
The Criterion: An International Journal in English
Film & Literature
Primitive Certainty and Tragic Action: Post-Jungian Mechanisms in Omkara
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.
