Haider and Kashmir

I saw Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider yesterday and though I’m sure I have enjoyed other movies more, I don’t think I’ve thought so much about a film after I’ve seen it. Haider is Hamlet, of course but it is so much more than that. Setting the movie in Kashmir led one to expect the same kind of movie set in Kashmir that Bollywood has shown before, Mission Kashmir and Roja come to mind, I’m sure there are many others. Militancy is seen as a tragic byproduct of misguided minds, and the Indian Army is everyone’s saviour. Of course, there are other movies where even such grey shades are not tolerated.

Which is why Haider was such a refreshing surprise. It is the first explicitly anti-Indian Army Bollywood movie that I have come across. The Indian army is the oppressor force, which summarily kills, and tortures. Many people in Kashmir shout ‘Hamein chahiye Azaadi’ and they aren’t automatically the bad guys. Haider’s father is a doctor who agrees  to treat an ailing militant leader in his house and becomes one of the disappeared. That’s when we learn that there is such a thing as the disappeared people of Kashmir, who the mainstream press doesn’t seem to remember. We learn that there are camps where people are tortured, and Kashmiris live effectively under martial law and occupation. Anyone uncomfortable with such truths is now slamming the movie as disrespectful.

When you have a parent in the army, you know as much about the institution as you can without actually being in the army. I have a complicated relationship with the army. I grew up in it, love and celebrate its histories, traditions and enjoy the feeling of belonging to it in a way. I also grew up with the conventional narrative on Pakistan, Kashmir and patriotism. I remember hating Pakistan after watching border, I remember the Kargil war. And my father has spent many, many years in the Kashmir and the North East. The first time it hit me that there is something wrong in Kashmir is when I read the Wikipedia page on ‘Human Rights in India’ when I was 13 years old. Then I started learning more and more about the way things actually are in Kashmir and the North East for that matter, both places where the army has been called in to quell dissent. For us ‘terrorists’, for them ‘freedom fighters’ which we are certainly entitled to fight, but in the crossfire caught, many, many innocent casualties. And thus, more and more ‘terrorists’.

I have now started wondering whether there is any point to keeping places and people in your country when they clearly do not want to live with you. The Pakistan Army committed genocide on its own countrymen trying to keep East and West Pakistan together. I mean, where will you draw the line. What is the territorial integrity of our country that we are trying to protect? There is an honour in war. War is bloodshed, and war is hell but two armies fighting across borders is something the army is supposed to do. Not Counter Insurgency Operations (as the task of fighting terrorists is called) where there is large scale oppression of your own people.

Maybe somewhere in our nationalistic hubris, some of us will remember Haider looking for his father in mortuaries full of corpses the next time someone says ‘Human Rights Abuses’ don’t happen in Kashmir. All those army wives and daughters will feel some empathy in the face of the mother whose son has been missing.  Even those who believe that their politics is wrong can somehow summon some vestige of humanity from within themselves to say, that killing, murdering, raping, torturing is wrong and someone needs to stop the ones who do so and make them accountable(AFSPA). There are many who say the movie has not gone far enough and there is a copout.(Here and here) Maybe so, but this is a movie where Haider sang ‘Saare Jahan Se Acchha’ ironically (which I really enjoyed, we need more subversion in our movies).

And leaving politics aside, there are so many other interesting things about the movie. The cinematography, showing us the colours of a different Kashmir, the deliberate Kashmiri accents in Hindi and English (love-d, ghar=gar), the not so subtle presentation of the Oedipus complex between Haider and Ghazala, the absurdist theatrics with the masks(the bhand), old men(and young children) lying in graves, Haider’s Toba Tek Singh-esque monologue, the hilarious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern i.e the Salman Khan loving Salmans, and the music etc etc

More movies like Haider please.