Haider's convenient half-truths and some inconvenient answers

Many years ago, I saw a Nat Geo Special. A snake slithers up a tree to a nest where a bird is watching over her eggs. Frightened at the mere sight of the snake, she takes flight, the snake eats the eggs, destroys the nest and slithers back only to a find an alligator in the swamp. The predator suddenly becomes the prey. The snake manages to escape the powerful jaws of the alligator but not before it is badly bruised, almost unfit to be a predator anymore. 

If you are Vishal Bharadwaj, your movie would not depict the snake as a predator but as mere prey, a badly bruised and injured reptile incapable of doing any harm. What you are told would obviously be the truth but an incomplete one.

So the unwitting viewer is given a book of history with first four chapters missing, without even making a mention that they ever existed. When you have a movie that is set in the Kashmir of 1995, you have to deal with the baggage of history. You cannot gloss over what happened from 1989 to 1995.

The filmmaker chooses to ignore those significant years which saw hundreds of temples being razed to dust, thousands of houses burnt after being looted, which saw this very majority, which is portrayed as almost subjugated, participating in a gory ritual of driving away the minorities and being the subjugators themselves.

There is a convenient script and an inconvenient half truth which makes the very edifice of the movie suspect and thus less credible.

The movie is a work of fiction, an adaptation of Shakaspeare's Hamlet against the backdrop of armed insurgency in Kashmir. The plot is an intelligent idea which is used to target AFSPA (which in the movie is called chutzpah), raise the issue of "disappeared people", talk about "half-widows" and interrogation centres.

The motive is thus essentially to raise all the issues which are high on agenda of the separatists. Ideally nothing wrong with that as long as you raise them along with the issues of religious cleansing, Islamic radicalisation, and protection of minorities.

Haider comes home to see his house in ruins (a strong sense of déjà vu filled me, my home too was set on fire, unfortunately by our own neighbours), to find his mother (Tabu) having an affair with his uncle. He then sets out to look for his "disappeared" father (in the movie that means picked up by the Army but not returned home), is mistreated (by who else but Army), meets Roohdar, a terrorist, who ends up telling him that his father is buried in the unmarked graveyards.

Roohdar (Irfan Khan) also tells him that it is his own uncle (Kay Kay Menon) who conspired to have his father killed. In a very subtle manner you see the Army being painted as the villain although it is lust of his own mother for her brother-in-law that leads to his father's killing.

That brings me to the Clock Tower of Lal Chowk, a scene in which Haider is shown as having lost his equanimity of mind. He talks about azadi and blabbers other nonsense. A stone's throw away from where the scene is enacted is the Palladium Cinema. Did Vishal Bharadwaj not see the cinema hall in ruins?

Did it not occur to him that his movie Haider would have been released in this cinema hall and maybe it could have run packed house for many weeks because of the kind of movie he was making? Did he not ask his screenplay writer or other Kashmiris why cinema halls in Kashmir were shut and under whose orders?

Did this not tantamount to the curtailment of freedom of speech? Or maybe he knew all the answers and knew they were incorrect questions and would beget inconvenient answers?

Or maybe he knew, to borrow a quote from Hamlet, that between incestuous sheets the separatists and him shared a cosy relationship and this was the price he was paying for shooting in Kashmir especially after he had been attacked in Kashmir University.

Post Script: In 14th Century, an Islamic invader called Sikander Butshikan (iconoclast) destroyed the Martand Sun Temple. Books of history tell us of the great architectural marvel that this temple was. The invader had all the idols defaced and broken.They tried burning the temple but a stone temple wouldn't burn.

When I saw the song "Bismil" (which was irrelevant to the movie in any case and could have been shot anywhere else in Kashmir) being pictured there with this big black gory puppet inside the temple, I couldn't resist but ask if Bharadwaj would have dared to do something similar in a mosque, a church or even a gurudwara?