From Race and Orientalism in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Caste and Indigenous Otherness on the Indian Screen

Abstract

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.