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Criticism

Something’s Rotten in Kashmir: Postcolonial Ambivalence and the War on Terror in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider

ABSTRACT

Haider, the terminal film in Vishal Bhardwaj's Indian Shakespeare trilogy, reconfigures Hamlet in the context of Indian-occupied Kashmir. Haider, tethers Shakespeare's play to contemporary geopolitical issues destabilizing the Indian subcontinent, the uneasy and anxious location of Kashmir within the Indian national and political imaginary. Drawing on the turmoil of the nativist insurgency and Indian government sponsored counter-insurgency, which literally turned brother against brother, Bhardwaj's aptly pivots to Hamlet as the vehicle through which to represent the conflict. While Bhardwaj's adaptation offers a compelling meditation on the ways in which postcolonial adaptations of Shakespeare can interrogate the very notion of postcoloniality, particularly when portraying a state—Kashmir—of ongoing colonial contest and violence, Haider is further complicated, I argue here, by its ambivalent participation in “War on Terror culture,” which demands a certain pathologically violent depiction of Muslim identity and in which the film eagerly and easily traffics.

Haider (2014), the terminal film in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Indian Shakespeare trilogy, reconfigures Hamlet in the context of Indian-occupied Kashmir. Following the director’s Bollywood takes on Macbeth in Maqbool (2003) and Othello in Omkara (2006), Haider, tethers Shakespeare’s play to contemporary geopolitical issues destabilizing the Indian subcontinent, the uneasy and anxious location of Kashmir within the Indian national and political imaginary.1 Based on Hamlet and Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night, the film depicts the mid-1990s Kashmiri Muslim uprising against the occupation and its occupying force, the Indian military. Drawing on the turmoil of the nativist insurgency and Indian government-sponsored counter-insurgency, which literally turned brother against brother, Bhardwaj aptly pivots to Hamlet as the vehicle through which to represent this conflict. At its most basic distillation, Shakespeare’s play is a family romance of jealousy, frustration, betrayal, and unlicensed desire, against which the affairs of state, lurking in the background, can seem little more than an irritating nuisance.2 Bhardwaj nimbly yokes the two duelling plots of Hamlet in his Haider via the temporal and geographic registers he mobilizes for his adaptation. The contested and explosive locus of Kashmir enmeshes the personal with the political and the political with the personal within a dense network of relations which makes extricating their discrete threads virtually impossible. The violence and clandestine machinations of the political sphere bleed into, distort, and inform the intimacy of the domestic and familial arena. The constant state of war in Kashmir – ongoing since 1948 – is simultaneously without and within, with no escape possible, as the eponymous Haider signals, “Poora Kashmir ek quaidkhana hai (all of Kashmir is a prison)”.3 While Bhardwaj’s adaptation offers a compelling meditation on the ways in which postcolonial adaptations of Shakespeare can interrogate the very notion of postcoloniality, particularly when portraying a state – Kashmir – of ongoing colonial contest and violence, Haider is further complicated, I argue here, by its ambivalent participation in “War on Terror culture”, which demands a certain pathologically violent depiction of Muslim identity and in which the film eagerly and easily traffics. While extreme violence appears to be common currency for “both sides”, of the conflict, what the global War on Terror has successfully communicated is that violence can be grafted onto Muslim identity, thereby anticipating and justifying the extrajudicial violence deployed against Muslims. In this article I explore how Haider destabilizes national identity politics, agency and personal and political freedom within political, familial, and patriarchal geographies that are simultaneously under assault and being renegotiated by the military and cultural dominance of the oppressor, the Indian nation-state and its agents.

As an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the narrative in Haider treads familiar ground: the untimely disappearance of the father recalling the son home to find that his family is sundered not only by the loss of the patriarch but also the insertion of his uncle into that domain of power and authority. These recognizable familial ruins function as the foundation upon which Bhardwaj builds and deviates from his source. While there are the requisite analogues to many of the characters: Ghazala as Gertrude, Khurram as Claudius, Arshia as both Horatio and Ophelia, Liaquat, “Lucky” as Laertes, and the ingenious comic construction of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the Salmans (who style themselves after 90s Bollywood heartthrob Salman Khan), the unfolding of the plot and the construction of our tragic protagonist deviate considerably from the source. Unlike in Hamlet, where the Ghost’s appearance frames the action of the first scene and establishes the telos of personal revenge generically mandated by the play, Bhardwaj delays – Hamlet-like – in introducing not only this theme but also its harbinger, the spirit-named Roohdar. Bhardwaj’s embodiment of what in Shakespeare remains the province of the spectral, follows the logic of the film, which eschews the internal, meditative, and, here, supernatural for the corporeal because of its investment in the body, its pain, and the physical and material violence it can be made to endure. The film’s narrative delay allows the audience to know Haider outside of the context of the revenge mandated by the murdered father – the confirmation of whose death is similarly deferred – to see him struggle with his grief and pain and to marshal those emotions into action to find answers to his father’s disappeared status. Haider, unlike his prototype, becomes a man of action and resolve, one who challenges the violence of the state not by matching that violence in militancy but through socially sanctioned modes of political protest and resistance that allow the oppressed the space to speak of their oppression. After the appearance of Roohdar, whose reliability for Haider lies in his ability to confirm through poetry his relationship with Hilal Meer, Haider’s disappeared father, and who provides confirmation of Hilal Meer’s murder by the Indian armed forces, the narrative swiftly realigns with its source, with Haider falling to an “antic disposition”, confronting his uncle-father in “the mousetrap”, and culminating in the spectacularly explosive finale, from which, in another deviation from the source, Haider is able to walk away because his mother, Ghazala, becomes the violent and bloody architect of his freedom.

It behoves anyone who writes about Haider to offer pertinent historical context for the film’s geopolitical terrain. The narrative leans quite heavily on the historical and affective registers conjured by the time and place of its Kashmiri setting. Indeed, we might even say that the real spirit haunting the film is that of the geography’s aborted yet ongoing quest for freedom, aazadi. Emerging from the trauma of partition in 1947, which forcefully rent the Indian subcontinent into two nation states: India and Pakistan, Indian-occupied Kashmir continues to remain a casualty of that political and geographic wound. Its own promise of aazadi and its political identity dependent upon the whims of its more powerful would be claimants. Kashmir, itself, is a remnant and reminder – Ghost-like – of the failure of the British imperial policy to successfully, morally, and ethically divest itself of the so-called jewel in its imperial crown. Within the postcolonial reality and history of the subcontinent, Kashmir remains a colonized and occupied geography, its postcoloniality indefinitely deferred and denied. At the time of independence from British colonial rule, the state of Jammu and Kashmir remained an independent principality, yet after tribal incursions into its territory from Pakistani Muslims, the princely state came under Indian protectorship on the condition that the plebiscite would be offered the population, who could then choose which nation-state to belong to (Akthar 45–47). The plebiscite, however, was never held and “was declared out of the question by Nehru after 1954, a policy stance that Delhi has persisted with ever since, all the while unilaterally integrating Kashmir into the Indian union” (Shankar 1–2). After the 1948 war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the northern border between the two nations, known as the Line of Control (LOC), “divide[d] Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir from Azad [free] Kashmir, its Pakistan-administered counterpart” (Kabir 7). The LOC is a live border, marking the disputed territory that each nation considers its own, while also signalling what each nation considers occupied illegitimately by the other: the LOC “marks the limit of both the nation-states concerned. But these limits themselves remain unclear” (Kabir 7). Both this armed border and the heavily militarized occupation of Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian military underscore the region’s colonialized position and are a constitutive feature of Haider.

Bhardwaj chooses a particularly tense period in the recent history of Kashmir, in which to locate Haider, the uprisings of the mid-1990s, which were preceded by armed demands for freedom in 1989. As Ananya Kabir signals in Territory of Desire, the earlier clashes resulted in the paranoid and suffocating security state, which Bhardwaj accesses in Haider:

Announcing itself in Srinagar, the Kashmiri demand for aazadi was made through Kalashnikovs, grenades and bombs, kidnappings, mass demonstrations, and other materializations of revolutionary violence. This moment was to pass, however. The Indian nation-state swiftly rolled out its own apparatus of discipline and punishment, and Jammu and Kashmir soon acquired the dubious distinction of becoming the world’s most heavily militarized zone. Everyday reality was radically altered through “crackdowns”, “bunkers”, “militants”, “surrendered militants”, and a whole gamut of military and paramilitary regimens. Self-styled Kashmiri militants crossed and recrossed the LOC, obtaining training and support from camps in Azad Kashmir and beyond. Non-Kashmiri mujahideen also crossed over from Afghanistan to join the struggle in the name of Islam. Disappeared youth, raped women, intracommunal breakdown, interrupted childhoods, traumatized soldiers, and above all the thickness of rumour turned the region into a veritable “space of death”. (9–10)

Kabir’s description of the state of emergency in Kashmir exposes the overwhelming violence through which Kashmiri calls for freedom were articulated and the even greater violence with which they were met by the Indian nation-state and its armed forces. Moreover, Kabir demonstrates how Kashmiri attempts at independence were aided and abetted by outside agents, such as Pakistan and even Afghani freedom fighters, so-called jihadists. Most significant is the violence affecting the native population which frames Kabir’s excursus, “the kidnappings” and “bombs”, as well as the “disappeared youth” and “raped women”. Violence in Kashmir is both internal and external, it is endemic, transforming the locale into a grave site. Haider adeptly inhabits the Kashmir of Kabir’s catalogue and its psychosocial aftermath, beginning not with the cause of the militarization, but exposing its subsequent conspiracy-driven claustrophobia and terror.4 Indeed, the expository scenes of the first few minutes of the film, suggest the pervasive danger of the locale through its tight shots of Hilal Meer walking through narrow alleyways followed by a group of armed militants, which then open to a wide shot of the compound he enters that has similarly armed militants manning the gates and patrolling the roof. Unlike many of its Hindi-film predecessors, Haider subordinates the geographic splendour of the Kashmiri landscape to the military and political disaster endured by the native inhabitants of the land.5 It is precisely this restricted focus on the political that allows the film to elicit sympathy for the people caught up in judicial and extra-judicial violence and, paradoxically, tether that violence to Muslims.

In addition to the symbolic freight bourn by Haider’s geography, the religious affiliation of its inhabitants is similarly loaded, informing both the plot and its representation of identity. Islam, violence, militants, and jihad are terms often used in intimate proximity, especially in the age of terror and terrorism instantiated by the United States War on Terror in the wake of 9/11. While both the geopolitical conflict in Kashmir and the insurgency of the mid-1990s highlighted in the film predate the United States’ ongoing military action, the idiom of the War on Terror offers us an optic through which to simultaneously frame and interrogate the film’s representation of Islam and Muslims through the figures of militants, foreign agents, and jihadists. Haider stations the Kashmiri struggle for independence and ever-present violence in Muslim bodies suggesting a pathology that “War on Terror” media access to otherize and to delegitimize Muslim resistance to occupation and oppression. Writing about the coverage of Islam in US media, Edward Said points out that “Islam” functions as a convenient shorthand through which everything undesirable about Muslims and the so-called “Islamic World”, can be simultaneously explained and delegitimized: “there is a consensus on “Islam” as a kind of scapegoat for everything we do not happen to like about the world’s new political, social, and economic patterns” (xv). In the context of “War on Terror culture”, the real political and social injustices that motivate violence never have to be addressed as long as the fact of “Islam”, Muslims, and unlicensed, non-state violence can be demonstrated, amplified, and responded to by “the other side” in equal or greater measure. I borrow the term “War on Terror culture” from Moustafa Bayoumi who writes that this culture circumscribes the possibility of Muslim identity by always and only allowing it legibility in the context of the War on Terror and its violent extremism:

 War on Terror culture assumes that Muslims collectively are responsible for and sympathetic to all acts of violence by individual Muslims everywhere, unless and until they explicitly say otherwise. But even then their words are often doubted since Muslims are seen as doctrinally prone to lying and violence. If any Muslim commits a horrible act of violence, the action is automatically assumed to be a heinous political feat. […] War on Terror culture represents Muslims always and only through the War on Terror lens and never on their own terms. […] War on Terror culture promotes the seductive synergy of militarism and entertainment while rationalizing or ignoring the massive civilian death toll of the War on Terror. […] War on Terror culture is essentially the deep institutionalization of George W. Bush’s simplistic proclamation that “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”, as if there can be no other options, as if one can’t oppose the horrors that the War on Terror delivers and the murderous nihilism of terrorism simultaneously. (12–13)

The War on Terror has facilitated the construction and representation of Muslim identity in the US and globally through its own logics. Within its bounds, Muslims and Islam exist only in the context of this conflict. Their lives and identities are defined, reflected, and refracted through terrorist violence and their outsider and other status within the body politic. Muslims are, moreover, shorn of any kind of individual identity: they are always a collective, capable only of the kind of thinking and action predetermined by the lens of the War on Terror. Rather than naively mapping Bayoumi’s formulation to the Indian context, I suggest looking for affinities, particularly given the evolving nature and over-militarization of the Indian occupation of Kashmir and the charge both real and sometimes politically expedient that non-Kashmiri actors have infiltrated the geography to form a global or pan-Islamic alliance or jihad (Tavares 278). Whether we call it global counter-terrorism or “War on Terror culture”, India, like the US has found it politic to frame the discourse around Kashmir through the optic of terrorism, “India uses counter-terrorism as the foundation for bilateral collaboration, including military to military ties, which would otherwise be controversial. India offered the US bases, airfields and intelligence for the anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan” (Sasikumar 624). Indeed, just as we see geo-political actions and discourses reflected in popular culture in the US in shows like 24 and Homeland and films like Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper, India, too, has a long history, especially in film, of depicting the Kashmir conflict with terrorist or jihadist Muslims at its centre. Films such as Roja, LoC, Kargil, and Mission Kashmir conjure the Muslim bogeyman as a dangerous Other in narratives that yoke the sanctity of the nation-state to the successful resolution of patriarchal heterosexual romance.6 The threatening Muslim Other must be excised and is therefore always outside the corporate body of the nation.

To be sure, Haider is sympathetic to the plight of its Kashmiri Muslim populace and is not coy about portraying the violence of the Indian state in its efforts to quell independence movements and annihilate militant violence. The crackdown at the beginning of the film, that we later learn was designed to catch Hilal Meer for performing an appendectomy on a militant, and the subsequent firebombing of the Meer home disclose the utter powerlessness of the occupied populace in the face of the military force of the occupier. The discourse that justifies the occupation founders against the humanistic reasons that Hilal Meer offers for helping militants when Ghazala, his wife, asks, “kis taraf hai aap (what side are you on)” and he responds “zindagi ki (of life/humanity)”. The film further emphasizes the asymmetry of power inherent in the position of the Kashmiris under Indian occupation through its depiction of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” deployed by the Indian armed forces in their detention centre, MAMA II. I deliberately use the phrase, “enhanced interrogation”, not only because it reflects the Bush administration’s policies regarding the treatment of perceived terrorists in custody – and therefore an artifact from the War on Terror – but also because Brigadier T.S Murthy in answer to Arshia’s questioning about torture during his press conference, claims that “The Indian Army is one of the most disciplined armed forces in the world. We train our officers to interrogate and not torture”. His riposte is quickly revealed to be a semantic fiction, when juxtaposed with the graphic sights and sounds of torture being inflicted on the prisoners in MAMA II, which include beatings, disfigurement, and genital mutilation.

Like the clever wordplay that links US and Indian torture to the global War on Terror, these scenes have their analogue in the leaked photos of US troops torturing prisoners in the Abu Gharib prison in Iraq in 2004. The following is a summary of the abuses committed by US military officials drawn from Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report of his Article 15–6 investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade released on 30 April 2004:

  • Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet.

  • Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees.

  • Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing.

  • Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time.

  • Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear.

  • Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped.

  • Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them.

  • Positioning a naked detainee on a box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture.

  • Writing “I am a Rapest [sic]” on the leg of a detainee accused of rape, and then photographing him naked.

  • Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture.

  • A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee.

  • Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee.

  • Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.7

I quote these abuses at length because they expose the level of dehumanization enacted on Iraqi prisoners by US troops and to show how the mobilization of such schemes falls adroitly in line with the logics of the War on Terror. Writing about the pictures that catalogued the abuse at Abu Ghraib in Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, Ayanna Thompson provocatively links this incident to early modern theatrical performances and the racialized bodies they produced through violence and torture. Thompson reveals “the horrifying continuity of the desire to construct and control the racialized Other through staged scenes of violence”, yet maintains an awareness of the historical and cultural differences underpinning these moments (122). Bhardwaj similarly appropriates the visual idiom of the War on Terror represented by scenes of torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib detention facility. The brutal torture inflicted on the prisoners at MAMA II ranges from the simple act of keeping the lights on so that the prisoners cannot sleep, to maiming their limbs and electrocuting their genitals. These scenes of torture emphasize the cultural alterity of the Kashmiri Muslims from the Indian officers degrading them. Their alterity manifests through their religious difference from the Indian officers, which the film declines to underscore but is omnipresent in the fact of their Muslim identities. By rendering the Muslim lives grievable, Bhardwaj seems to offer a significant counterpoint to most “War on Terror culture”, representations, which position Muslim life as disposable. As Judith Butler argues in Frames of War, visual and discursive frames seek to control our experience of war, by cordoning off what and who should and should not be represented: “in targeting populations, war seeks to manage and form populations, distinguishing those lives to be preserved from those lives that are dispensable” (31). Such strategies affirm the value of some lives at the same time that they call attention to the disposability of the lives, societies, and cultures of those who are not represented. Building on the disposability of these lives, Butler claims that they are, in fact, “ungrievable”, which she further defines: “Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed” (34). Despite the sympathy, empathy, and grief elicited by Haider for the Kashmiri people caught in the web of its plot, before the credits roll, Bhardwaj inserts an epilogue screen card that notes: “in the last two decades, thousands of lives have been lost in the Kashmir conflict”. The use of passive voice here as well as the erasure of the cause of these lost lives obfuscate the scale of death and violence that can be attributed to the Indian state and its army. Moreover, another card “salutes” and “valorizes” the Indian Army for their efforts in Kashmir during “recent floods”. Such maneuvers, slight and small as they might seem, when coupled with the retreat of the occupying forces from the narrative after the appearance of Roohdar signal the film’s ambivalent relation not only to the occupation but also to the War on Terror culture which the film exploits.

Within this narrative of religious violence, extremism, the security state, and the postcolonial-colonized state of Kashmir in Haider, what role do we allocate William Shakespeare’s Hamlet? What authoritative, hegemonic, or subversive position might the playwright and play serve in the context Bhardwaj presents? Kashmiri geo-politics and the psychosocial anxieties they generate and foster leave scant room in Haider for the revenge and ruminations mandated by its source. Indeed, the deferral of the Hamlet narrative in the first half of the film is seemingly of a piece with Hamlet’s own delay in following the Ghost’s murderous mandates, suggesting that the place of and for Shakespeare here is as a supplement. The spectral frame of Shakespeare facilitates the interrogation of India’s brutal occupation of Kashmir. Of particular use to Bhardwaj is Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be”, which becomes a recurring motif through which the film investigates the arrested and unsatisfactorily static political position of Kashmir and the identity of Kashmiris. Appearing in its most substantive form in Haider’s antic monologue after he has learned about his uncle’s hand in disappearing his father, the confirmation of his father’s death after detention in MAMA II, and his mother’s complicity in his father’s downfall. His monologue takes place in Srinagar’s Lalchowk, or red square, an important site in the Kashmiri political resistance (Taneja 48–52). Here, a newly shorn Haider, dressed as a kind of harlequin, with a threadbare blazer over his kurta, a boom box strapped to his body, and a noose around his neck provocatively asks,

Hum hain ya hum nahin; Hum hain to kahan hai aur nahin to kahan gaye; Hum hain to kis liye aur kahan gaye to kaab, hain na; Hum the bhi ya the hi nahin. Chutzpah ho gaya hamare saath.

(Do we exist or do we not; If we exist then where do we exist; if not then where did we go? If we exist then for what purpose? If we disappeared then when? Right? Did we exist or did we not? We are the victims of chutzpah.)

As he explains chutzpah to his audience, which he mispronounces, punning perhaps on the obscenity it conveys in Hindi, Haider defines chutzpah as “besharam gustaakh jaise Afspa (shameless insolence, like AFSPA)”, that is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which essentially grants the Indian military unlimited power to maintain public order in disturbed areas (Taneja 51–2). The unchecked power of this Act allows the military to disappear, maim, and kill anyone they deem to be dangerous. The chutzpah of AFSPA, like that of the security state, lies it the protean quality of the power it appropriates for itself. Unlike Hamlet’s meditation on what follows after “we have shuffled off this mortal coil”, Haider’s catechism, here, slips from the personal to the political register transmitting the state of uncertainty that the “state of emergency” in Kashmir has fomented. Shakespeare’s language offers utility insofar as his poetic idiom encodes Haider’s resistance within a recognizable schema. The existential problem with which Hamlet wrestles subtends Haider’s speech yet that problem is about the dislocation and erasure of Kashmir and Kashmiri identity.

The other allusion to Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, however, seems to disrupt the film’s initial deployment within the network of its political imaginary by locating it firmly in Haider’s own personal turmoil about who and what to believe. Haider’s faith in the veracity of Roohdar’s words and his ventriloquized paternal command to murder Khurram for his betrayal is vexed by Khurram’s own revelations about Roohdar’s status as an undercover Pakistani intelligence officer. Torn between his many and replicating father figures, the wronged poet-father, the vengeful ghost-father, and the incestuous uncle-father, Haider struggles to untangle the complex web of lies, deceit, and political intrigue in which he is ruthlessly enmeshed. In the comforting arms of his lover, Arshia, Haider contemplates the truths and lies he is being prescribed, “Shaq pe hai yakeen to yakeen pe hai shaq muje (If suspicion is taken as truth, then the truth is also suspicious to me)”. Haider continues to employ antithesis to finally arrive at his fatal question: “Kiska juth juth hai; kiska sach me sach nahin; hai ke hai nahin; bas yehi sawal hai; aur sawal ka jawab bhi sawal hai […] jaan loon ke jaan don; main rahun ke main nahin, (whose lie is a lie; whose truth is not true; is it or isn’t it; enough. That is the question and the answer to the question is also a question. […] Should I take my life or should I give it. Should I live or die)” The film reinforces the turn from the political to the personal by shifting the tone and scene to the private intimate world of the doomed lovers, who have recuperated a space for themselves amid the chaos of the external world of politics, militants, and the occupation. The move further affirms the film’s interest from this point on in the personal revenge Haider seeks, rather than the politically contingent and arrested state of Jammu and Kashmir under occupation.

The film’s transition from the plight of the oppressed under an unjust occupation to personal, familial vengeance – inteqaam – premised on the plot development of the Shakespearean source, expunges the radical political possibilities inherent in that same source. The revenge play, after all, ushers in a new regime at its conclusion, freeing the polity from the corruption and chains of the past. The end of Haider, however, fragments that possibility, eschewing the mandates of genre, patriarchal command, and militancy, preferring instead obeisance to the maternal will to live. In a radical move of its own, the film makes Ghazala the agent of Haider’s aazadi, freedom, by having her assume the mantle and suicide vest of revenger and militant, and destroy herself, Khurram, and his lackeys. While on the surface that might seem laudable and offer hopeful escape from the unending cycle of revenge, it simultaneously maintains the status quo in Kashmir, leaving unchanged and marginally challenged the authority of the Indian state. In other words, the film’s transformation of political resistance into personal revenge upholds the power of the occupier – no matter the level of critique aimed at the Indian state or the sympathy solicited for the persecuted Kashmiri populace. To render the conflict in Kashmir as personal revenge, as a family squabble between brothers, reincribes resistance within the familiar ideologies imposed by the Indian state which configures in its ideological and political maps Jammu and Kashmir as the head of its national political body (Kabir 8). The only resistance the film poses to the traditional tropes of Kashmir is its focus on the helplessness of the Kashmiri people and by highlighting of the brutal violence of the Indian army. In other ways, the revenge drama works to destabilize and depoliticize Kashmiri resistance. Power remains in the hands of those who do not hesitate to ruthlessly wield it. To settle on, in the end, the notion that the excessive and illegitimate (given the occupation and lack of plebiscite) force of the occupier can only be met by the disavowal of violence by the occupied does not recognize the fear, anger, humiliation, and degradation of life suffered by the oppressed. It expects only and always for the oppressed to show greater humanity than their oppressors. It offers an illusion of peace – and only on the terms dictated by the occupier.

To investigate the contours of the nation, identity, and Shakespeare in Haider means acknowledging the ways that the film’s own provocation, in its use of a colonized, heavily-militarized, religiously-othered, and contested geography necessitates its ambivalence toward both Shakespeare and Kashmir. While not as deeply meditative or interior as its source, Haider succeeds in querying the symbolic, affective, and subjective value of nation or “imagined community” in a locale denied the possibility of such identity and belonging.8 To depict Shakespeare’s Hamlet through Kashmir is to subordinate that national, global, and imperial figure and canon to the ethical, political, and personal conditions of life in the Kashmir valley and its occupied, besieged, and globally ignored status. It is simultaneously to acknowledge how the logics of the War on Terror have facilitated the secondary status of Kashmir on the global stage because Muslim identity serves to legitimize state violence against it. Shakespeare here functions as a contact zone. The cultural capital and cache that accrues to Hamlet facilitates Haider’s depiction of the brutal and degrading reality of Kashmiri existence under Indian occupation. It remains for us to ask what ethical dimension inheres to our inquiry of this object because our critical interest in this film is eclipsed in all ways by the stark material reality of the lives of the Kashmiri people living under Indian occupation. Our inquiry must also, I believe, contribute in some way to advocating for their freedom, dignity, and humanity. Since August 2019, the people of Jammu and Kashmir have been under a severe lockdown, initiated by the current government’s encroachment on Kashmiri rights and land sovereignty by revoking Article 370 of the constitution and the ensuing native unrest.9 What are our obligations, as teachers and scholars of Shakespeare who might approach this film as an artifact of the global Shakespeare industry? In what ways do our inquiries, that focus on the aesthetic dimension of this object while obscuring or ignoring the material reality upon which it is based, reproduce asymmetrical relations of power and domination? We must consider our own imperial position vis-à-vis this work, just as we do Shakespeare’s. Hamlet asks “To be or not to be”, to which Haider responds “To be and not to be”. Through such reconfigurations Bhardwaj demonstrates the plasticity of Shakespeare in other, global, particular, local, indigenous, and national contexts.10 Bhardwaj extends his manipulation of Hamlet to the end by having Haider abstain from murdering his uncle and abandon the bloody spectacle of and geography of death that is the graveyard and by extension Indian occupied Kashmir. Yet, as the closing titles and the ruby blood marring the pristine snow attest, the Indian nation state’s vise-like grip on this geography and the presence of the Indian army endures. Kashmir remains in stasis, trapped by the conjunction of “to be and not to be”.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In her review of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Indian Shakespeare trilogy, Rodgers notes about Haider that this film, unlike Maqbool and Omkara, “foregrounds its cultural context […] that pushes Shakespeare into the penumbra of history” (503). Mindful of Trivedi and Chakravarti’s caution in their Introduction that Indian Shakespeare possesses a more capacious cultural and linguistic character than that indicated by the popular term Bollywood, I use it here because of its applicability to Bhardwaj’s oeuvre in terms of the genre he employs, particularly for Haider as a Kashmir film and to the Hindi cinema actors/superstars embodying his characters.

2 For more on Hamlet’s geopolitics see Kiséry, Dutton, and Fitzmaurice.

3 Taneja points out the constant state of war, conflict, and militarization of the region since the subcontinent’s independence from Britain in 1947 (46). Kabir similarly notes that “barely six months into independence, in early 1948 […] India and Pakistan fought their first of four wars over territory, all of which have involved, directly or indirectly, Jammu and Kashmir” (6). All translations of the dialogue in Haider are those of the author.

4 In his study of Haider, Cartelli fleshes out the religious roots of the violence in Kashmir which the film seems to obscure (136).

5 The first chapter of Kabir’s Territory of Desire, “Masks of Desire”, analyzes the Indian film tradition of using Kashmir as a setting through which to articulate national subjectivity. Kashmir becomes a geography through which the Indian nation, then, can imagine its own wholeness and postcolonial identity (31–53).

6 See Kabir, chapter 1, “Masks of Desire”.

7 The summary is taken from CNN Editorial Research.

8 For more on Haider and affect see Singh. Recent publications on Haider and its local and postcolonial context include Banerjee, Croteau, Mookherjee, Sarkar “Haider” and “Hariraj”.

9 See, for example, the coverage on BBC: “Article 370: What Happened in Kashmir and Why it Matters”, BBC News, 5 August, 2019.

10 For more on indigeneity in Haider see Young and Cartelli.

Works Cited

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