Nuancing the Negative: The Significance of the Nuanced Portrayal of Shakespearean Villains in Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara and Haider

Abstract

This article looks at how the characters who play the role of Shakespeare's villains are constructed differently in Vishal Bhardwaj's two Hindi movie versions of Othello and Hamlet, called Omkara and Haider, respectively; and what implications this has for using Shakespeare's works in a postcolonial context. Both of Bhardwaj's films are based closely on their respective source texts: Othello (the basis for Omkara) and Hamlet (the basis for Haider); however, in contrast to Shakespeare's classical villains that can be defined by their evilness or their evil deeds, Bhardwaj's villains represent evolved characters, whose motivations are historically determined, multilayered with psychological scrutiny, and culturally embedded. The theories of narrative desire by Langdon Elsbree, Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence, and postcolonial re-adaptation theories articulated by Julie Sanders and Ania Loomba provide the main theoretical framework in this study. The article argues that Bhardwaj's villains—most notably Langda Tyagi (the Iago character in Omkara) and Khurram (the Claudius character in Haider)—cannot be classified as purely good or purely evil because they share socioeconomic issues, are from different regions of India, and are existing within differing political climates. In this sense, Bhardwaj's films re-contextualize the villainous trope from being a means of defining theatricality to being an important place for examining issues of caste and nationality, as well as to examine the impact of colonialism on contemporary India. This article concludes that Bhardwaj's use of "nuancing" in the portrayal of these antagonistic characters encourages the audience to view themselves as responsible for the structures that create these types of individuals. The author concludes that this use of nuance is the most significant departure from and contribution to the Shakespearean canon made by Bhardwaj's films.