Susanne Gruss

Shakespeare in Bollywood? Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara

Othello has been portrayed by many of Hollywood’s classic actors, including Orson Welles (1952), Laurence Olivier (1965), and, more recently, Laurence Fishburne (1995). In film adapta tions, the play has thus already travelled far; in terms of literary criticism, Othello has also become a stock element of postcolonial criticisms of Shakespeare. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara (2006) adds a new twist to both trends in turning Shakespeare’s play into a Bollywood film, including the typical features of the genre: song and dancesequences. This article focuses on how this crosscultural enterprise appropriates both Othello as ‘master text’ and the genre it uses, the Bollywood blockbuster, and scrutinises the commercial potential of the film’s transnational visuals. Bhardwaj not only relocates Othello to India (and turns the race conflict into one of caste), he also carefully shapes and changes the Bollywood film: while Omkara could be inter preted as one of the family tragedies so popular with Indian audiences, the song and dance scenes are more convincingly rooted in the plot than in typical examples of the genre and seem to accommodate the filmic tastes of a Western audience. Omkara is therefore read as a paradig matic example of the fluidity of cultural borrowings and conventions in the early twentyfirst century.

Adapting Othello – and Race Othello has a long and complex screen history – “no Shakespeare play”, Cartelli and Rowe point out in their recent New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007), “has been adapted to the screen as provocatively as Othello has in the last twenty years” (Cartelli and Rowe 120). By way of an introduction to the politics of adaptation that inevitably inform Vishal Bhardwaj’s Bollywood Othello, I will therefore briefly touch on previous film versions of Shake speare’s play. While Orson Welles’ Othello (1952) has been described as diminishing Othello’s blackness through its blackandwhite film noir ap proach, Laurence Olivier’s Othello (1965) had to face severe criticism be cause of its “quite appalling projection of racist stereotypes” (Aebischer 62): his Othello is visibly othered by a thick layer of black makeup, an ‘African’ voice, rolling eyes, a West Indian accent, “a vulgar, openmouthed, lip smacking laugh, and an inclination to sensuality” (Aebischer 62f.).1 It is of much more than anecdotal value that this Othello quite literally blackens

1 Neil Taylor quotes from Olivier’s On Acting (1986) to illustrate that Olivier’s “own concep tion of ‘being black’ required him to ‘be beautiful’, to develop a deep sensuous voice (‘dark violet – velvet stuff’), to speak with an accent and to walk ‘like a soft black leopard’” (Tay lor 269).

224 Susanne Gruss dead Desdemona when some of his makeup smudges her during his final monologue (cf. Aebischer 63). Although Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995) was the first highbudget adaptation of the play with a black actor as the lead, the film has similarly been criticised as racist. Advertised by the director as an ‘erotic thriller’ (cf. Rosenthal 178), the film makes extensive use of Laurence Fishburne’s corporeality; the moor is eroticised and exoticised through the use of jewellery and, more importantly, tattoos. The exploitative gaze on Othello’s body, Deborah Cartmell points out, “reinforces a racial stereotype” (Cartmell 77). Several critics have identified Kenneth Branagh’s Iago as the ‘real hero’ of this adaptation, the “wielder of the racist and misogynist gaze that has reduced Othello and Desdemona to their physicality and disabling ‘otherness’” (Aebischer 69). The most recent Hollywood adaptation of Othello that I am aware of is Tim Blake Nelson’s ‘O’ (2001), an American highschool Othello that casts the moor as a basketball whizz kid, who, be cause of his sporting genius, is granted a scholarship at a white elite prep school in the USAmerican South. Even though it focuses on an analysis of teen violence, the film is similar to Parker’s Othello in its depiction of a ra cialised sexuality; both Othello and ‘O’ are therefore “most readily under stood as reflections on the shifting and uneven processes of the formation of racial identities” (Thornton Burnett 68). Othello has thus often been used to shed light on contemporary – and in these cases American – issues of race and violence. As the examples I have mentioned demonstrate, it is especially Othello’s blackness2 and what has often been identified as the latent (or blatant, depending on the critic’s point of view) racism and misogyny of the play that make screen adaptations a challenge. As Shakespeare’s plot “requires the gifted black protagonist to devolve once again to murder, [each production] locks these films into a storyline that suggests racial stereotypes are inevitably selffulfilling. In dif ferent ways, each prompts the question: can Othello be successfully updated? and what would success mean if it could?” (Cartelli and Rowe 120) If Othello therefore “remains haunted by its own cultural history” (Cartelli and Rowe 123), what does it mean when the play is turned into an Indian film adhering to the principles of Bollywood? In this essay, I will delineate how Vishal Bhardwaj creates a unique cultural hybrid from Shakespeare’s text. His Omkara (2006) convincingly integrates the bard’s text into the conven tions of Indian popular cinema, but at the same time also crucially alters these conventions through its revision of Othello; as I will show, Omkara appropriates both Shakespeare’s play and the conventions of the Bollywood ‘filmi’ in order to create a contemporary Othello with a truly international

2 See, for example, Hailey Rippey, who points out that Othello “embodies the simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from blackness as a sexual image” (Hailey Rippey 26).