Drakakis at Calcutta Club. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

He landed right in the midst of Brigade Parade Grounds-bound Calcutta on Sunday. No wonder Professor John Drakakis describes his first experience of the city as ?impressionistic?.

?I almost felt like joining those men. There was such a lot of activity and energy,? smiles the Shakespeare scholar, now with Stirling University, UK.

Professor Drakakis is in town on a British Council-sponsored visit to deliver the Mohini Mohan Bhattacharya lectures at the English department of Calcutta University. He gave the keynote address at an international conference on Imperial Constructs and Indigenous Self-fashioning there and was swamped with questions from students afterwards.

The response struck a chord with the genial Welshman. ?It is difficult not to be enthusiastic when you are confronted with that kind of commitment. We have enormous resources in the UK and we are on a world stage. But here the students seem to be so confident about the questions they ask and are so eager for dialogue.? Drakakis, who went on lecture tours to Kalyani and Burdwan, found this confidence in the districts as well.

It is ?an accident? that he came to Calcutta University, which played a major role in the formation of the anti-colonial discourse, on the eve of its 150th year celebrations. ?I got a strong sense of commitment of the university. The students are so enthusiastic because the staff is so enthusiastic.?

The scholar was thrilled to have had two vice-chancellors in his audience and met a registrar ?who actually teaches!?

Drakakis?s rereading of Shakespeare ? he is the editor of Alternative Shakespeares and the general editor of the New Critical Idiom series by Routledge ? challenges the established modes of critical practice. This, he says, was the result of a dissatisfaction with traditional ways of thinking. ?When I was at the university in the 60s, we wanted to open up English studies which was a crude form of historical studies, focusing on the text to the exclusion of the context. The young members of the profession wanted to include politics, feminism etc in their writings. Ironically, the next generation labels this as new orthodoxy.?

The man who has just finished editing The Merchant of Venice is to write a textual bibliography of Shakespeare, a volume of Shakespeare and presentism ? the present as a point of departure. ?You cannot look at history without the spectacles of the present,? he sums up.