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NY Times, Oct. 28 2014
Kashmiri ‘Hamlet’ Stirs Rage in India
‘Haider’ Angers Hindu Nationalists but Excites Film Critics
By VAIBHAV VATS
NEW DELHI — The Bollywood director Vishal Bhardwaj has made his name by
adapting Shakespeare into film, using the plays to reflect the violence
and vicissitudes of modern India. “Maqbool,” an adaptation of “Macbeth,”
was set in the Mumbai underworld; “Omkara” transported “Othello” to the
feudal badlands of northern India. His latest effort, a loose adaptation
of “Hamlet” called “Haider,” which takes place in Kashmir during the
turbulent 1990s, has become the most acclaimed and contentious Bollywood
movie of the year.
The film, which opened internationally on Oct. 2, drew a fierce reaction
on social media from Hindu nationalists, who called for a boycott.
Kashmir, a disputed territory claimed by both India and Pakistan,
remains a sensitive subject on the Indian subcontinent.
One post said on Twitter: “Any movie that sympathizes with terrorists,
glorifies them; insults Indian Army & justifies ethnic cleansing, goes
to the bin. #BoycottHaider.” The campaign’s Facebook page includes a
photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a conservative whose election
this year has emboldened Indians who advocate a muscular, unapologetic
nationalism.
Journalists in India’s national media, however, greeted the movie with
rapturous praise. The columnist Mukul Kesavan, writing in The Telegraph
newspaper in Kolkata, said its “great achievement is to bring Kashmir
out of the closet.” The Mint newspaper called it an “immensely effective
reimagination of Shakespeare.”
In The New York Times, Rachel Saltz suggested that the movie “grafts its
source story less convincingly to its setting” than Mr. Bhardwaj’s
previous efforts while providing “the occasional sharp reminder of how
cinematically he can construct Shakespearean moments.” Over the weekend,
“Haider” won the people’s choice award in the world genre category at
the Rome Film Festival.
The movie’s portrait of Kashmir is radical by Bollywood standards.
Avoiding nationalist arguments, the film portrays the tragic human cost
of the conflict and its netherworld of disappearances, military torture
and extrajudicial killings.
“When we saw the final edit, we prayed the movie would make it through
the censor,” said the journalist Basharat Peer, who helped write the
script. Censors cleared “Haider” after 41 cuts. (Mr. Bhardwaj says he
made 35 of those cuts “voluntarily,” for narrative purposes.)
Even in the film’s fourth week in theaters, the controversy surrounding
it shows little sign of abating. It has been banned in Pakistan, where
the censors claimed — surprisingly, for a movie that casts a negative
light on the Indian state — that “Haider” was “against the ideology of
Pakistan.”
The Hindu Front for Justice, a group of rightist lawyers, petitioned
India’s Allahabad High Court to seek a ban on screenings of the film,
arguing that “Haider” was against the “national interest.” Mr. Bhardwaj
and Mr. Peer have until Nov. 15 to reply. The movie is likely to
complete its theatrical run in India by mid-November, in any case.
The idea for a Kashmiri “Hamlet” originated last year, when Mr. Bhardwaj
was seeking a vehicle to complete his trilogy of Shakespearean
tragedies. He happened upon “Curfewed Night,” a memoir by Mr. Peer about
growing up in Kashmir amid the conflict.
“The stories in the book gripped me,” he said. A few weeks later, Mr.
Bhardwaj met Mr. Peer in New Delhi, and they began collaborating on the
screenplay, drawing on Mr. Bhardwaj’s mastery of Shakespearean
adaptations and Mr. Peer’s journalistic realism.
Mr. Peer was an unusual choice for a Bollywood screenwriter. Bollywood
movies are for the most part loud, rambunctious affairs, far removed
from Mr. Peer’s literary sensibility. Mr. Peer had his reservations,
too. “I knew Vishal as an accomplished filmmaker, but I did not know
much about his politics,” he said.
Bollywood has not been kind to Kashmir. In the years before conflict
erupted in the late 1980s, it served as little more than a tourist
backdrop for romantic dance numbers. More recently, it has been
portrayed through a purely nationalist prism as a sinister haven
seething with terrorists.
Mr. Peer said he felt that “Haider” could chart a new direction. “When I
told Vishal the basic premise, he had no problems with it,” he said. “I
felt, this is already a big start. Nobody in Mumbai, nobody in the last
25 years in the film industry, had even come close.”
In perhaps the most chilling scene of the movie, a truck full of bodies
arrives at a morgue, and a boy jumps from the bloodstained pile, dazed
to discover he is still alive. “I was taking material from stories I had
reported on and grafting them onto Shakespeare,” Mr. Peer said.
Autobiographical elements seeped into the narrative. Haider’s parents
send him to Aligarh, a university town in north India, to shelter him
from the violence overtaking Kashmir. The movie’s plot is set in motion
when he returns to his homeland to search for his father, who has been
abducted by the military.
He is plunged into a looking-glass world where lies and deception are
common, and the government has abandoned human rights and the rule of
law to crush the armed insurgency.
In a recent interview at a cafe here, Mr. Peer checked his Twitter
account repeatedly as dozens of messages poured in, mostly either strong
praise or vile insults.
“I’m not apologetic, or scared, or afraid,” he said, noting that he had
been denounced or threatened for his journalistic work on several
occasions. “I’m proud of a lot of stories and moments in this film.
Within the limits of Bollywood, we pushed things as far as we could.”
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