The moon has blood clots - a review of Haider

“19 January 1990 was a very cold day despite the sun’s weak attempts to emerge from behind dark clouds…’Naara-e-taqbeer, Allah ho Akbar!’ I looked at my father; his face was contorted. He knew only too well what the slogan meant. I had heard it as well, in a stirring drama telecast a few years ago on Doordarshan, an adaptation of Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, a novel based on the events of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. It was the cry that a mob of Muslim rioters shouted as it descended upon Hindu settlements. It was a war cry…The crowd wanted to turn Kashmir into Pakistan, without the Pandit men, but with their women…Ma rushed to the kitchen and returned with a long knife. It was her father’s. ‘If they come, I will kill her,’ she looked at my sister. ‘And then I will kill myself. And you see what you two need to do.’ Father looked at her in disbelief. But he didn’t utter a word…My life flashed in front of me, like a silent film. I remembered my childhood with my sister. How I played with her and how she always liked to play ‘teacher-teacher’, making me learn the spellings of ‘difficult’ words…I remembered the red ribbon she wore; I remembered how she waited behind the closed gates of her school to catch a glimpse of Father’s shoes from beneath; I remembered how she threw a duster at one of her friends who tried to bully me;...We were fourteen. I often think of that moment…At fourteen we knew we were refugees, but we had no idea what family meant. And I don’t think we realised then that we would never have a home again.”

– Excerpts from Rahul Pandita’s 2013 novel Our Moon has Blood Clots.

The author was only fourteen years old in 1990 when he was forced to leave his home in Srinagar along with his family, who were Kashmiri Pandits. The memoir which is stark and vivid brings in a different take on the entire debate about the Kashmir problem of India where hundred of Kashmiri Pandits were tortured and killed and a few lakhs reduced to living in exile in their own country. It is this alternative take of massive ethnic cleansing organized by Islamist militants which flows in parallel to the more documented pro-independence demands of separatists in the valley which is curbed by the Indian National army using brutal force and incessant violence.

Why do we bring up this memoir which is spine-chilling and depressing? Because of Vishal Bharadwaj’s masterful film Haider which is an inspired adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and is the third of a trilogy that includes Maqbool (adaptation of Macbeth) and Omkara (adaptation of Othello). Haider is based in Kashmir in 1995, after five years from Pandita’s telling times. Does Haider capture history in its entirety? It probably hasn’t. Which reflection for that matter ever is unbiased? As viewers and readers as well, don’t we always take sides, based on mis-information, half-beliefs, pseudo-secular ranting that disguises religious overtones and so forth? As the “#Boycott Haider” gets popularity in negative trending in Twitter, it is probably prudent to pause a bit and accept that Haider’s reality is a bit fractured.  Yes, it did mention the Kashmiri Pandit’s in one of the scenes where the Army chief spoke to the general public who rallied against the Army’s indiscriminate handling of Kashmiri Muslims. However, there is no doubt that Vishal Bharadwaj and his script writer Basharat Peer (famous Kashmiri journalist and author of yet another heart-wrenching memoir of the valley - Curfewed Night) did portray the atrocities meted out against the separatist revolutionaries and the incapacity of general Kashmiri muslims in the hands of the separatists and the faceless, de-humanized, vandal Indian Army. It is more in that sense, a one-way drama of a nation using iron fists in the form of AFSPA to curb, dominate and trample every voice that is not taking any particular side as well. Early in the film when Haider’s mother Ghazala asks her husband Dr. Hilal Meer whose side he is taking when he decides to operate a militant in his own home, the doctor replies in assurance that he takes the side of life like every doctor will do. This is particularly interesting since this is one trifle note that the director does touch upon as a sublime whiff for the attentive viewer to keep a mark on. The visual landscaping of Haider mesmerizes with the dark panorama – cold and chilling. There is no Shammi Kapoor or Sharmila Tagore in the reality or the perception of it. The mornings don’t break into sunlight and azaans, rather there are Army raids where every male of the village need to line up with their identity cards.  The sprawling lakes and the Jhelum seem frozen like the dead river inside, dead and black. The director’s camera moves over the valley – where are the temples and the ruins of them courtesy Sikander Butshikan and others who followed his idealogy apart from the very late climax song and dance which was choreographed using the Martand Sun Temple in the background – a temple which bears testimony of the ravaged history of the Kashmiri Hindus in the valley? Yet, Haider to me remains an important film in the legacy of Indian cinema primarily for a few notable points worth a mention.

First, like Maqbool and Omkara which mostly tread the original Shakespearean line of narrative with suitable Indianized alterations and contemporary modernizations here as well we find soliloquies seemingly absent, allegories of grave digging (your own grave that is!), play within play in the Bismil song as a proof of Claudius aka Khurram’s guilt and most significantly the ghost of the palace changed to Rooh Dar (an enigmatic Irrfan Khan who shifts the film in a completely different gear just before the intermission). In keeping with the main flow of the Shakespearean tragedy, yet institutionalize within Indian paradigm is no mean task and the director with three films in the trilogy ensures that he is probably the only Indian film maker to have adapted Shakespeare with success till date and repeated the success twice.

Second, the most popular notion of Hamlet in the popular mind is the famous “To be or, not to be” adage which is transported by Haider a bit differently as “Dil ki agar sunu toh tu hai...Dimag ki sunu toh tu hai nahi. Jaan lun ki Jaan dun? Main rahoon ki main nahi”. Actually, the dilemma of Hamlet is seemingly absent in the madness of Haider.  Here is a young man who has been de-fathered by the machineries of the state, betrayed by his own mother, back-stabbed by his child hood friends Salman(s), devastated by his own uncle who politicks against him and his deceased father and the separatist terrorists who take advantage of him to make him a pawn in their machinery instead. Where is the personal dilemma for Haider? Life is fast, cruelly paced for him even to have a dilemma but just to follow the ordeal to take revenge of his father’s death. Vishal Bhardwaj preserved the narrative linearity and moulded Haider within the realms of revenge as the basic undertone.

Third, Haider’s love/hate relation with his mother – a sublime Tabu who can hold so much in her eyes that she doesn’t need to speak! She is teary-eyed yet non-melodramatic, emotions that touch the verge of sentiments but not without for once making you feel for her. She is the villain she admits to her son but to her credit Tabu as Ghazala moves Haider away in a film which is supposed to be centered round him only. By making a side character more powerful than the corresponding positioning in the original plot, Vishal Bhardwaj seem more ambitious in the third part of the trilogy than the previous ones. Though there have been incestuous markers between Gertrude, the Queen of Denmark and Hamlet, her son yet never did she hold the reigns in her hand as definitely as Ghazala, towards the end of Hailder. There is definite reference of strong Oedipal Complex between Haider and Ghazala in scenes more than once but most remarkable when Haider (shown two times with two different Haiders resembling two ages) kisses her neck after applying fragrance – Tabu’s repressed look at the mirror haunts like trapped fire.

Fourth, the enticing ending of the film with reference to the near start of it and also somewhere in the middle when Haider meets Ghazala at their devastated home. In the beginning we find a confused, emotional and disturbed Haider at the foot of his ravaged home which he left to study at Aligarh. He came back as a poet to find his jannat ruined – where is his home now? His home actually has turned into a kabarastan – a graveyard. In the final scene, after the final destruction and self–annihilation of Ghazala we find Haider release Khurram who is at his mercy and run back. The setting is a graveyard, made double so after the carnage and bloodshed, the lone house is torn down by bullets and yet this is where Haider runs probably. Is it the home for Haider, his destination where he left his dead lover Arshia? Does home and cemetery become synonyms here? In releasing Haider from being dead, Vishal Bhardwaj keeps him tormented, in search of an elusive home. And in this final act, the director makes Haider, not just one unique individual (almost like a ‘hero’) in search of revenge and finding the fruitlessness of the exercise – he thereby relates Haider with the other unfortunate youth of the Kashmir valley who are torn between multiple forces which rip them apart. In this regard Rahul Pandita becomes Haider and they interchange their experiences – the troops, the forces, the camps and the execution chambers change colour, the brutality of exigency remain the same, their modes differ may be and at times the degree of ‘punishment’. In one crucial scene, Haider’s grandfather argues with a reactionary separatist –“Bandook sirf inteqaam janti hai, aazaadi to lathi se bhi mil jaati hai”. It is interesting a quote given the film got released on the 2^nd of October and is something which has been long forgotten as a lesson.

Apart from the issues about the veracity of representation of the Kashmir politics in question, Haider remains a major film in the Indian context for being cinematically eloquent with deft imageries, slick edit, minimalist yet pronounced music and superlative acting by everyone. It is a film, notwithstanding its weighted lineage of William Shakespeare, will be an Indian film to look at warmly. It looks into the individual from a generic standpoint and empathizes with him. May be one day, someone will make a film on Rahul Pandita’s book. Haider will be a precursor to such attempts to look at the collective history of the land, to make the representations more wholesome, more rounded and more liberal. Since, it is not only Rahul’s or even Haider’s but for all of us, our moon does have blood clots.

(This article was published originally in Dearcinema)