Abstract
Romeo and Juliet remains the Shakespearean playtext most popularly adapted and recreated for the Indian screen. One reason for this popularity might be the familiarity that this story of the pair of doomed lovers has, to similar others of the subcontinent – Laila-Majnu, Sohni-Mahiwal, Heer-Ranjha. Its tragic elements of love, romance, foreboding, pain, and loss are important as well. Mostly great box office successes, adaptations of Romeo and Juliet are seen across both Hindi – and regional-language Indian films, most recently Arshinagar (Bengali, Aparna Sen, 2015) and Sairat (Marathi, Nagraj Manjule, 2016). This paper proposes to examine the ways in which Romeo and Juliet has been adapted and the romance presented in the 1978 Telugu black-and-white film Maro Charithra, directed by K. Balachander. Relocating the feud between the two families to one based on differences of language and culture, Balachander’s film locates the story in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh (then undivided), with a Telugu-speaking Juliet/Swapna and a Tamil-speaking Romeo/Balu. Maro Charithra is the first Telugu screen adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and while there has been discussion of its director’s 1981 Hindi-language remake, Ek Duuje Ke Liye, until now the Telugu film has been absent from mainstream critical discussion.
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