What does it take to start a magazine entirely devoted to one play? And then, what does it take to run it single-handedly for 25 years? A love for the subject, of course, but also a certain doggedness, a scholarly pursuit of depth and a notion that others are equally profound; as also, let’s just say it, an appreciable whimsy. Therefore, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the directions given to the home of such a person. Walk east, I was told, and cross two intersections, then look out for the 1950s Dodge parked outside a biscuit-coloured building. In the event, I did miss the Dodge, and Rupin W Desai, retired professor of English literature and the sole staffer of Hamlet Studies for a quarter century, had to come downstairs and find me. I may as well confess, I didn’t even know which side east lay.

Upstairs, there are books everywhere — catalogued, numbered, indexed. “That’s all Shakespeare,” Desai points to the shelves behind me. “And this is all Yeats,” he points to those behind him. In 1971, Desai had completed his PhD from the Northwestern University on a Fulbright scholarship. His thesis was on Shakespeare’s influence on Yeats. After a year of teaching in the US, he returned to India and joined Delhi University as a reader. His wife, Jyoti, is also a professor of English and teaches Shakespeare at Khalsa College. Over a munificent spread of cucumber sandwiches, shaami kebabs, cake and biscuits, Desai, occasionally edited by Jyoti, tells me how Hamlet Studies came to be.

Although the relevance of the play is eternal, in the late-1970s, the socio-political environment in India was perfectly Hamlet -esque. Indira Gandhi had imposed Emergency and subsequently lost the election to the Janata alliance. Desai — along with two other scholars of English literature, AN Kaul and GK Das — decided to start the magazine in 1979. “ Hamlet addresses issues that all of us are grappling with in our modern world — freedom of speech, political espionage, the manipulation by politicians in whose hands we are all victims. They exploit us even though we are a democracy. Above all, there is the whole question of justice. Hamlet is complicated, and we deemed it utterly worthy of a journal devoted to it,” Desai says.

The three of them wrote to Shakespeare scholars around the world, edited and put the journal together. Vikas Publishing House, a local publisher, sponsored the printing and circulation. Two years on, the publisher washed his hands off the project. Kaul dropped out. And Das got posted to Kashmir. “So I said, well then, I’ll carry on,” Desai says. By then, the journal had 50 or 60 subscribers from around the world — college libraries, Shakespeare scholars and “Hamlet crackpots” paid $14 (₹250 in India) for an annual subscription. In the first year, Desai invested around ₹5,000, a princely sum then, in producing and mailing the journal to subscribers. As people wrote in, with questions, praise and contributions, Desai kept at it, calling for submissions, editing and rewriting, laying out the pages and spending a few thousand rupees year after year. He found a printer close by, a former student as well as a Hamlet aficionado. “Overall, though, I think I broke even. Jyoti doesn’t agree; she thinks I’ve ended up losing money.” Across the table, Jyoti rolls her eyes.

There isn’t an issue of the journal he cannot locate… or quote from. Nor is there a line in Hamlet (perhaps in all of Shakespeare) that he cannot recite from memory. Tall and wiry, with an impressive voice and a perfectly clipped accent, Desai often trails into long passages from the play. Or he brings over a book and asks me to read a paragraph or two. “No, no, read it aloud,” he insists . I read aloud, worrying about pronunciation and enunciation, until the sheer beauty of the sentences takes over and makes you forget the impossibility of the situation — that we are in brutal Delhi in 2016, reading something written 400 years ago, and being lulled and comforted by it. Only then does it become possible to understand why Desai started Hamlet Studies and how he kept it running for years.

The best part of running the journal, he says, was in the kind of work he managed to publish. Immediately he’s off to find a copy in which Baron Rees Mogg, former editor of the Times , who also sat in the House of Commons, had an essay on the ‘Politics of Hamlet’. “He’s a politician himself, which brings such depth to his analysis of the play. Where else could you read it?”

Then, Desai makes me read out a poem that a subscriber, Subimal Das, from Assam had written in. The poem ends with lines from Hamlet :

A patch of little ground to gain

That hath no profit but the name.

I point out that these words could also best describe his endeavour with Hamlet Studies . Desai is quiet for a while. “You are right, I never saw that until now,” he says.

Finally, fatigue had made him stop. “And the sheer physical labour involved. Packing, tying things up, going to the post office. I did feel a great sense of emptiness after the last issue. But it was a conscious decision I took. There were other things to do. Twenty five years is a long time.”

Also, aren’t 25 years enough to analyse Hamlet , I ask.

“Oh no!” Desai is astonished at the question. “ Hamlet is inexhaustible.”

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