Thou shalt not covet

• 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.
• However, Tanika Gupta’s adaptation of Great Expectations, currently showing at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, opens with “Pipli” buzzing around, doing cartwheels, at ease in his world.
• Dickens brought the upper classes to their knees in his novels, exposing the entanglements of gentility and criminality.

Pip and Magwitch

• In the Dickens novel, Pip refuses to treat his terrifying encounter with Magwitch as anything other than a “chance occurrence”.
• Magwitch – who reinvents himself in the penal colony of Australia, where he is transported to – becomes the anonymous benefactor whose colonial labour finances Pip’s education.
• Dickens’s Pip does not treat his entry into Satis House – the estate of Miss Havisham – as the random event it is.

MacCaulay’s Minute

• In Gupta’s play, the backdrop to Pipli’s soul-searching is the first partition of Bengal into East and West Bengal (1905).
• This echoes politician Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute Upon Indian Education (1835), which shaped British educational policy.
• The Macaulay Minute ushered a colonial modernity no longer reliant on the indigenous literature and culture and bred mimic men fully compliant with British rule.

The language issue

• The treatment of language in decolonising Dickens’s Great Expectations is a missed opportunity.
• Furthermore, little attention is paid to differences between Bengali Hindus and Muslims when it came to their respective reckonings of Curzon’s division.
• This is clever, but reinforces once again the power of English to stand in as both global language and local vernacular.