“Cast[e]ing Shakespeare”

Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy is one of the most critically and commercially successful film adaptations of Shakespeare in twenty-first-century India. This chapter examines the first film from this sequence, Maqbool, his 2008 adaptation of Macbeth. I argue that Bhardwaj’s representations of disability in the film disclose shifting perceptions of race and caste within twenty-first-century India’s body politic in the wake of the BJP’s rise as India’s dominant political force. While race and caste are not identical social constructs, they are fundamentally entangled in a myriad of historical and cultural contexts. Using Eunjung Kim’s framework of “curative time” within neoliberal temporalities of ablenationalism, I discuss how Maqbool endorses earlier models of religious cosmopolitanism instituted by Gandhi but also codes India’s religious minorities as other through images of contamination, pollution, and disability. Maqbool’s complex positioning as social justice cinema both criticizes and partakes in the caste and disability formations of Hindutva narratives, as India increasingly shifts from its left-wing political roots towards a neoliberal, right-wing platform.