In a beautiful section midway through Anjum Hasan’s novel Lunatic In My Head (Penguin/Zubaan, 2007) – in my estimation one of the best scenes in the history of the Indian novel – we see the middle-aged college lecturer in English literature Firdaus Ansari, one of Hasan’s three protagonists in the book, going to class in Shillong to teach William Shakespeare’s As You Like It to her students.

Firdaus, we know by this point, is still a spinster, lives with her grandfather, feels herself slightly over the hill, has a much younger Manipuri boyfriend called Ibomcha, is still a virgin and slightly squeamish about sex, and has been struggling for several years to complete her M.Phil on marriage in the novels of Jane Austen. She feels profoundly alienated from her life circumstances: at the beginning of the chapter we find her looking at herself in the mirror and thinking that “There was no connection between her and her image; if she got up and walked away, this woman whose eyes were boring into hers would remain.”

Firdaus is not looking forward to teaching As You Like It to a bunch of uncomprehending and disinterested students. And, even though she has some ancient notes on the play, handed down from teacher to teacher over the years, she trembles before the immense authority of Shakespeare, the demands he makes on those who serve as mediators and interpreters for him. The double-edged words of Jacques the fool, we are told, “could still jangle Firdaus’s nerves”.

We see Firdaus begin to read out a passage from the play to her class “of whispering backbenchers, cautiously gum-chewing middle-benchers, and girls with looks of blank sincerity up front”:

“He that a fool doth very wisely hit, Doth very foolishly, although he smart, Not to seem senseless of the bob: if not, The wise man’s folly is anatomised, Even by the squandering glances of the fool,” she read out […].

She began to haltingly explain Jacques’ twisted lines. “The idea here, girls, is that Jaques feels that by being a fool, being given the charter, the freedom to be foolish, is liberating. Why is it liberating?…Any ideas?”

No one responds, so:

Firdaus read out impatiently from her fading notes. “Jacques says to Duke Senior that his only suit or requirement is that he be allowed to wear a motley coat, one that will signal to the world that he is a fool. In addition, that is withal, he must have freedom as large as the wind to quote blow on whom I please unquote, that is, direct his foolish wit or witty folly towards whomever he chooses. Those who are most provoked by his folly, Jacques goes on to say, are those who must laugh the hardest. Why is this so…? That’s what I was asking you,” she broke off to say, “…if you have any clue about this, but you obviously don’t. Anyway…why is this so?” She continued reading. “Jacques explains that this should be obvious to people, as obvious to them as the way to the church is. The fact is that the person who hits a fool, which can be taken to mean hit not in a literal sense, but figuratively, that is he who criticises or berates a fool, might appear smart but is actually very foolish. […] For if he criticises a fool he exposes himself. He exposes himself and his folly is laid bare within brackets anatomised. Even the squandering glances, that is, the casual fun that a fool might poke at a man…”

It is by any standard an incoherent, fumbling explanation: there is much dross amidst scraps of sense. But just as Jacques’s chatter is wise foolishness, so Hasan’s portrayal of her protagonist is one of clarity routed through incoherence. By not punctuating Firdaus’s talk as Firdaus herself directs it (“…quote blow on whom I please unquote”, “…which can be taken to mean hit not in a literal sense, but figuratively”), Hasan gives us a sense of how Firdaus’s students are hearing her lecture, and how puzzling it must seem to them.

And by showing how Firdaus, while feeling frustration at the sluggishness of her students, is herself not willing to walk with Shakespeare without the crutch of her notes, Hasan has the courage and the confidence to present us with a fairly damning indictment of her protagonist, whose reproaches to her students mask the fact that she, too, is – to borrow a phrase from Othello – “perplex’d in the extreme”. The most meaningful words in Hasan’s passage are not those that make some sense of what Jacques is saying, but precisely the most superfluous ones: phrases like “In addition, that is withal” and “within brackets anatomised”, which show that Firdaus is actually on the same side of the fence as her students. It is a genuinely novelistic passage, teeming with crisscrossing meanings: as a result of the author’s artful layering, the words point out towards Shakespeare and back towards Firdaus at the same time, and we understand not just the place of the fool in Shakespearean comedy but the feelings of inadequacy felt by Firdaus.

Firdaus knows that her students must grapple with Shakespeare “simply because he was standing in the way, he was unavoidable”. She is quite right: in the castle of English literature, the biggest suite of rooms belongs to Shakespeare. But why? For what reason? Firdaus’s reverence for Shakespeare, and the incongruity of this fairly representative classroom scene narrated by Hasan, help crystallise a peculiarly Indian attitude towards Shakespeare, which is to see him as the gold standard of sophisticated “high” English, as a dealer in proverbs and precepts, and, finally, as some kind of transcendent genius, a god who never put a foot wrong. Shakespeare is standing in the way, and we bow before him: we have not broken free of a colonized relationship with him.

Even when we do not comprehend Shakespeare, or faintly comprehend him, we are sure that he was great: the very fact that we do not understand what he is saying proves it, and just to say his name is to bask in reflected glory. Shakespeare is supposed to be good for us, as green vegetables are. I remember how, in school, my seventh standard textbook had a passage from Hamlet which excerpted Polonius’s immensely tedious words of advice to his departing son Laertes. The councillors of education who chose it presumably thought that it was an edifying passage that would be good for students, and by presenting Polonius’s speech out of context, chose to totally ignore the fact that we are at some point supposed to laugh at Polonius’s longwindedness. The dramatic situation counts for nothing; the highflown words for everything.

This Bardolatry, perversely, has the effect of diminishing our enjoyment and appreciation of Shakespeare, because it defines, a priori, the terms of our engagement with him, instead of giving us the chance to apply our all faculties on Shakespeare’s enormously knotty and complicated language in an open field, as it were. Shakespeare’s language is certainly extraordinary, but what is extraordinary about it is that it is not necessarily “good”, or grammatically correct, or coherent in its syntax: it is a language of both beauty and craziness, of grinding stasis and thrilling energy.

Indeed, I have on occasion heard some grizzled Indian Shakespeareans declare that they cannot bear to read anything but Shakespeare (there used to be a figure like this in many English departments in India, and their eclipse is in its own way rather sad, because in many cases they have been replaced by figures who, waving the flags of new critical theories, are convinced that Shakespeare’s reputation is a conspiracy of British imperialism, or that he represents not artistic genius but a coalescence and personification of the social and ideological energies of his time) – they cannot bear to read anything but Shakespeare because the language of “modern literature”, with its slang and its cuss words, seems debased by comparision. But actually Shakespeare himself is full of curses, scurrility, ribaldry, and slang, now given a patina of respectability by the passage of four centuries.

Shakespeare (but not the Indian Shakespeare) is as rude as anybody in the canon, for the exigencies of his dramatic and intensely practical art, which thrived or withered according to gate receipts, required that he write for groundlings as much as sophisticates. A line like  “Now is he total gules” (Hamlet, II, ii, meaning “now he is totally red with blood”) sits uneasily with our view of Shakespeare as representative of high culture: it could belong just as easily to a rap song.

In fact, it is imperative that we read Shakespeare without rose-tinted glasses, and note (alongside his wondrous density and compression of sense; his startling nominalizations and verbalizations, compound words and neologisms; the knotty texture of his thought; the marvellous and supple rhythms of his lines) his often gratuitous wordplay, his shambling and over-long metaphors, his immense sententiousness, and his tendency to say in ten lines what he might have done in two. As the literary critic Frank Kermode writes in an essay called “Writing About Shakespeare”, “There is a way of treating Shakespeare…as a very good but sometimes not so good poet, as sometimes but not always clearly a writer of genius – as always, indeed, a writer and to be considered as such.” Just as Firdaus is all the more sympathetic for her weakness, so too the richest Shakespeare, the most intriguing Shakespeare, is one whom we discern as being both grand and grandiloquent, both untouchable and fallible, a wizard with words whose trade also forced him into hackwork, and whom we might imagine sitting in his room after a long day at the playhouse, sometimes short of inspiration, and saying to himself, like Richard II, “I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out”.

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At the close of that passage in Lunatic in my Head, we see Firdaus back home after an eventful day. Once again the ghost of Shakespeare insinuates itself into her consciousness, stands in the way:

In bed at night, listening to her grandfather coughing his chronic cough, Firdaus, still in complete possession of her new-found clarity, realised – with the shock one might feel when an old ache suddenly vanishes – that all self-confidence was connected to language. If she could clearly articulate what she felt, if she could find the right words, if she could speak them forcefully into the world, she would be able to make an impress on reality. […]

She felt calm and drowsy. Her nose hurt less now. At the very border of sleep, Jacques’ lines came back to her: ‘Invest me in my motley; give me leave to speak my mind, and I will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world’, and she knew that in some roundabout way he was speaking about the power of language too, about the power of the tongue, its wit and cunning, its ability to make men reveal their deepest selves.

“Invest me in my motley; give me leave to speak my mind, and I will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world” – these ringing words might be read as Shakespeare’s coded appeal to his audience, and indeed as the imprecation of every writer to his or her imagined reader.