Shankara and Shakespeare

When I was an English (Hons) student at City College, I was lucky enough to have Prof Vishvakarma as a teacher. "Friends, let’s turn to the Bard’s last and most magical play, The Tempest," he would drawl, as I sat in his class with 15 others waiting for pearls of wisdom to drop from his mouth. "I want you all to imagine for a moment, the magic island as theatre, and again imagine the theatre as a magic island." Silence. He stared hard at us and we stared back at him. "Shakespeare is unsurpassable," he would intone and we did not protest. The silent tug of war between us was a daily affair.

The professor’s job was to impart wisdom to a handful of pesky students whose thoughts wandered wildly and who were more interested in looking out of the window rather than in paying attention to his lecture. The discussion that morning seemed to centre around the lines, "we are such stuff as dreams are made on/and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

We could see he had a hard job on hand. Repeatedly, the Prof asked what the poet was up to in those lines. Did the Bard dismiss this life, the one and only life we know, as a mere dream, as Maya?

The class of eight men and an equal number of women turned blank looks at him. They didn’t know what he wanted them to say. He egged them on; it didn’t matter if what they said was foolish. But they thought, all of them, that it was better for the pearls of wisdom to fall from the Prof’s mouth. "Miss M, any comments?" He always singled me out, perhaps because I looked the dopiest of the lot. I merely shook my head, not wanting to make a fool of myself in front of others.

I can see him now, wispy grey wings of hair framing his sensitive face, reading those lines. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on…." Indeed, he dared to suggest that The Tempest could lend itself to an Indian interpretation. (Post-colonial before the Empire struck back?) He asked us if we detected in those lines the philosophy of Maya, as expounded by the sage Shankara. Life is a dream, nothingness. While we looked on baffled, he continued to play on the possibilities of Shakespeare’s meaning as expressed in his last and final play where Prospero was burying his Book, saying goodbye to the magical world he had created out of nothing. Was Prospero Shakespeare?

"Maya is the subtlest form of the human perception of truth as expounded by Shankara," said Prof Vishvakarma. "Please explain Maya, sir," came a squeaky voice from the back of the class. It was Mahmuda who ducked her head, scared of a reprimand from the Prof.

"To put it bluntly," continued the Prof, his wings of hair airily afloat, "Maya is nothingness, shunya, emptiness, illusion."

At this point stood up Chandra, the bright one of the class, and he quoted "Sir, there are more things in this life than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The class sat astounded.