When even raving reviews failed to prompt me to watch Haider, some of my friends said that I should watch the movie for a personal reason. It has enacted a scene where the protagonist is detained by the army men for calling Anantnag as Islamabad. This had happened to me also long back in 2002 when I was detained near Sher-e Kashmir Park for the same reason. The news was carried by Greater Kashmir on its front page on 12 October, 2002. The scene made me relive that harrowing experience. Watching Haider was both a pleasant surprise and a disappointment. The movie defies any attempt to treat it as a typical cross-over cinema, enacting Shakespearean tragedy as it equally fails to do any sort of justice to the Kashmiri conflict as it began, spiraled or subsided with the passage of time. Haider is a typical Bollywood masala movie aimed at entertaining the audience instead of educating them. It has been taken seriously because of its Kashmir connection only. But Haider is an exception too in certain respects. The movie literally looks like a case of applying a square peg on a round hole. It has tried to interpolate a medieval English language classic to a contemporary conflict. The two do intersect at many points. That way, the movie integrates a universal human depravity, jealousy, with a localized political conflict. In any case of jealousy there is politics and every kind of politics does have a strong element of jealousy. At the same time, the realities of medieval England and the contemporary Kashmir are poles apart. Hamlet was a prince, Haider is a common man, just the son of a doctor which does not make him a prince by any standard. None of the Kashmiris is a prince. In fact we have been at the receiving end of the conflict and we continue to remain so. The moral sense of the two contexts is also altogether different. While marrying the widow of a dead brother was morally repugnant in the medieval Christian England, such a practice is common in Muslim cultures and is in fact recommended at times. In Hamlet, the king is basically killed for his throne, marriage with the widowed queen follows the usurpation, while in Haider, Dr Hilal is got murdered for his wife only. What is morally abhorable in Haider is that Khurram and Gazala are seen to be living in a sort of live-in relationship, which is culturally non-existent in Kashmir. The incongruity is that while the marriage of Hamlet’s uncle with the widowed queen sets the rot in Denmark, such a practice is culturally permitted from Islamic perspective. Therefore, the plot of the movie loses its intensity in the first go only. The conflict is shown to be internal to Kashmiris - spawned, driven, intensified and finally resolved by Kashmiris themselves while as in actuality, there are strong external factors to the Kashmir conflict which have gone far beyond Kashmiris themselves. Army is simply shown to be doing their duty, at times exceeding their brief. However, the reality of Indian Army’s torturous intervention in Kashmir of 90’s was much more horrible and recollecting that sends shivers down the spine of Kashmiris even now. Two scenes that stand apart for their quality in the movie are the fools’ scene and the grave-diggers scene which do some sort of Justice to the original play. Being a student of Shakespearean drama, explaining or understanding the role of characters like those of fools or grave-diggers is always a difficult task. However the movie does make us understand the amount of wisdom hidden in trivial side of life and conflict. In tragedies like those of Kashmir, one has to pretend to be a fool to survive. Similarly if grave is the end, it is the grave digger who brings the end. Surely the movie is not an Indian viewpoint but the movie is not a Kashmiri viewpoint either, though there are certain scenes which do focus on the human aspect of the conflict which has so far deliberately been ignored by other film makers. Such scenes do make the movie unpalatable to those who are habitual of watching prime time shows on news channels. A clumsily conceived by brilliantly made movie.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 08:57:58 +0000
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