Primitive Certainty and Tragic Action: Post-Jungian Mechanisms in Omkara

The Criterion: An International Journal in English
ISSN: 0976-8165 | Impact Factor: 8.67 | Peer-Reviewed | Open Access
Film & Literature

Primitive Certainty and Tragic Action: Post-Jungian Mechanisms in Omkara

Salma Soleiman
Vol. 17, Issue 1February 2026Pages 776-789Article ID: 2026V17N1030

Abstract

This paper examines Omkara (2006), Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello, through a post-Jungian archetypal framework, focusing on how certainty—rather than jealousy—drives the film’s tragic violence. Drawing on Matthew M. Fike’s reading of primitive mentality in Othello, the study argues that Omkara stages a fetishistic displacement in which relational uncertainty is transferred onto a material object, the heirloom kamarbandh, which comes to function as incontrovertible proof. As projection and fetishism intensify, dialogue, testimony, ritual, and symbolic mediation collapse, giving way to action experienced as psychological necessity. Through cinematic elements such as objects, ritual disruption, and spatial motifs, Bhardwaj translates archaic psychic mechanisms into visual form. The paper concludes that Omkara radicalizes Shakespearean tragedy by presenting violence as the exhaustion of meaning produced by certainty itself.

Keywords

Othello, Omkara, Fetishism, Certainty, Psycholoanalysis, Violence.

How to Cite

Salma Soleiman. “Primitive Certainty and Tragic Action: Post-Jungian Mechanisms in Omkara.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 2026, pp. 776-789. ISSN: 0976-8165.

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