Kashmir’s Timeless Hamlet

This story was published as part of Outlook Magazine's 'Future Tense' issue, dated October 11, 2024. To read more stories from the Issue, click here.

Around the halfway mark in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014), we enter Faraz Cinema. “Main hun diwaana tere pyaar ka, peecha na chhodunga tera,” sings Salman Khan, like a dutiful stalker, on screen. A wide shot shows the Indian Army officers, as viewers, enduring varied stages of boredom—some drinking, some sleeping, some barely awake. Then, a door opens, and convicts line up in front of the screen. An officer signals the projectionist to stop; the interrogation—or the real film—has to start.

This Hamlet adaptation, much like its setting, Kashmir, inverts conventions, mocks normalcy, and distorts identities. So a theatre, promising freedom from the captivity of mundane life, functions as a prison. The multiplicity of identities here isn’t just restricted to inanimate things. Because in the same theatre, Haider’s father, “Doctor” (Narendra Jha), notices an “aasteen ka saanp”—a man whom he considered bhai, Khurram (Kay Kay Menon), morphed into the Army’s informer—a brother turned betrayer. In a drama centred on a conflict-torn land, coveted by two countries, it makes poetic and perfect sense that dualities define Haider.

Consider its more literal example: the Army officials stopping and checking the IDs of regular Kashmiris, reminding them that they need permission to enter their own homes. Or making them feel, as a character says later, that “All of Kashmir is a prison”. These ID checks, even more than the Faraz Cinema scene, examine and extrapolate identity and duality, as the ‘correct’ documents make all the difference: between allowed and detained, insider and infiltrator, home and prison. Sometimes this diktat produces dark humour: A middle-aged man (played by Basharat Peer, the writer of the memoir Curfewed Nights, the movie’s other source material) stands in front of his house, frozen and lost, refusing to enter. It’s only when he’s mock checked that he feels ‘normal’ and resumes walking again. In another scene, while searching for his father, Haider (Shahid Kapoor) opens the door of a police truck and sees scores of dead bodies. Right then, a bloodied boy leaps out, screaming, “Thank God, I’m alive! Thank God, I’m alive!”

Existential dread suffuses Haider. Grieving the disappearance of his father, he transitions from son to sinner, poet to murderer, unable to differentiate the dualities stinging his mind: Has his father disappeared or died? Is he sane or insane? They converge in a searing soliloquy that doubles up as a paean to duality itself—absorbed by Hamlet, spat by Haider, written by Shakespeare, moulded by Bhardwaj—“Dil ki gar sunoon to hai, dimaag ki to hai nahin. Jaan loon, ke jaan doon? Main rahoon, ke main nahin? [to trust the surging beats of the heart or to heed the caution of the sober mind? To kill or to die? To be or not to be?].”

At least one more factor amplifies the dualities in Haider: Hamlet. Just see the introduction—and character—of Roohdar (Irrfan), the cinematic counterpart of the play’s ghost. The ominous hums segue into a throbbing background score, as a blurry figure emerges in the snow in a limp so poetic that it deserves to be a dance. Bhardwaj builds great ambiguity around Roohdar—does he exist, does he not? Is he a person or an apparition? And the actor relishes such scenes. After mock checking the middle-aged Kashmiri, Roohdar says it’s a “psychological disorder, called the new disease”. It impresses a local journalist (Shraddha Kapoor) who asks him, “Are you a doctor?” He tilts and smiles: “Main Doctor ki rooh hun [I’m the doctor’s soul].”

Sometimes the dualities, foreshadowing the protagonist’s ins­anity, are literal. Take an early scene, where Haider visits his house, which was bombed by the Indian Army. Where others see rubble, he sees home. He imagines snuggling up to his parents as a child; he sees himself polishing his father’s shoes; he remembers admiring his mother (Tabu) in the mirror and kissing her neck. Snapping back to the present, he places a vase on a broken table, dusts off a sofa, practises a shot with his cricket bat—anything to convince himself that he’s not homeless.

The same house appears towards the end of the film, where Ghazala (Tabu) goes to meet her mad and murderous son. She looks at her split image in a broken mirror. Standing behind her, he says, “My two-faced mother.” Just like her lover, the ‘two-faced’ Khurram. Haider holds her chin and says, “Such innocence on one face, such deceit on the other.” This scene, in fact, contains duality in duality—garnished by an echo. In a rubble doubling up as a home, a mother and a son, who could also be lovers, are looking at the mirror in the same way they used to in happier times.

Sometimes echoes, like dualities, underscore traumas that don’t mitigate but amplify, showing how these characters are imprisoned in their own circularities. Just like the scenes featuring the demolished house and the mirror, Ghazala putting a gun to her head—or threatening to kill herself—recurs as well. She does it for the first time after discovering a gun in Haider’s school bag who wants to “cross the border”. This threat of suicide, then, is to make him leave Srinagar for Aligarh Muslim University. Years later, sitting with him in their ruined home, she cups his wrist and points the gun at her forehead: “I’m tired of my wretched life. End my agony.” Haider doesn’t but Ghazala persists and, like a twisted literary joke, gets ‘third time lucky’ in the climax, detonating herself in a graveyard, exercising her only agency.

But the most superb example of duality, materialising as a traumatic and vengeful response, comes in the ‘whodunit’ song Bismil (an ingenious hat doff to the play-within-a-play in Hamlet). It’s also a commentary on the protest art—evident in songs, placards, and slogans rippling on Indian streets over the last several years—as it’s the only recourse available to powerless victims. So when Haider can’t scream, he sings. When he can’t be direct—levelling allegations and taking names—he is elliptical, weaving a story through puppets. Nothing is commonplace—or ‘normal’—in Kashmir: a song is a puzzle, a dance is a wail—and the perpetrator sits in the audience, watching his victims perform (just like the scene in Faraz Cinema).

The insanity and duality doubles down in the third act, as three gravediggers dig their own graves. A playful song, Aao Na, intensifies the irony, where a kid gambols in a snowy graveyard, handing them biscuits. On seeing Haider, they urge him to follow suit. He shovels the snow, carves a grave, and lies in it. There are 20 more minutes left in the movie but, at this point, it gets over in spirit. Because for many ravaged Kashmiris, their ultimate duality doesn’t hinge on dead or alive but dead and alive.