Haider: A politically neutered film

This film cannot have had a Kashmiri audience in mind; this is made clear by the three messages that roll out with the end credits. If anything, those three messages make Haider a politically neutered film.

Message one: “thousands of lives have been lost in the Kashmir conflict”. Don’t Kashmiris already know it? Furthermore, there is no attempt to isolate civilian casualties whether through death, disappearances, or, generations lost to infantile disorders, psychological traumas and other lifelong disabilities. The soldiers and the non-combatants killed are merged in one indistinguishable statement of mortality, forgetting that one lot died to impose the writ of an occupying power and the other to defend their right to self-determination. Message two: things were bad in 1995 (the year in which the film is set with no reason given for the selection of that particular year) but now there is “improvement”, measured by the increase in tourist traffic. How many times have Kashmiris had to measure the “normality” of their lives according to that one gauge against which their truths have so often been miscalibrated? How much of this increased traffic forms the jingoistic armed forces-aided pilgrimages that do so much damage to the delicate environment of the Valley? How much of this tourist traffic is associated with the insistence by Indians on their “right” to visit war-ravaged Kashmir? The third message, predictable, given the timing of the film’s release, was about the valiant rescue of flood-afflicted Kashmiris by the Indian army. Not a word is said about the rescue efforts of Kashmiris themselves who were left at the mercy of an unprepared state. At the end of the film, then, we have something like an apology to the mainstream Indian narrative for any excesses that might have been committed in this film’s telling of Kashmir. This sounds like more of the usual: speaking about Kashmiris but above their heads. 

This film is certainly set against the conditions of militant insurgency in the Valley in 1995. But nowhere do those conditions form more than a backdrop for Haider’s angst-ridden antics — for they are, as told, the antics of a “lost boy” (that begin with the morose figure in the bus to the contradictory figure who refuses till the end to kill his uncle). That is barring one instance when combating insurgency provides the instrument — a “crackdown” — to do away with Dr Meer, Haider’s father. Other than that, everything associated with the militant protest of Kashmiris, both violent and non-violent, would have been equally well-served simply by showing clips of Indian newsreaders detailing in anodyne fashion the facts we are used to hearing when they become unavoidable reality. The film seems in a thirsty rush to fill in the gaps left behind by many films based in/on Kashmir that Bollywood has made in the last quarter of a century and more; they have tended to tell either the story of a landscape without a people in the Valley or about India’s valorous war to prevent its vivisection by opprobrious Pakistani agents. 

This is not to say that the effort to restore the ugliness of counter-insurgency to filmland’s Kashmir is not laudable. However, Haider only seems to produce a predictable laundry-list to be ticked off quickly and as convincingly as possible in the time allotted: let’s show cordon-and-search operations/crackdowns, disappearances, unmarked graves, interrogation centres code-named eerily familial, the repeated humiliation of the identity-checking of Kashmiris. Yes, they’re all there. Even thrown in is the board at an army camp that proclaims “let’s get them by the balls, hearts and minds will follow”. Everything that hit the news headlines since 2008 has been thrown into this masala mix. So are the bands, the folk performers. But they form no part in moving the story. They seem to provide the wash against which the lovely cinematography and the story of Haider assume lives, independent of Vishal Bhardwaj’s and Basharat Peer’s own. 

But the Bard spoke of Denmark as a “rotten state”. Where in this film do we really smell the stench of such a rotting state? At most there is a tiny whiff of malodour and that leaves us with the impression that it has been corrected — message two after all said that the “last few years of relative peace have renewed hope”. 

The portrayal of Ghazala, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude in the original, is of an ideologically untouched mother. One of the most vacant characters this film could have produced. She keeps proclaiming she is a half-widow while she has the privilege of becoming, except for the minor religio-legal hurdle soon overcome, a full-fledged wife. The only other person, other than a muculent brother-in-law, she cares for, is her son. And that son, unlike those of many mothers of the disappeared, is alive. How is one to derive sympathy for the half-widow, half-mother of Kashmir from what she represents? 

How many incarnations does the Mother figure take for Bollywood to bring to heel her recalcitrant son that is Kashmir? In a none-too-subtle allusion, the Mother here is tricked away from her loyalty to the high-minded, largely India-neutral husband to supporting the wrong 'un, the wheeler-dealer who, if not exactly pro-Pakistani, is one who might willingly make his pact with the devil. Tackily, with reference to resistance in a Muslim majority state, the mother resolves her “temporary” loss of her ethical moorings through nothing less than a suicide bombing. Can we get more stereotyping than that? But even more, she doesn’t stick by her lesson — that revenge only begets more revenge — as she blows up as many enemies as she can in her final act in the film. Seriously? A suicide bombing by a Kashmiri?

Moreover, the film cannot resist introducing the shadowy figure of the Pakistani agent provocateur. It is as if all of Haider’s anxiety about his father’s disappearance and death has no self-generative power but grows only through the manipulation of outside, viz Pakistani and pro-Pakistani separatist, forces — Roohdar, above all. In the end, of course, the Mother wins as Haider, rather than she, gives up the gun to leave his amputated uncle to die on his own. 

To end, if this adaptation of Hamlet had been set in let us say Rajasthan (where exoticised stories of feuds are plentiful enough to set up the fratricide), it might have done a better job of taking up the Bard in Indian context; that Shakespeare’s tragedy squeezes itself into the Valley and then pretends to throw in some understanding of the issues besetting the people of Kashmir simply turns the tragedy into a farce and Bhardwaj’s into yet more Bollywood flavoured spice. At the end of the day, Haider is made into the type of insurgent Kashmiri, the Centre in Delhi would like to speak to.

The author is Professor of History at Presidency University, Kolkata