The article discusses an Indian film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream entitled 10ml Love (dir. Sharat Katariya, 2012). There is little scholarship on 10ml Love, which has been studied mainly as an independent film in Hinglish that depicts the lives of the cosmopolitan youth in urban India. Drawing upon recent readings of the play that identify elements of racism and whiteness as well as an analysis from an Orientalist lens that sees India as a gendered utopia, I suggest that the film adaptation highlights not racial/white supremacy but caste supremacy; furthermore, it indulges not in Orientalist tropes but tropes of indigenous Otherness based on religion, gender, caste, and class. I argue that this film presents two opposing political utopias—a right-wing utopia that stands for the maintenance of traditional values and a left-wing utopia that attempts to challenge, question, and subvert the conservative order. However, 10ml Love seems to endorse neither of the two utopias wholly; its reality appears to lie between the two utopias, a reality that is marked by stereotypes of Otherness. This paper analyses the audio-visual depiction of the tension between the utopias at both the ends of the political spectrum, as well as the realities of Otherness created by the presence of various social locations and identities in Indian society.
While Indian cinematic adaptations that attempt to recreate William Shakespeare’s Othello have received scholarly attention, practically no work has been done on films that make fleeting references to the source text while questioning its authority. This article aims to fill the gap by presenting two Hindi-language postcolonial adaptations, namely Izzat (1968) and Aastha (1997), that can be read as anti-Othello films. They challenge Shakespeare’s status as a colonial icon in independent India by terming his works as ‘rotting feudal tales’ and by subverting Othello’s murder of Desdemona. However, although men of ‘low’, mixed or ambiguous origins do not kill their wives in these two adaptations, both films still depict the marginalization of caste, class and gender Others. This article will study the tension between these on-screen Others and the anti-Othello stance.
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