A knowledgable person in the field of drama
This phase of Sanskritization of the Hindi vernacular was accompanied by comparisons of Hindi literature to Shakespeare. Where and why did Shakespeare figure in all this? Because Shakespeare was disseminated as the authoritative text in colonial India and became an icon of a "superior," and "secular" civilization, it came to function as a grammar for the Hindi literati-a grammar through which proponents of Hindi sought its legitimacy as a superior language by claiming that their own texts were "cultured," "rational," and complex." Sanskrit texts such as Kalidasa's Shakuntala, which had been advocated as a literary model began to be compared to the works of Shakespeare and Kalidasa himself given the designation of the "Indian Shakespeare." The Hindi literary revival, thus, enlisted the project of colonial rule--a project that sought to establish its own "civilizing mission" via Shakespeare--to its own project of establishing the status of Hindi as a national language. In other words, the project of recuperating the function of Hindi as a national language became one that involved the authority of an author whose introduction in the literary curriculum in India bore the ideological underpinnings of imperial authority.
from the abstract of "Indian Shakespeare," and the Politics of Language in Colonial India
by Nandi Bhatia The University of Western Ontario
