Trespassing on Sacred Ground: The Politics of Religion in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool 

Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj’s Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet—Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014) respectively—use Shakespeare’s tragedies as lenses through which to view the religious and political conflicts of post-1947 India. Rather than embrace a secularized national identity, as do many Bollywood films, these three films explicitly depict the religious practices and experiences of the two most prominent religions in India, Hinduism and Islam. Maqbool focuses on a predominantly Muslim community of gangsters in Mumbai; Omkara examines caste system prejudices amongst a group of criminals and politicians whose social roles are interchangeable; and Haider deals with the suffering of the mainly Muslim population of the Kashmir Valley at the hands of the occupying Indian military as well as Pakistani and home-grown militants. Clearly, there are provocative intersections between the religious followers and their praxis throughout all three films; however, as I have written of Haider and Omkara elsewhere (see Croteau “Ancient” and “Bollywood”), this piece explores his first compelling Shakespeare adaptation: Maqbool. Key religious elements are used to provide crucial impetus and emphasis in the narrative of Maqbool, which, while focusing ostensibly on human interrelationships, explores potent overarching issues surrounding religious devotion and conflict—and their complex relationship to all sorts of politics—in contemporary India.

As other adapters of Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy Macbeth have done, Vishal Bhardwaj sets his 2003 film Maqbool in the context of a criminal mob syndicate. As is typical in Bollywood, the Mumbai “mob” that is the focus of the film is Muslim…