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Something’s Rotten in Kashmir: Post-coloniality, the War on Terror, and Ambivalence in Haider

Everyone knows that India is illegally occupying Kashmir. It is said the world over. Everybody
accepts it.—Nivedita Menon

Kashmiris’ struggle has never been so energised in its entire history and the rejection of Indian
occupation never so loud and clear. But in contrast to it the international community’s silence has
never been so deafening, and the big powers apathy never so morally appalling.—Touquir
Hussain

Haider, the final installment of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Indian Shakespeare trilogy, reconfigures

Hamlet in the context of Indian-occupied Kashmir. Released in 2014, the film depicts events of

the mid-1990s that saw Kashmiri Muslim insurgency against the occupation and its agents, the

Indian armed forces. Drawing on the turmoil of the nativist insurgency and Indian government

sponsored counter-insurgency, which literally turned brother against brother, Bhardwaj’s pivot to

Hamlet is hardly surprising. At its most basic distillation, Shakespeare’s play is a family romance

of jealousy, frustration, betrayal, and unlicensed desire, against which the affairs of state, always

lurking in the background, seem little more than an irritating nuisance. Bhardwaj nimbly yokes

the two dueling plots of Hamlet in his Haider via the temporal and geographic registers he

mobilizes for his adaptation. The contested and explosive locus of Kashmir enmeshes the

personal with the political and the political with the personal to such an extreme that their

discrete threads become indistinguishable. The violence and clandestine machinations of the

political sphere bleed into, distort, and inform the intimacy of the domestic and familial. The

constant state of war in Kashmir, then, is simultaneously without and within, with no escape

possible—as the eponymous Haider signals, “Poora Kashmir ek quaidkhana hai (all of Kashmir

is a prison).” Bhardwaj’s film is further complicated, I argue here, by its ambivalent participation

in War on Terror culture, which demands a certain pathologically violent depiction of Muslim

identity and in which the film eagerly and easily traffics. While extreme violence appears to be

the coin of the realm for all “sides,” of the depicted conflict, what the global War on Terror has
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successfully communicated is that violence can be successfuly grafted onto Muslim identity,

thereby anticipating and justifying the extrajudicial violence deployed against Muslims. In this

paper I explore how Haider interrogates national identity politics, agency, and personal and

political freedom within political, familial, and patriarchal geographies that are simultaneously

under assault and being renegotiated by the military and cultural dominance of the oppressor, the

Indian nation-state and its agents.

As an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the narrative in Haider treads familiar

ground: the untimely death of the father recalling the son home to find that his family is sundered

not only by the demise of the patriarch but also the insertion of his uncle into that domain. These

recognizable familial ruins function as the foundation upon which Bhardwaj builds and deviates

from his source. While there are the requisite analogues to many of the characters: Arshia as

Ophelia, Liaquat/Lucky as Laertes, and the ingenious comic construction of Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern in the Salmans, the unfolding of the plot and the construction of our tragic

protagonist deviate considerably from the source. Unlike in Hamlet, where the Ghost’s

appearance frames the action of the first scene and establishes the telos of revenge generically

mandated by the play, Bhardwaj delays—Hamlet like—in introducing not only this theme but

also its harbinger, the ghost-named, Roohdar. This delay allows the audience to know Hamlet

outside of the context of the revenge demanded by the command of the dead father, to see him

struggle with his grief and pain, and to marshal those emotions into action to find answers to his

father’s disappeared status. Hamlet, here, becomes a man of action and resolve, one who

challenges the violence of the state, not by matching that violence but through modes of political

protest and resistance. After the appearance of Roohdar, whose reliability for Haider lies in his

ability to confirm, through poetry, his relationship with Hilal Meer, Haider’s disapperared father,
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and who provides confirmation of Hilal Meer’s murder by the Indian armed forces, the narrative

swiftly realigns with its source, with Haider falling to an “antic disposition,” confronting his

uncle-father in “the mousetrap,” and increasing the body count, culminating in the spectacularly

explosive finale, from which, in another deviation from the source, Haider is able to walk away.

It behooves anyone who writes about Haider, I think, to offer pertinent historical context

for the film’s geopolitical ambit. Emerging from the trauma of partition, which forcefully rent

the subcontinent into two nation states, Indian-occupied Kashmir continues to remain a casualty

of that political and geographic wound. Its own promise of azaadi, freedom, and identity

dependent upon the whims of its more powerful would be claimants and occupiers, Pakistan and

India, respectively. Kashmir is a remnant and reminder of the failure of the British imperial

powers to morally and ethically divest themselves of the jewel in their imperial crown. Within

the post-colonial reality and history of the subcontinent, Kashmir remains a colonized and

occupied geography, its post-coloniality deferred. Bhardwaj chooses a particularly tense period

in the recent history of Kashmir, in which to locate Haider, the uprisings of the mid-1990s,

which were inaugurated by armed demands for freedom in 1989. As Ananya Kabir signals in

Territory of Desire, the 1989 clash resulted in the paranoid and suffocating security state

Bhardwaj represents in Hiader:

Announcing itself in Srinagar, the Kashmiri demand for aazadi was made
through Kalashnikovs, grenades and bombs, kidnappings, mass demonstration,
and other materializations of revolutionary violence. This moment was to pass,
however. The Indian nation-state swiftly rolled out its own apparatus of discipline
and punishment, and Jammu and Kashmir soon acquired the dubious distinction
of becoming the world’s most heavily militarized zone. Everyday reality was
radically altered through “crackdowns,” “bunkers,” “militants,” “surrendered
militants,” and a whole gamut of military and paramilitary regimens. Self-styled
Kashmiri militants crossed and recrossed the LOC, obtaining training and support
from camps in Azad Kashmir and beyond. Non-Kashmiri mujahideen also
crossed over from Afghanistan to join the struggle in the name of Islam.
Disappeared youth, raped women, intracommunal breakdown, interrupted
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childhoods, traumatized soldiers, and above all the thickness of rumor turned the
region into a veritable “space of death.” (9-10)

Haider adroitly inhabits the Kashmir of Kabir’s summary and its psychosocial aftermath,

beginning not with the cause of the militarization, but exposing its subsequent conspiracy-driven

claustrophobia and terror. Indeed, the expository scenes of the first few minutes of the film,

suggest the pervasive danger of the locale through the tight shots of Hilal Meer walking through

narrow alleyways followed by a group of armed militants, which then open to a wide shot of the

compound he enters that has similarly armed militants manning the gates and patrolling the roof.

Unlike many of its Hindi-film predecessors, Haider subordinates the geographic splendor of the

Kashmiri landscape to the military and political disaster endured by the local, native inhabitants

of the land (Kabir chapter 1). It is precisely this restricted focus on the political that allows the

film to elicit sympathy for the people caught up in judicial and extra-judicial violence and,

paradoxically, locate that violence in Muslim identity.

Islam, violence, militants, and jihad are terms often used in intimate proximity, especially

in the age of terror and terrorism instantiated by the United States War on Terror in the wake of

9/11. I recognize that marshaling an argument about the operations of the global War on Terror

in Haider will raise eyebrows as well as objections. Two that I anticipate here are that the film

depicts events of Kashmiri militant insurgencies of the mid-1990s, prior to the terrorist attacks

on the US which culminated in the US’s on-going, endless, and geographically unbound, yet

predominantly Islamicate, War on Terror, and second, that utilizing US ideologies of war in a

vastly different geography with its own, particular history of conflict and violence, erases the

local valences of that conflict by bulldozing over it with yet another form of American

exceptionalism. I don’t attempt to claim a seamless genealogy of War on Terror culture and

representation that sutures Haider to other media like, 24, Homeland, or American Sniper;
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however, I do argue that the localizing of the Kashmiri struggle for independence and the

ensuing violence in Muslim bodies suggests a pathology that all such media access to otherize

and to delegitimize their resistance to occupation and oppression. In other words, the real

political and social injustices that motivate violence never have to be addressed as long as the

fact of unlicensed, non-state violence can be demonstrated, amplified, and responded to in equal

or greater measure.

I’ve used the term War on Terror culture a few times, and I borrow it from Moustafa

Bayoumi who writes—again in an American context—that this culture circumscribes the

possibility of Muslim identity by always and only allowing it legibility in the context of the War

on Terror and its violent extremism:

War on Terror culture assumes that Muslims collectively are responsible for and
sympathetic to all acts of violence by individual Muslims everywhere, unless and
until they explicitly say otherwise. But even then their words are often doubted
since Muslims are seen as doctrinally prone to lying and violence. If any Muslim
commits a horrible act of violence, the action is automatically assumed to be a
heinous political feat. […] War on Terror culture represents Muslims always and
only through the War on Terror lens and never on their own terms. […] War on
Terror culture promotes the seductive synergy of militarism and entertainment
while rationalizing or ignoring the massive civilian death toll of the War on
Terror. […] War on Terror culture is essentially the deep institutionalization of
George W. Bush’s simplistic proclamation that “either you are with us or you are
with the terrorists,” as if there can be no other options, as if one can’t oppose the
horrors that the War on Terror delivers and the murderous nihilism of terrorism
simultaneously. (12-13)

Rather than naively applying Bayoumi’s formulation to the Indian context, I would suggest

looking for affinities, particularly given the evolving nature and over-militarization of the Indian

occupation of Kashmir and to the charge both real and sometimes politically expedient that non-

Kashmiri actors have infiltrated the geography to form a global or pan-Islamic alliance or jihad.

Whether we call it global counter-terrorism or War on Terror culture, India, like the US has

found it politic to frame the discourse around Kashmir through the optic of terrorism, “India uses
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counter-terrorism as the foundation for bilateral collaboration, including military to military ties,

which would otherwise be controversial. India offered the US bases, airfields and intelligence for

the anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan” (Sasikumar 624). Just as we see geo-political actions

and discourses reflected in popular culture in the US, India, too, has a long history, especially in

film, of depicting the Kashmir conflict and the terrorist/jihadist Muslims at its center (films such

as Roja, LoC, Kargil, and Mission Kashmir).

To be sure, Haider is sympathetic to the plight of the Kashmiri people and is not coy

about portraying the violence of the Indian state in its efforts to quell efforts at independence and

annihilate militant violence. The crackdown at the beginning of the film, that we later learn was

designed to catch Hilal Meer for performing an appendectomy on a militant and the subsequent

firebombing of the Meer home disclose the utter helplessness of the occupied populace in the

face of the military force and power of the occupier. The discourse that justifies the occupation

founders against the humanistic reasons that Hilal Meer offers for helping the militant when

Ghazala, his wife, asks, “kis taraf hai aap (what side are you on)” and he responds “zindagi ki (of

life/humanity).” The film further emphasizes asymmetry of power inherent in the position of the

Kashmiris under Indian occupation through its depiction of the “enhanced interrogation

techniques” deployed by the Indian armed forces in their detention center, MAMA II. I

deliberately use the phrase, “enhanced interrogation,” not only because it is revenant of the Bush

administration’s policies regarding the treatment of perceived terrorists in custody—and

therefore an artifact from the US War on Terror—but also because Brigadier T.S Murthy in

answer to Arshia’s questioning about torture during his press conference, claims that “The Indian

Army is one of the most disciplined armed forces in the world. We train our officers to

interrogate and not torture.” His riposte is quickly revealed to be a semantic fiction, when
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juxtaposed with the graphic sights and sounds of torture being inflicted on the prisoners in

MAMA II, which include beatings, disfigurement, and genital mutilation.

Like the clever wordplay that links US and Indian torture to the global War on Terror,

these scenes have their analogue in the leaked photos of US troops torturing prisoners in the Abu

Gharib prison in Iraq. The following is a list of some of the abuses committed by US military

officials:

- Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet.

- Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees.
- Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing.
- Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time.
- Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear.
- Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and
videotaped.
- Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them.
- Positioning a naked detainee on a box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his
fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture.
- Writing "I am a Rapest (sic)" on the leg of a detainee accused of rape, and then photographing
him naked.
- Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female soldier pose
for a picture.
- A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee.
- Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at
least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee.
- Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.

The idiom of the War on Terror utilized by Bhardwaj suggests a provocation not usually

registered in War on Terror culture, which purports that Muslims have deserved the violence and

degradation visited upon them (see for example the recent case of the Australian minister’s

abhorrent remarks in the wake of the New Zealand Christchurch mosque massacre) nor

registered in mainstream Hindi cinematic engagement with “the Kashmir issue.” Nonetheless, at

the end, before the credits roll, Bhardwaj inserts a epilogue screen card, which “salutes” and

“valorizes” the Indian Army for their efforts in Kashmir during “recent floods,” such maneuvers,

slight and small as they might seem, when coupled with the retreat of the occupying forces from
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the narrative after the appearance of Roohdar signal its ambivalent relation not only to the

occupation but also to the War on Terror culture in which it participates.

Within this narrative of religious violence, extremism, the security state, and the post-

colonial not-state of Kashmir in Haider, what role do we allocate William Shakespeare’s

Hamlet? What authoritative, hegemonic, or subversive position might the playwright and play

serve in the context Bhadwaj presents? As I’ve been trying to establish, in Haider Kashmir, its

geo-politics, the psychosocial anxieties it generates and fosters leaves scant room for the revenge

and ruminations mandated by its source. Indeed, the deferral of the Hamlet narrative in the first

half of the film seemingly of a piece with Hamlet’s own delay in following the Ghost’s

murderous mandates, suggests that the place of and for Shakespeare here is as a supplement. The

spectral frame of Shakespeare facilitates the interrogation of Indian state politics and their brutal

occupation of Kashmir. Of particular use to Bhardwaj is Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, “To be

or not to be,” which becomes a recurring motif through which the film investigates the arrested

and unsatisfactorily static political position of Kashmir and the identity of Kashmiris. Appearing

in its most substantive form in Haider’s antic monologue after he’s learned about his uncle’s

hand in disappearing his father, this father’s death after detention in MAMA II, and his mother’s

complicity in his father’s downfall. His monologue takes place in Srinagar’s Lalchowk, or red

square, an important geography in the Kashmiri resistance. Here, a newly shorn Haider, dressed

as a kind of harlequin, with a threadbare blazer over his kurta, a boom box strapped to his body,

and a noose around his neck provocatively asks,

Hum hain ya hum nahin; Hum hain to kahan hai aur nahin to kahan gaye; Hum
hain to kis liye aur kahan gaye to kaab hain na; Hum the bhi ya the hi nahin.
Chutzpah ho gaya hamare saath.
Do we exist or do we not; If we exist then where do we exist; if not then where
did we go? If we exist then for what purpose? If we disappeared then when?
Right? Did we exist or did we not? Chutzpah happened to us.
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As he explains chutzpah to his audience, which he mispronounces, punning perhaps on the

obscenity it conveys in Hindi, Haider defines chutzpah as “besharam gustaakh jaise Afspa,

shameless insolence, like AFSPA,” that is is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which

essentially grants the Indian military unlimited power to maintain public order in disturbed areas.

The unchecked power of this Act allows the military to disappear, maim, and kill anyone they

deem to be dangerous. Unlike Hamlet’s meditation on what follows after “we have shuffled off

this mortal coil,” Haider’s catechism, here, slips from the personal to the political register

transmitting the state of uncertainty that the “state of emergency,” in Kashmir has fomented.

Shakespeare’s language offers utility insofar as his poetic idiom encodes Haider’s resistance

within a recognizable schema. The existential problem with which Hamlet wrestles subtends

Haider’s speech yet that problem is about the dislocation and erasure of Kashmir and Kashmiri

identity.

The other allusion to Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, however, seems to disrupt the film’s

initial deployment within the network of its political imaginary by locating it firmly in Haider’s

own personal turmoil about who and what to believe. Haider’s faith in the veracity of Roohdar’s

words and his ventriloquized paternal command to murder Khurram for his betrayal is vexed by

Khurram’s own revelations about Roohdar’s status as an undercover Pakistani intelligence

officer. Torn between his many and replicating father figures, the wronged poet-father, the

vengeful ghost-father, and the incestuous uncle-father, Haider struggles to untangle the complex

web of lies, deceit, and political intrigue in which he is ruthlessly enmeshed. In the comforting

arms of his lover, Arshia, Haider contemplates the truths and lies he’s being prescribed, “Shaq pe

hai yakeen to yakeen pe hai shaq muje (If suspicion is taken as truth, then the truth is also
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suspicious to me). Haider continues to employ antithesis to finally arrive at his fatal question:

“Kiska juth juth hai; kiska sach me sach nahin; hai ke hai nahin; bas yehi sawal hai; aur sawal ka

jawab bhi sawal hai […] jaan loon ke jaan don; main rahun ke main nahin, (whose lie is a lie;

whose truth is not true; is it or isn’t it; enough. That tis the question and the answer to the

question is also a question. […] Should I take my life or should I give it. Should I live or die)”

The film reinforces the turn from the political to the personal by shifting the tone and scene to

the private intimate world of the doomed lovers, who have recuperated a space for themselves

amid the chaos of the external world of politics, militants, and the occupation. The move further

affirms the film’s interest from this point on in the personal revenge Haider seeks, rather than the

politically contingent and arrested state of Jammu Kashmir under occupation.

This transition, premised on the plot development of the Shakespearean source, expunges

the radical political possibilities inherent in that same source. The revenge play, after all, ushers

in a new regime at its conclusion. The end of Haider, however, fragments that possibility,

eschewing the mandates of genre, patriarchal command, and militancy, preferring instead

obeisance to the maternal will to live. While on the surface that might seem laudable and offer

hopeful escape from the unending cycle of revenge, it simultaneously maintains the status quo in

Kashmir, leaving unchanged and marginally challenged the authority of the Indian state. In other

words, the film’s transformation of political resistance into personal revenge upholds the power

of the occupier—no matter the level of critique aimed at the Indian state or the sympathy

solicited for the persecuted Kashmiri populace. To render the conflict in Kashmir as personal

revenge, as a family squabble between brothers, reincribes resistance within the familiar

ideologies imposed by the Indian state which configures Jammu Kashmir as the head of its

national political body. The only resistance the film poses to the traditional tropes of Kashmir is
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its focus on their helplessness and the highlighting of the brutal violence of the Indian army. In

other ways, the revenge drama works to destabilize and depoliticize Kashmiri resistance. Power

remains in the hands of those who do not hesitate to ruthlessly wield it. To settle on, in the end,

the notion that the excessive and illegitimate (given the occupation and lack of plebiscite) force

of the occupier can only be met by the disavowal of violence by the occupied does not recognize

the fear, anger, humiliation, and degradation of life suffered by the oppressed. It expects only

and always for the oppressed to show greater humanity than their oppressors. It offers an illusion

of peace—and only on the terms dictated by the occupier.

I’ve tried today to talk about Shakespeare and nation through an adaptation or

appropriation (if you prefer) that is not as deeply meditative or interior as its source yet succeeds

in querying the symbolic, affective—to borrow from Jyotsna Singh—and subjective value of

nation or imagined community in a locale denied the possibility of such identity and belonging.

To depict Shakespeare’s Hamlet through Kashmir is to subordinate that national, global, and

imperial figure and work to the ethical, political, and personal conditions of the Kashmir valley

and its occupied, besieged, and globally ignored status. Shakespeare here functions as a contact

zone. The cultural capital and cache that accrues to the plays facilitates Haider’s depiction of the

brutal reality of Kashmiri existence under Indian occupation. It remains for us to ask what ethical

dimension inheres to our inquiry of this object because our critical interest in this film is eclipsed

in all ways by the brutal material reality of the lives of the Kashmiri people living under Indian

occupation. Our inquiry must also, I believe, contribute in some way to advocating for their

freedom, dignity, and humanity. Hamlet asks “To be or not to be,” to which Haider responds “To

be and not to be.” Through such reconfigurations Bhardwaj demonstrates the plasticity of

Shakespeare in other, global, particular, local, indigenous, and national contexts. Bhardwaj
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extends his manipulation of Hamlet to the end by having Haider abstain from murdering his

uncle and abandon the bloody spectacle of and geography of death, that is the graveyard and by

extension Indian occupied Kashmir. Yet, as the closing titles and the ruby blood marring the

pristine snow attest, the Indian nation state’s hold on this geography and the presence of the

Indian army endures and Kashmir remains in stasis, trapped by the conjunction of “to be and not

to be.”

Works Cited

Bayoumi, Moustafa. This Muslim American life: Dispatches from the war on terror. NYU Press,
2015.

Bhardwaj, Vishal. Dir. Haider. VB Pictures, 2014.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Territory of desire: Representing the valley of Kashmir. U of Minnesota
Press, 2009.

Sasikumar, Karthika. "State agency in the time of the global war on terror: India and the counter-
terrorism regime." Review of International Studies 36.3 (2010): 615-638.