“My angel!” A woman’s voice is heard outside a hut in the snow in Kashmir in 1995, a landscape devoid of colors other than mostly black, white, and deep blue. Ghazala’s son, Haider, a lone fighter, is hiding inside the severely damaged hut. Having sustained gun-shot wounds, he is surrounded by the soldiers led by his uncle Khurram who plans to kill him with a shoulder-launch rocket, but Ghazala, caught in between her lover and her son who is intent on avenging his father’s death, convinces Khurram to give her one last chance to persuade Haider to give up his revenge plan and surrender. Soft spoken, Ghazala may not appear to be a particularly strong woman at first glance, but she is taking on the active role of a liaison, negotiator, and now a game changer.
Family issues and personal identity are tragically entangled in terrorism, politics, and national identity when Haider responds to his mother’s plea that “there is no greater pain than to see the corpse of your own child” by re-asserting that he cannot “die without avenging the murder of one’s father.” His moral compass is clearly pointing in a different direction. His mother does not believe politics should and can take precedence over love. His mother’s love is apparent, but it is not enough to change Haider’s mind. In her desperate last attempt to turn her son around, Ghazala spells out what is one of the most significant themes of Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 film Haider: “revenge begets revenge; revenge does not set us free. True freedom lies beyond revenge.” The clash between the mother’s and her son’s worldviews is tragic.
What follows is a moving scene in which a determined mother sacrifices her own life to save her son. Ghazala kisses Haider good-bye and walks out toward Khurram and his men. Once standing in front of them, she opens her coat to reveal a suicide vest consisting of numerous hand grenades. As everyone runs away from her, Khurram and Haider rush towards Ghazala but unable to stop her. Bhardwaj’s choice for slow motion accentuates the impossible weight of Time. Khurram and Haider finally realize what is at stake, only too late. They race against time to save their lover and mother, respectively, but are up against time—linear time. Nothing could be turned back. Life can only be lived forward.
The blast kills everyone except Haider, who is spared because he is farther away, and Khurram, who loses his legs and is severely injured. For a brief moment, the flame over Ghazala’s remains brings, in an eerie way, both warmth and despair to Haider’s face as he stands over the carnage. He wastes no time to mourn his mother by picking up a pistol and walking towards Khurram, now crawling in the snow, to take his revenge. As the camera pans over the two blood-covered figures against a background of blood-stained snow, two competing voices are heard in the voice over, namely Haider’s father’s abomination: “Aim bullets at those cunning, deceiving eyes that entrapped your mother” followed by Haider’s mother’s plea for him to give up his revenge mission. Haider eventually spares Khurram’s life and walks away, leaving him howling in the snow, begging for Haider to “finish him off.” It is ambiguous whether Haider spares Khurram because his mother’s death has shown him the path to love and peace, or because “finishing [Khurram] off” is a charitable act rather than revenge, considering Khurram’s circumstances.
For students familiar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, despite divergences in plot and characterization, it should become apparent that we are watching an Indian film adaptation of the tragedy. There are explicit and more subtle parallels and echoes among Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Indian history, and Haider: the figures of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can be seen in the video-store owners (Suman and Suman) in the film; the talented journalist Arshia finds herself on a path leading toward Ophelia’s tragic life thanks to her father and brother.
One of the most striking scenes is the equivalent to the "to be or not to be" scene in Shakespeare. Haider turns the "to be or not to be" soliloquy into a confessional and motivational speech in front of a crowd in market square. It is decidedly more public and more political. He uses the hang-man's rope around his neck as an imaginary microphone. Haider also carries a boom box with a cassette player. The first question he poses points to an existentialist inquiry: "Hello, mike testing 1, 2, 3. Hello. Can you hear me?" Like Hamlet, Haider has longed to be heard. He urges the crowd to reflect on Kashmir's political crisis: “Do we exist or do we not? Chutzpah is our problem."
Like Hamlet, Haider explores dramatic ambiguity: How much does the Gertrude figure know about Claudius’s plan to kill Hamlet? Does she consciously intervene to save Hamlet? If so, does her act of self-sacrifice give her more agency in a men’s world? As Tony Howard points out, Haider’s ending “poses uncomfortable contemporary questions about suicide and revenge—and the ability of Shakespeare’s texts to help us answer them” (51). The ending of Haider is ambiguous, as we are not shown whether or how Haider finds a new path in life.
Haider’s life experience and identity are full of paradoxes. The film engages with the notion of duality. Ironically, Haider’s Muslim family send him away to university in the hope that he would not be religiously and politically radicalized. A student of “revolutionary poets of British India” (as he tells the Indian guard at the checkpoint), Haider returns to his homeland of militarized Kashmir in the midst of mid-1990s Pakistan-India conflicts upon the news of his dissident father’s disappearance. Even the props carry this duality. Arshia (Ophelia) knits her father a red scarf, which he wears often proudly. However, the same scarf is used to tie up Haider’s hands in a later scene. Many scenes, shot on site in Kashmir, are largely devoid of colors and overwhelmed by the weight of politics. Politics means there are always more than two sides to the story. Haider finds his mother in a relationship with his uncle, a high-ranking official. The play-within-a-play and gravedigger scenes are staged in the form of musical numbers. Directed by Vishal Bhardwaj and written by the Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer, Haider (UTV Motion Pictures, India, 2014; in Hindi and Urdu) is one of the latest Asian Shakespeare films.
Haider has a limited distribution in Asia and did not pass the Pakistani censor. It is, however, screened in the US and UK. Haider is now available on DVD with English subtitles and is reasonably easy to obtain in Canada, the US, and UK. The same could not be said of other Asian Shakespeare films which are not available on VCD or DVD, do not have subtitles (in any language), or is not easy to obtain even if they have been commercially released.
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Excerpted from “Shakespeare on Film in Asia.” Chapter 12 of The Shakespearean World, ed. Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 225-240; free and open-access full text
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How to cite this article:
Alexa Alice Joubin, "Alternate History, Haider, and Hamlet," Shakespeare on the Move, https://blogs.gwu.edu/ajoubin