This adaptation is set in Bengal in 1899, where rumours that the British Empire’s plans for partition have spread.
We set eyes on Pip, the protagonist of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations, for the first time in the churchyard where his parents and brothers are buried. The vision of the boy in front of the ruins of his family is one of rude survivalism. It’s a trait that will see Pip through the misadventures ahead – but the sorrow of surviving on these terms is unmistakable.
In this adaptation, Magwitch is an Indian man of African descent, renamed Malik . This is perhaps a nod to Malik Ambar , an Ethiopian slave who rose to power and whose military prowess in the southern peninsula of India was dreaded by the Mughals. Similarly, Malik funnels the fortune he has made in Assam into Pipli’s prospects – and Malik too is denied rehabilitation in the system whose equitable distribution of wealth he aids.
Gupta unsparingly portrays the interplay of self-regard and self-loathing in Pipli as he comes of age. The play shines new light on the individualism and elitism shaping Pipli’s deferred outrage at Miss Havisham’s brutality and his withheld affection for his real benefactor. Pipli’s lawyer, Jaggers , tells him bluntly that he will amount to nothing more than an interpreter. This echoes politician Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute Upon Indian Education , which shaped British educational policy. It was designed to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”.
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