Kashmir conflict lies at the heart of Bollywood movie Haider

India's censorship board cleared Haider for release after asking for seven cuts to the film - but the thrust of the movie was not altered in the process.

Indian Bollywood actors Tabbu (L) and Irffan Khan pose for a photograph during a promotional event for the forthcoming film 'Haider, Omkara and Maqbool ' directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (R) in Mumbai on lShow more

NEW DELHI // A new Bollywood film based on Hamlet and set in Kashmir of the 1990s takes a frank look at India’s controversial use of military force in the region.

Haider, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj and released on Thursday, transplants the Shakespeare play into an Indian counterinsurgency against Kashmiri militants fighting for independence or to join Pakistan.

Mr Bhardwaj, who previously reworked Macbeth and Othello into Indian settings to critical acclaim, is already fielding queries about whether Haider will be seen as an anti-India film.

“I’m also an Indian, I’m also a patriot, I also love my nation. So I won’t do anything which is antinational,” Mr Bhardwaj told the Times of India newspaper on Tuesday. “But what is anti-human, I will definitely comment on it.”

India’s Central Board of Film Certification cleared Haider for release after asking for seven cuts to the film. None of these, however, altered the thrust of the movie or its criticism of the Indian state’s actions in Kashmir, according to one person associated with the film.

Across the border, in Pakistan, a report in Dawn newspaper on Wednesday suggested that “the film might not get the much-needed NOC [No Objection Certificate] by the Pakistan Film Censor Board. The film … has been shot in Kashmir, which led to reservations about its release in Pakistan.”

Based on Curfewed Night, a memoir by the journalist Basharat Peer about growing up in Kashmir in the 1990s, Haider depicts the Ikhwan, a counterinsurgency militia armed and funded by Indian security forces.

Formed in 1994 and at its most active for three to four years, Ikhwan exemplified, for Mr Peer, the abuses perpetrated by the Indian state in Kashmir. In Curfewed Night, he recalled that Ikhwan “tortured and killed like modern-day Mongols. Ikhwan … went on a rampage, killing, maiming and harassing anyone they thought to be sympathetic to the Jamaat [the Jamaat-e-Islami, a religious body supportive of Pakistan] or the separatists.”

Human rights groups have been critical of the Indian Army’s actions in Kashmir.

In a 1994 report, Human Rights Watch contended that soldiers and state-armed militias carried out extra-judicial killings “as a matter of policy”. As recently as 2010, a division of the US State Department wrote about the “numerous reports” that the Indian state has “committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals and insurgents” in Kashmir.

“I thought Hamlet in particular is so apt to be adapted to Kashmir because of the scenes of oppression, betrayal, injustice and revenge, and the dark, brooding atmosphere of the play,” Mr Peer, who wrote the screenplay of Haider along with Mr Bhardwaj, told The National on Wednesday. “The moment you think of that fabled line, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ you think of Kashmir.”

Haider is, Mr Peer said, a “relentlessly intense film. I’m waiting to see how people react to it.” He hadn’t received any confirmed news about the movie’s release in Pakistan, he said.

In Haider, Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and chief antagonist, is transposed into a Kashmiri lawyer who collaborates in the formation of Ikhwan. The Hamlet character Haider, played by the Bollywood star Shahid Kapoor, is incensed by this betrayal; even as he seeks vengeance for the death of his father, he tumbles slowly into psychological disarray.

Haider has already earned some praise for its boldness in advance of its release.

Mr Bhardwaj, wrote a reviewer for the Mid-Day newspaper on Wednesday, “reminds us of the harsh truth in our own backyard.”

“We all have been hearing and reading horror stories involving people … who call Kashmir their home and their seemingly unending struggle in the face of extreme adversity, but we often quickly turn the page and move on,” the review continued. In Haider, Mr Bhardwaj “holds the mirror so uncomfortably close to the issue that intimate details of the suffering and the evident hopelessness of your own countrymen sits as a burden on your conscience.”