Kashmir Journal: the spectacle / side show of Kashmir
I recently watched the film Haider (2014) again, this time in the context of my Kashmir seminar and along with my students. I, like many others who study and teach Kashmir, have watched and shown many a Kashmir film, including the 1960s classics such as Kashmir ki Kali (1964) and the more recent ones such as Mission Kashmir (2000). If viewed in this long tradition of Kashmir films, Haider has a different feel, not only because it does not celebrate Kashmir’s beauty, focused as it is on the darker aspects of Kashmir, but because it does not dwell on the Kashmir-India relationship. The Indian state and its security apparatus does loom large in the film, but the Kashmir of Haider seems driven by its own internal, local dynamics. Whatever the film’s political message, one thing seems clear: Kashmiri society has been rent asunder from within as a result of the uprising, drawing in and destroying Kashmiris regardless of their political affiliations.
India’s love affair with Kashmir began with and was cemented by the 1960s Kashmir films. Kashmir emerged in these films as a playground for Indian tourists, usually urban elites who spent their summers in Kashmir to wash away the sins and cares of their city lives in the sacred beauty of Kashmir’s landscape and the purifying love of a Kashmiri woman. Kashmir was thus folded into the Indian nationalist imagination as the true essence of India, untouched by westernization and the vagaries of modernity. Hindi films continued to utilize Kashmir as their backdrop well into the 1980s, with lovers gamboling across its lakes, meadows, and valleys, thus keeping alive the idea of Kashmir as a paradise on earth and a mecca for lovers.
The insurgency, which gathered force at the same time as Indian economic liberalization, paved the way for the replacement of Kashmir with Switzerland and other western landscapes as Hindi cinema’s locales of choice. India could now look outward for its beautiful landscapes where its lovers could find and experience love, as capitalist modernity in all its forms came to be embraced, not shunned. Kashmir had become an impediment to this dream of a new, resurgent India. This ushered in the next era of Kashmir films, such as Roja (first released in Tamil in 1992) and Mission Kashmir, which, albeit in different ways, attempted to reconcile the new reality of Kashmir within this now aspirational India, often pitting Indian patriotism against Kashmiri terrorism and militancy. Even in these films, however, Kashmir’s landscape remained mesmerizingly beautiful—a place where love could still be discovered and fulfilled, as long as one chose the right side.
The insurgency, which gathered force at the same time as Indian economic liberalization, paved the way for the replacement of Kashmir with Switzerland and other western landscapes as Hindi cinema’s locales of choice. India could now look outward for its beautiful landscapes where its lovers could find and experience love, as capitalist modernity in all its forms came to be embraced, not shunned. Kashmir had become an impediment to this dream of a new, resurgent India. This ushered in the next era of Kashmir films, such as Roja (first released in Tamil in 1992) and Mission Kashmir, which, albeit in different ways, attempted to reconcile the new reality of Kashmir within this now aspirational India, often pitting Indian patriotism against Kashmiri terrorism and militancy. Even in these films, however, Kashmir’s landscape remained mesmerizingly beautiful—a place where love could still be discovered and fulfilled, as long as one chose the right side.
Unlike earlier Kashmir films, all of which revel in the spring and summer beauty of Kashmir’s landscape, Haider is filmed almost entirely during winter, with Kashmir’s terrain appearing as stark and ominous. Love of any kind, we sense almost immediately, is doomed from the start. Ghosts haunt this landscape, not least of earlier films, often shown playing for the security forces in movie theaters that have been converted into army barracks and interrogation centers. In a particularly telling scene, after being shuttled from one prison to another, Haider’s father and his spirit end up on stage in front of their interrogators—stark reminders of the true reality of Kashmir—with a Kashmir film playing on screen behind them.
Winter is also the time when Kashmir is left to Kashmiris, devoid as it is of Indian and other tourists (although the security forces remain). As the narrative unfolds across the backdrop of a deepening winter—and two Kashmiri families are caught up in the politics of the insurgency and counter-insurgency—anger, jealously, deep sadness, fear, and revenge take over, leaving behind a trail of deaths and endless destruction. The film is strikingly absent of scenes of anti-India street protests or demonstrations, which rarely take place in winter, although it might also illustrate that these have been brutally repressed. But this creates the sense that the battles and struggles are to be fought out amongst Kashmiris themselves. As with all colonizers, India has wrecked its havoc and can watch it play out as the colonized destroy each other.
Revenge is the central driving force in Haider, not surprising given that it is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but although the film appears to offer a choice between the vengeful path and a path less violent, this is clearly a false choice. All the characters, some willingly and most unwillingly, are dragged into a cycle of violence, revenge, and more violence. The grandfather’s words to the militant commander that freedom does not lie in violence but has to be sought beyond it, repeated in the last scene of the film by Haider’s mother in an attempt to persuade her son not to kill his uncle and cross the border to become a militant, ring hollow as she ends her own life. The bomb strapped to her body explodes, leaving the uncle, her new husband, dragging his legless torso across the graveyard. By choosing not to shoot him and end his uncle’s life, Haider ultimately gets his revenge. As he hobbles off in the final frame, face streaming with tears and facing the prospect of a loveless life (everyone that he knows or loves is dead, some at his own hand), one wonders if death might not have been preferable.
There is no material difference between life and death in Haider’s Kashmir. The film does not create and play out the dichotomy between a ‘good’ versus a ‘bad’ Muslim character as in the films of yore, with the former triumphantly upholding the ideals of Indian secularism and life, while the latter ends up dead, hoisted on his own petard. Everyone, from Haider to his lover, her father, his uncle, his mother, his friends, and even the specter of his dead father, is a purveyor of death—their own or someone else’s. The insurgency and India’s response to it has Kashmiris digging their own graves, as in the haunting song set in the graveyard towards the end of the film, in which gravediggers call on people, regardless of their ages, heights, weights, status, to dig their own graves and lie in them, ‘Aao na, ki jaan gayi, jahan gaya, so jao.’
Winter is also the time when Kashmir is left to Kashmiris, devoid as it is of Indian and other tourists (although the security forces remain). As the narrative unfolds across the backdrop of a deepening winter—and two Kashmiri families are caught up in the politics of the insurgency and counter-insurgency—anger, jealously, deep sadness, fear, and revenge take over, leaving behind a trail of deaths and endless destruction. The film is strikingly absent of scenes of anti-India street protests or demonstrations, which rarely take place in winter, although it might also illustrate that these have been brutally repressed. But this creates the sense that the battles and struggles are to be fought out amongst Kashmiris themselves. As with all colonizers, India has wrecked its havoc and can watch it play out as the colonized destroy each other.
Revenge is the central driving force in Haider, not surprising given that it is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but although the film appears to offer a choice between the vengeful path and a path less violent, this is clearly a false choice. All the characters, some willingly and most unwillingly, are dragged into a cycle of violence, revenge, and more violence. The grandfather’s words to the militant commander that freedom does not lie in violence but has to be sought beyond it, repeated in the last scene of the film by Haider’s mother in an attempt to persuade her son not to kill his uncle and cross the border to become a militant, ring hollow as she ends her own life. The bomb strapped to her body explodes, leaving the uncle, her new husband, dragging his legless torso across the graveyard. By choosing not to shoot him and end his uncle’s life, Haider ultimately gets his revenge. As he hobbles off in the final frame, face streaming with tears and facing the prospect of a loveless life (everyone that he knows or loves is dead, some at his own hand), one wonders if death might not have been preferable.
There is no material difference between life and death in Haider’s Kashmir. The film does not create and play out the dichotomy between a ‘good’ versus a ‘bad’ Muslim character as in the films of yore, with the former triumphantly upholding the ideals of Indian secularism and life, while the latter ends up dead, hoisted on his own petard. Everyone, from Haider to his lover, her father, his uncle, his mother, his friends, and even the specter of his dead father, is a purveyor of death—their own or someone else’s. The insurgency and India’s response to it has Kashmiris digging their own graves, as in the haunting song set in the graveyard towards the end of the film, in which gravediggers call on people, regardless of their ages, heights, weights, status, to dig their own graves and lie in them, ‘Aao na, ki jaan gayi, jahan gaya, so jao.’
It was sobering to watch Haider at this time because the film is set at the height of the insurgency in 1995, and conditions in Kashmir today seem to have come full circle. A new generation of Kashmiris now celebrates death as the only option, as for them the promise of democracy, politics, love, life, and India has faded into the distance. Kashmir seems lost, not just to India, but also to itself. And for most Indians, Kashmir has been reduced to a spectacle, or perhaps more appropriately, a side show.
The idea of its beauty still lingers and Indians want to avail of it if conditions are peaceful, but if not, there so many other, favored destinations outside India for middle-class Indians. What happens to Kashmiris within this side show is of little import. They are, as in that scene in Haider, merely annoying interruptions in the truly grand spectacle of Modi’s India.
The idea of its beauty still lingers and Indians want to avail of it if conditions are peaceful, but if not, there so many other, favored destinations outside India for middle-class Indians. What happens to Kashmiris within this side show is of little import. They are, as in that scene in Haider, merely annoying interruptions in the truly grand spectacle of Modi’s India.
Chitralekha Zutshi, first posted in April 2017
do read the other episodes in Chitralekha Zutshi's Kashmir Journal