The women of Omkara make it the crown jewel of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy

6 min readMumbaiJul 29, 2026 08:19 AM IST Omkara was released twenty years ago. Maqbool, it is. For millions, it will always be Vishal Bhardwaj’s feverish reimagining of Macbeth, with career-cementing performances by Irrfan and Tabu. And, arguably, rightly so. Maqbool was perhaps the trilogy’s boldest act of reinvention, while Haider remains its most searingly political work. But for me, it will always be Bhardwaj’s Moor of Meerut, Omkara. It is the one that has never loosened its grip on me. There is something inexhaustible about it, something that never stops becoming. It is the most cerebral, the most dramatically volatile, and, undoubtedly, the sexiest. Needless to say, it is Bhardwaj’s earthy re-imagining of Othello, where Venice gives way to the dust and violence of Uttar Pradesh, an