Aishwarya Vardhana - Response to "Haider"

Haider was a powerful film for several reasons. Aside from the successful execution of cinematic elements (e.g. videography, casting selection, acting) the story told is an inveterate controversy. Haider is modeled after the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet, a story well-known throughout the world. Director Vishal Bhardwaj's decision to model the movie narrative after Hamlet is appropriate for three reasons:  

1) Hamlet the tragedy is deeply religious - as was the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir 

2) Hamlet the character is deeply philosophical 

3) Hamlet the tragedy cannot be separated from its feminist undertones

The religiousness, philosophical rhetoric and feminist messages of Hamlet, in addition to its timeless adaptability, make it the perfect framework for Bhardwaj's "Haider". However despite creating an objectively impressive movie, Bhardwaj fails to do justice to the deeply complex Kashmiri insurgency and, more importantly, speaks over the Kashmiri audience. He makes a film about Kashmir that is not for the Kashmiri people (a film which he “fraudishly” then dedicates to the Kashmiri community) which is problematic because 

1) it reflects the imbalance of power within India 

2) silences, by omission, the marginalized voices of Kashmiri Pandits 

3) reflects the continual pattern of Bollywood appropriating and/or misrepresenting minority communities within India.

I believe the film Haider is not for the Kashmiri audience for three main reasons:

1) The excessive amount of death and violence in the movie panders to a non-Kashmiri audience. The movie melts all the different deaths together, whether the death is of a soldier, an insurgent or a civilian, there are no distinctions made between the different kinds of death or the different reasons for which people die. Instead of giving a face to the countless, faceless Kashmiris who died, disappeared, were traumatized for life, or the generational violence experienced by families, the film glorifies the gore of the insurgency and compiles all death into a monolithic, bloody mess. While this tactic may have appealed to the larger Indian audience and bolstered the commercial success of the film, it simultaneously removes the context in which a community suffered. Bhardwaj capitalizes on the dramatic and controversial nature of the Kashmiri conflicts and by removing the nuances of the conflict is able to commercialize a real life tragedy into an artistic one.

2) It promotes the concept of "improvement" in Kashmir that is measured in relation to increases in tourism, an industry with its own plethora of problematic effects. This promotion of gauging the normalcy of Kashmiri lives with respect to the influx of tourists (tourists who harm the environment and disrupt the lives of native Kashmiris) is indicative of Haider’s ignorant approach to presenting Kashmir to the rest of India and the larger world. 

3) In his Tweets actor and Kashmiri Pandit Anupam Kher articulates the fraudish nature of the film, arguing that it leans in favor of the insurgency and is less sympathetic of the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. While I believe Kher's stance crosses over into a territory that is largely Hindu fundamentalist and nationalist and his comparison of the insurgents to the Taliban exposes bias on his part, I agree with his anger in Bhardwaj's disregard for the genocide experienced by Kashmiri Pandits. Perhaps Haider empathizes with the insurgents because historically their narrative has been silenced due to their Pakistani ties, however I find Bhardwaj's dedication of the film to the Kashmiri Pandit community irrelevant and therefore "fraudish", as Kher says in his Tweet.