Absence and repetition in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider

• Main Author: Taarini Mookherjee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2016-12-01
• Series: Cogent Arts & Humanities
• Subjects: adaptation; global shakespeare; bollywood; theories of translation; performance and repetition; kashmir; political disappearance; absent presence; foreignness in the arts
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2016.1260824

Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet set in the politically volatile Kashmir of the 1990s was one of the most anticipated Hindi movies of 2014, and in the weeks leading up to and after its release, spawned a media frenzy. Both as a Shakespearean adaptation and as a film about Kashmir, Haider has had to deal with the exacting standards and accompanying political discourse and debates of both fields. This paper will be moving away from the dominant discourse of fidelity in adaptation studies to focus on an extended close reading of the film on its own terms. I argue that, repetition and absence, terms that are fundamentally tied to the ontology of a translation or adaptation, are politically reimagined in this film, providing a lens with which to view the film. I borrow Spivak’s formulation of the “training of the imagination of the reader” to demonstrate that this adaptation, similarly, trains and equips the viewer to read it. This paper enters a larger debate in the field of translation and adaptation studies, suggesting that placing an emphasis on a comparison with the putative original and the unidirectional process of adaptation can result in overlooking both an adaptation’s political ramifications and its role as an interpretation of the original.