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.
