Confessions of the half-caste, or wheeling strangers of here and everywhere

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 gender-based 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.