Confessions of the half-caste, or wheeling strangers of here and everywhere
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Confessions of the half-caste, or wheeling strangers of here and everywhere
Amrita Dhar Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
Abstract This essay reads two Othellos together – Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century play and Vishal Bhardwaj’s 21st-century film – to attend to the caste- and genderbased confessions that drive the plot of Omkara. Through close attention to selected scenes from the film, this work demonstrates that casteism, a phenomenon cemented by India’s colonial past and thus reflecting the subcontinent’s neo-colonial (instead of post-colonial) reality, along with entrenched misogyny and ableism, work together to precipitate the tragedy of Dolly and Omkara. In bringing these apparently distant texts together, and in its commitment to intersectional exploration of embodiment, this work is a deliberate exercise in such transtemporal and transcultural thinking that literary criticism should enable. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 212–219. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00171-y
1 All translations from the film’s Hindi are the author’s.
A slanting sun illuminates a red-earthed, hillock-dotted, starkly beautiful North Indian landscape as two men sit talking. Ishwar ‘Langda’ (literally, ‘the limping one’) Tyagi tells Rajan ‘Rajju’ Tiwari (who is dressed as a groom): ‘Teri dulhan ko adha-Bahman ’thake le ja rah’hai.’ [‘The half-Brahmin is taking away your bride.’]1 The statement is a provocation. To start with, Rajju (Roderigo) resists the bait offered by Langda (Iago). But Rajju knows immediately whom Langda means by that peculiar epithet, ‘adha-Bahman’ [‘half-Brahmin’]. ‘Omi Bhaiya?’
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 212–219
Confessions of the Half-Caste
he asks. This is how we first hear of the title character (Othello) of Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Omkara(Bhardwaj, 2006). This essay will attend to the caste- and gender-based confessions that drive the plot of Bhardwaj’s 21st-century film, even as it looks to Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century play alongside, to argue that the story of the Moor (in the play) and the half-caste (in the film) remains a place where the embodied realities of race, caste, gender, and disability meet a curious post-colonialism. I say ‘curious,’ because the reality of post-colonialism is neo-colonialism: a transfer of power such that the least enfranchised simply change masters. Caste hierarchies in the Indian subcontinent predate colonisation. Yet, it was the Raj that helped finesse a system of sociocultural discrimination into one of systematic disenfranchisement. As such, I assert that 21st-century casteism is not only a legacy of colonialism, but a thriving form of colonial thinking. Thence, I claim that Omkara’s perceived outcast-ness is a real function of his outcaste-ness, which, in turn, is locked into his patriarchal entitlement. My work is in conversation with the scholarship of Ania Loomba and Kim Hall
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