“To be or not to be”

Abstract

Indian Cinema fondly referred to as Bollywood, has remained the cultural barometer of the country while being a powerful medium of entertainment articulating contemporaneous societal and medical issues. Particularly, the portrayal of mental illnesses remains an interesting yet under-studied domain to-date. Initially projected as synonymous with madness or insanity, psychiatric conditions gradually metamorphosed to more rational screen reflection. This article analyses the portrayal of the mental illness in three Hindi feature films (Omkara (2006), Haider (2014), Maqbool (2003) by Vishal Bhardwaj) that were based on the screen adaptations of Shakespearean Tragedy namely Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth, respectively. Through this phenomenological deliberation, we discuss how these movies in their own style and expressions have embodied mental illness in a hitherto unexplored way. Using extended case studies, we qualitatively investigated how the spectrum of mental illness was depicted; how these representations operated within cinematic narratives; whether the characters presented as an ideal; and, how the idea of the mental illness was an important construct for rendering structures comprehensible according to commonly held cultural understandings. Overall, we found, mental illness representations were characterized by a multi-dimensional morality; accompanied by gloomy structures with social chaos. Such adaptation of Shakespeare in the Indian context brings to light how mental illnesses is still perceived in India.