Was Haider among the best to have come out from Bollywood in recent years? I certainly didn't think so. It reduced the complexity of conflict in Kashmir to a simple black and white duality. I wrote about the shades of grey in war and conflict for Kindle magazine. Read it here or see below.
Haider as a film projecting the reality of Kashmir, has coalesced multiple narratives into a simplistic choice between vengeance and peace. Deepa Bhasthi elaborates on the shades of grey which often permeate into the everyday lives of Kashmiris ….
REVENGE
Horatio:
They bleed on both sides. - How is it, my lord?
Osric:
How is't, Laertes?
Laertes:
Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric; I am justly kill'd with mine own
treachery.
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act V. Scene II
The story of revenge served cold or
otherwise, has never been found to be linear. Take Arjuna. Or Hamlet. Or the
legend of the snake with a rage that lasts a purported 12 long years. Or the
Tamils, the Sinhalese. Or Haider.
Embroiled in the act of seeking revenge are complex philosophical and ethical
issues that surround the means of revenge, be it cold blooded murder,
calculated vengeance or thwarted desire. There are always many shades between
white and black, many more than fifty. Yet, popular culture seems to insist on
conveniently bracketing revenge, emotions, conflict, into water tight boxes,
with no recourse of escape, no space for alternative interpretations.
That was my problem with Haider. Admittedly, it is one of the
better films to come out from the B-factory in recent times. I should have
known better though when everyone and their uncle recommended that this, Haider, was "true cinema." I
went for the poetry, but there was hardly any. Instead I admired the Kashmiri
embroidery, on everything from the blankets to waistcoats to durries in the sun
room, and wished the film was half an hour shorter. The movie was not only very
far from "true cinema", whatever that definition, but it also tried
to reduce the Kashmir issue, and the larger question of vindication and vengeance
to a simple, straightforward answer. It can never be simple, human beings are
much more complicated than that.
Coincidentally, it so happened that I was
midway through Samanth Subramanian's fantastic book This Divided Island - Stories from the Sri Lankan War when I went
to watch Haider. Both presented an
interesting juxtaposition to the issue of revenge, seeking it, being at its
receiving end or fated to be a mute witness. Subramanian, a New Delhi based
journalist, moved to Sri Lanka for nearly a year, traveled extensively and
gathered the multiple narratives of post-war Sri Lanka. He is Tamil, so that
places him on a precarious ledge. But like a true journalist, he is only the
carrier of stories, the messenger who refuses, who cannot take sides.
The island has not left anyone unaffected by
the decades old war that ended in a purge five years ago. How could it? Not
even if you were an ostrich in the sand could something of that gravity pass
you by without leaving a dent. The Tamil side was massacred, youth were, in
later years, forced to pick up arms - why does a poet pick up arms? Why did
Haider? Sometimes there is no choice, most times actually. Conditioned by a
lifetime of an ideology, a single incident, or a slow brewing that sparks off
something that is hidden in all of us, that is the philosophy we need to
examine.
What is it that they say, about a little of
the Satan in all of us? The Sinhalese were victims too in the tear drop
country. Journalists disappeared, families were ripped apart. The monks,
saffron robed and a picture of tranquility and peace, broke down mosques, and militantly
continue to encroach and build upon Tamil temples, Subramanian writes. It
shouldn't have shocked me, but it did. Religion has always blackmailed its
devout to bring out the devil in them, Buddhism can't be any different. Yet all
you see in popular culture is the calmness of a monk under a Bodhi tree,
meditating for world peace. That is what manufactured consent does to you,
taking away what your common sense knows to impose what someone somewhere with
an agenda wants you to believe. Perhaps nothing gave me a jolt as reading
passages of what the religious majority has been doing to the religious
minority in that country. It shouldn't have, I almost feel foolish for being
complicit with the manufactured mass opinion, but then, there is that devil in
all of us.
Haider is complicit too,
in feeding into and perpetrating the mass opinion of what Kashmiriyat is,
reducing it to just its issue of nationalism. It is that, it is a lot of that.
But Kashmir is also about every day concerns of people - of grappling with
love, loss, money, success, career, modernity, effects of globalisation and the
other mundane things that concern people everywhere, elsewhere. By completely
ignoring the everyday of people in any non-normal conflict zone, we, as
consumers of popular culture that does so, are in danger of forcing these
people back into a narrow narrative, further reducing what their individual
lives mean beyond cold statistics.
The greyish tone of any country's political
situation is best understood in its individual case studies, those in turn
facilitating wider interpretations of the whole picture. No one in a war can be
wholly right, no one can be wholly wrong either. As long as those of us who
have the luxury of living along unbombed roads and at a safe distance from
conflict remember that there are always, always two sides to an issue,
somewhere, the clinical, calculated, manipulative manufacturing of consent will
be unsuccessful.
J., my Kashmiri friend, is one of those cool
dudes, deliciously handsome, like most Kashmiri men are. It wasn't until some time
into our acquaintance that I got to know he was from Ananthnag, one of the most
heavily affected areas in the post 1989 years. J and I never spoke of it,
though the journalist in me itches to hear his story. For me, he is a
happy-go-lucky sort, filmy in the way he breaks into a Bollywood inspired
dialogue, tehezeeb-ed and utterly
chivalrous in an old world way. He must have demons too, and a cause for
revenge. The last time I spoke to him, he was on the lookout for a girlfriend.
He, like his counterparts in all the countries of the world, at war or
otherwise, is a sum of all these parts of his, no part greater than the whole.
Vindication, vengeance and its synonyms are
only available in shades of grey.