changed the import of the source texts themselves. Shakespeare is here presented to Bengali child readers nestled within a postcolonial children’s world classics series. The Translation series thus stretches the bounds of the established Western canon of “great works/great authors” to present a subversive, flattened canon of “world literature.” It becomes readily apparent to the twenty-first century reader, however, that the retellings implicitly champion middle-class bhadralok genteel Bengali values implicated in regres-sive majoritarian cultural aspects such as casteism, classism, and racism. This article goes on to argue that although subversive to a degree in terms of reframing Shakespeare’s canonical status within the broader context of the postcolonial Translation series, these children’s adaptations ultimately reinforce entrenched, oppressive social hierarchies within Bengal.