I Am Not What I Am: Iago and Langda’s Motivations in 'Othello' and 'Omkara' Ryan Brady College

After four hundred years of being performed on innumerable stages and cinema screens across the globe, Shakespeare’s Othello, with its many instances of jealousy, racism, and misogyny, remains a remarkably relevant play. As a result, it has been frequently adapted and translated into a variety of contexts, some of which have been vastly different from that of the original source material. Take, for example, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2006 film Omkara, which takes Shakespeare’s seminal text and sets it in the colorful and politically corrupt world of contemporary India. Bhardwaj’s adaptation achieves the unique combination of cathartic melodrama, chaotic action sequences, and carefully choreographed music numbers characteristic of the prototypical Bollywood film whilst simultaneously maintaining the oppressive, earthy atmosphere of Shakespeare’s monumental tragedy. However, for all its faithfulness and adherence to the essence of Shakespeare’s text, Omkara is a radically different beast. This is perhaps most apparent in Saif Ali Khan’s portrayal of Iago (renamed “Langda” in Bhardwaj’s film), the vengeful and capricious figure responsible for most—if not all—of the suffering in the play: whereas the motives of Shakespeare’s Iago are often...