How Haider has changed the way we look at censorship in Bollywood

Much has been said and written about Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet set in the Kashmir of 1995. Much has also been made of the film’s lead performances, with Shahid Kapoor playing the title role and Tabu as his enigmatic mother. Much has been said about the end of the film, the middle of the film, the beginning of the film and everything in between. And not everyone has agreed on everything about it.

It would be safe to say that Haider has been one of the few mainstream, big-budget political films from one of contemporary Hindi cinema’s auteurs to have polarised audiences, professional film critics and even an anonymous former Indian army officer. But this division of opinion may be salutary for our popular culture.

Polarisation is an unfortunately misunderstood phenomenon in our mass culture. Every Salman, Shah Rukh, Aamir film or any other commercial movie has to get an immediate thumbs-up or thumbs-down from "we the people". An in-between position won’t do. Nuance won’t do. What about a really carefully articulated and qualified position? Never, ever.

But in the case of Haider, this extreme division in opinion can actually help spark debate over how to handle a complex political theme for a mainstream audience. Polarisation, so often associated with the politics of this country, is a discrete matter. But hair-splitting over the content and nature of a movie with a strong political inclination is a conversation (though with the potential of unravelling) that requires serious encouragement in our cultural milieu.

One of the takeaways for this viewer after watching Haider was the astute sense of awareness the makers displayed about what you can and cannot say about Kashmir, and how to say it to a largely non-Kashmiri Indian audience. It is a particularly striking value of the film since it is a subject that the Indian state and perhaps censor board could be testy with (the censors recommended 41 cuts which the makers accepted). In other words, the makers display a knack for grasping issues of censorship and self-censorship in an Indian setting.

While we know that triteness has often marked the depiction of Kashmir in much of mainstream Hindi cinema, we have left that part of our cinematic history unanalysed. For what can mask the work of power more than the deploying of Manichean ideas of good and bad and black and white? The cinematic cliché of the Kashmiri separatist as Pakistani agent and the Indian state as liberator and protector have more been acts of political neutralisation than aesthetic advancement.

So, one viewpoint about a conflict zone in our vicinity is measured through typecasts. At the other end of the spectrum of our public discourse stand documentarians, activists and lawyers who mount severe critiques of the behaviour of the Indian state in Kashmir, in central India or the Northeast.

Arundhati Roy, accused of sedition in October 2010 for her views on Kashmiri azadi, represents a severe criticism of the idea of the Indian state. Thus, we witness classic opinion polarisation over parts of this country that are justified in their anger against the power centres of India. But the question remains, between these extreme positions, where is the space to debate all this in the middle?

And here lies the value of a commercial film like Haider. It is a narrative that appears to avoid falling into the extremities discussed earlier and yet sends a serious message across about Indian authorities without using a whip or gun to criticise the latter. Haider humanises and personalises what used to be an abstract conflict for much mainstream Hindi cinema.

Yet as it focuses on the actions, inactions, betrayals of the members of a Kashmiri family and their friends, the viewer actually never loses sight of why all this mayhem happens. (The closest the film comes to confronting the atrocities of the Indian state are in the torture scenes.) By making the Indian state a semi-shadowy presence and the familial conflicts visceral, a mainstream film appears to find a middle ground when it comes to handling a theme like Kashmir. It perhaps also makes a censor’s work harder to spot any criticism of authority.

In the global history of literature, the examples of writers and artists facing censorship are numerous. Orwell’s or Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre, are telling documents about totalitarian societies, even if they wrote largely works of fiction. It is bizarre. The idea of censorship and the censor, in the act of carrying out their duties can actually end up granting writers and artists the content and the framework to subvert the censorship they aim for.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Orwell’s 1984, succeed as they do the job of holding up a mirror to the authoritarian societies they are based in. The refrain “big brother is watching you” ends up becoming a critique of repression. Words symbolising force like AFSPA get subverted in their very expression in Haider: If you setup the story line skilfully, you can break the rules by sticking to them.

It is in this light that Haider seems to have done the unusual in contemporary commercial Hindi cinema. It finds a plot line for a serious political theme and deals with it in manner that will not attract the claws of the censor and still be a viable venture. One hopes this isn’t the only commercial film on Kashmir.

Indian audiences need to be told of the lives of the Maoists; the travails of the Northeast; the suicides of Vidarbha; the privations and migrations of the Kashmiri Pandits – all groups of people with great reasons to demonise the power centres of India. Lest they run into the hands of the censors, they need to look no further than at Haider, which provides a good lesson on how to criticise the Indian state without criticising it on its face.