A post-colonially-minded colleague of mine once asked to visit my Shakespeare class, and I said, sure! He told my students that the reason Shakespeare was a requirement for their degree was that in the prior century in India, the British Raj had determined that requiring the study of Shakespeare in schools was an effective instrument of cultural indoctrination and control. Cricket was the English national game, and Shakespeare was the English national poet.
All this was true. But it wasn't the whole truth. India was the first geographical locale to require Shakespeare for formal study in English, since Shakespeare was seen as a conduit to the appreciation of what was most admirably English. However, as most people who have read any Shakespeare know, Englishness and Raj aside, Shakespeare is an excellent writer with a lot of fascinating ideas, so requiring him to be studied in any English class, east or west, is not such a bad idea for a whole slew of reasons. In a Shakespeare class, there are more fruitful ways of discussing his poems and plays than by showcasing their dubious history as tools of cultural indoctrination.
India didn't throw out cricket when they threw out the British, and they didn't throw out Shakespeare. He was too popular. As in other countries, Shakespeare has been used and enjoyed in India in all kinds of interesting ways, suspicious and otherwise. Knowledge of Shakespeare in English served as "cultural capital" for the "upper-class, elite Indians" of nineteenth-century Calcutta, to quote scholar Jyotsna Singh. But Shakespeare has also been translated into numerous Indian languages;
