Haider, Kashmir, Lion King
Kashmir is in the northernmost of India. It shares borders with Pakistan, China and has had a problematic past. (I am from the southernmost part of India, Tamil Nadu, as I said before, I know more about my neighbouring country Srilanka than Kashmir. But let me try to share my understanding of the problem and why it is in the news now.)
We in India have a strange thing that brings together. I don’t know what but we are a country that is 70+ years old in its existence. Before the British drew the borders and separated us as India, Pakistan and East Pakistan (Bangladesh), we were a group of different kingdoms and provinces. Long story short: When Kashmir was reluctant to join India, many political leaders of that time gave some special privileges to Kashmir and annexed it with India. But since then, Kashmir, the Swiss like the scenic state of our country, is in trouble with our neighbours like Pakistan and China.
The current Indian government led by Modi did a massive change to that privilege and passed a law in our parliament. A government which is faraway from Kashmir had decided the fate of the millions of Kashmiris. People are concerned about it because Kashmiris weren’t consulted for this decision.
Kashmir even though it is in India, for me, it has a lot of similarities with Sri Lanka. The Tamils in Sri Lanka faced enough oppression and discrimination by the Sinhala majority government. Many Tamils have “disappeared” from the records. We have heard the stories of white vans in Sri Lanka which sends shiver in the spine of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Kashmiris also face the same problems of disappearance because of the Indian Armed Forces.
Haider, a Bollywood movie, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, tackles the political tinderbox of Kashmir. The film is set in Kashmir in the late ’90s. It shows the theme that is familiar in our public debates in TV and social media: ignorance about Kashmir in the pop-Indian psyche. The Indian mind works like this: Kashmir is part of India, but why do they have special privileges, Nehru is an asshole, why were the Kashmiri pandits kicked out of the valley.
We don’t realise the agency of Kashmir, the history behind the special privileges granted to them. It is the same Indian psyche that tried to impose Hindi as a national language and learnt its lesson from Tamilnadu. I digress, but the movie, Haider, showcases this beautifully.
Why does a doctor risk his life in helping a person labelled as a terrorist? How do love and lust push the boundary in a person to betray a sibling? There are many such nuanced and lofty conundrums posed by Shakespeare in his play, Hamlet. It is the genius of screenwriters Vishal Bhardwaj and Basharat Peer. Basharat is a journalist and has written books about Kashmir. The duo has imbibed the essence of Hamlet and brought it out in the Indian context.
By the way, why was I talking about Disney’s Lion King? Because Lion King is also a loose adaptation of Hamlet. Scar, the brother of Mufasa betrays and takes over the kingdom. Simba comes from a faraway land and defeats Scar and avenges for the death of Mufasa.
I always wonder how Shakespeare, even though his text is unreadable for my mind, had constructed such an excellent plot that gets every universal audience hooked in and interested till the end.