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From Hamlet to Haider: The Existential Anguish of the Individual under State Surveillance

Md. Saifur Rahman

Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Haider (2014), an Indian adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in

Kashmir in 1995, in the midst of militancy and a brutal Indian counterinsurgency, stirred

controversy immediately after it was released. The precarious political realities of the region,

particularly the violation of Human Rights by the Indian Army in Kashmir depicted in the film,

angered the nationalistic feelings of Indian filmgoers. Several groups in the social media began

to appeal to boycott the film. Using the hash tag #Boycotthaider, thousands of twitter users

immediately blamed the film as sympathetic towards Kashmiri separatists or biased against the

Indian Army and criticized it for presenting Kashmir as a prison just as “Denmark is a prison” in

Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Bhardwaj , who based his Hamlet adaptation on journalist-author

Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night, claimed:“In my film, in a way, Kashmir becomes Hamlet” . He

delineated the valley as a Police-state where, after the draconian implementation of AFSPA

(Armed Forces Special Powers Act), everyone entering and leaving the region had to stand in a

queue to allow members of the armed forces to search their bodies .The residents had to follow

very strict identity-check methods and had to live under complete state surveillance (Singh).

The theme of surveillance has been explored in many politicized Hamlet adaptations

throughout the world. The earliest stage productions used the surveillance motif by using

attendants or guards spying on the protagonist during the soliloquies when he was supposed to be

alone on the stage. Later, major Hamlet productions across the world used the surveillance motif
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to dramatize the political conflicts in their respective socio-political contexts. As Robert S.

Mirola points out, “In 1837, Pavel Mochalovev on Russian stage portrayed a deeply sorrowful

Hamlet who challenged the authority, representing those who stood against the Tsarist repression

of intellectuals and artists” (xxvi). During the Stalinist regime, Boris Pasternak’s translation of

Hamlet was banned in Russia, sensing “the subversive potential of the individualistic and

rebellious Hero” (Mirola xxvi). In the post-Stalinist era, Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet, a 1964 film

based on a translation by Boris Pasternak and made by cast and crew who had suffered under the

regime of Joseph Stalin, re- created the motif of “Denmark is a Prison” by using “Jagged

boulders, large Stalinist statues, the iron grills and heavy portcullis of the castle, the prisonlike

balustrade, the metal farthingale” (Mirola xxvi).Because the surveillance motif in Hamlet can be

more effectively portrayed in celluloid than on the stage, directors of several film adaptations of

Hamlet tried to experiment with this motif to exemplify the struggle between the oppressive

authorities and a rebellious individual. Gregory Doran’s Hamlet (2009), a television film

adaptation of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2008 modern-dress stage production, used

security cameras as props to show that the characters are under constant observation. Wendy

Faunce’s analysis of the role of surveillance in Doran’s film points out:

Not only do the characters in the film make use of the cameras, as they had done on

stage, but many scenes in the film are presented as footage captured by the security

cameras. This allows the audience to see from the camera’s point of view, creating an

experience in which those in the audience survey the few players. This enables the

audience to experience the performance from a reverse-panoptic point of view. Doing so

shifts their position from one of being on the outside looking in, to one of being on the

inside looking in. The audience is positioned not only within the play, but in a position of
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power and authority. This allows the audience to understand the role and influence of the

security cameras and the characters behind them in a deep and personal way.

Michael Almereyda also used surveillance devices in his film Hamlet (2000), an

adaptation set in contemporary New York City. In Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), the Ghost

appears in CCTV footage, and Ophelia wires listening devices underneath her garments during

her conversation with Hamlet so that Claudius can listen to him to understand his intentions.

Following the footsteps of his predecessors, Bhardwaj finds the surveillance motif very effective

in a setting where he could fuse the protagonist’s internal turmoil with that of the state, where

surveillance is repeatedly reinforced by the state machinery to gain complete control over

individuals. The film deviates from the Shakespearean text by delaying the ghost scene towards

the middle. In an interview given to Harneet Singh of The Indian Express, Bhradwaj said:

“Haider is an extension of what I have attempted in Maqbool and Omkara. Haider doesn’t begin

like he [Shakespeare] begins his play. I’ve turned his third act into the first act (Singh).” The film

begins with the camera panning over the flowing River Jhelum and the snow-covered tranquility

of the landscape which afterwards is shattered by the approaching military jeeps and heavy

boots running. The day begins with an announcement from the mosque:

It's a cordon and search operation. Every man and boy is ordered to assemble in the

school grounds immediately. Women and children may stay home. It's a cordon and

search operation. Every man and boy is ordered to assemble in the school grounds

immediately.

The announcement is heard in the background while the camera focuses on worried faces of

people who come out of their houses, gather in the school ground to be identified by a masked
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military informer sitting in a car so that the army can arrest suspected militants and allow the rest

to go back to their normal lives. The surveillance and controlling method in the scene from

Haider resembles Foucault’s panoptic model of social control described in his Discipline and

Punish: The Birth of the Prisons where, with the omnipresent network of surveillance every

movement and every action of every character are spied on all the time. Foucault describes

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, an architectural design which ensures the functioning of power:

At the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide

windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into

cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on

the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the

light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a

supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned

man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower,

standing out precisely against the light the small captive shadows in the cells of the

periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone,

perfectly individualized and constantly visible. (200)

Bharadwaj repositions Hamlet in insurgency-stricken Kashmir and makes him aware of

the panoptic control of power he has to encounter. Hearing the news of his father’s

disappearance, Haider returns from Aligarh, where he was conducting research on the

revolutionary poets of British India. He is detained at a military check post by an officer who

even reads his diary in search of anti-state sentiments in it. Several times he is searched and

questioned by the army and rescued by Arshia (Ophelia), his childhood companion and by

Salman-Salman (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), his friends who were appointed by the police
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commissioner (Polonius) to spy on him. Haider becomes aware of the prison-like atmosphere of

Kashmir and identifies himself as an inmate. Foucault shows that in the panoptic structure those

who are in control of power make the existence of the surveillance machinery evident to those

who are to be controlled to achieve absolute subjugation.

….to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures

the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that surveillance is permanent in

its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should

tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a

machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who

exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which

they are themselves the bearers. (201)

In Haider this traumatic psychological subjugation of the individual living under

surveillance is shown in a scene, where a local resident fears to enter his own house, unless and

until he is frisked and his identity card is checked by someone. In his search for his missing

father, Haider goes to the police to file a formal report reading from the Armed Forces Special

Powers Act, Rule 4 of section 5 which states “Any person taken under custody under this Act

shall be handed over to the office in charge of the nearest police station with the least possible

delay."He is advised not to file the report as it would make the situation worse by drawing more

attention. This scene makes the protagonist realize the futility of seeking justice from the State.

It is important to note that in Bharadwaj’s film, Haider’s anguish develops long before he comes

to know about the Ghost’s revelation, the anguish, not arising from the freedom of choice as

depicted in the Shakespearean text, but from the constraint on it by the State machinery. Hamlet

critics have always tried to interpret reasons behind the protagonist’s inaction or procrastination.
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T.S. Eliot claimed the play is an “artistic failure” as the emotions of the protagonist “exceeded

the facts” as the “madness” of Hamlet to escape suspicion is “not to lull but to arouse the king’s

suspicion” (146). Interestingly, very little effort has been made by the protagonist in Haider to

lull the suspicion of the authorities. In fact, Haider deliberately arouses the suspicion of those in

power: initially by taking legal action against the Army for the disappearance of his father, later

by speaking in public exposing the hypocrisy of the state. After knowing the secret of his father’s

murder, Haider is seen in the street addressing a public gathering:

UN council resolution number 47 of 1948 Article 2 of the Geneva Convention and article

370 of the Indian Constitution raises but one question! Do we exist or do we not? If we

do, then who are we? If not, then where are we? Did we exist at all? Or not? Chutzpah is

our problem. Do you know what chutzpah means? Once upon a time a bank was robbed.

Pointing the gun at the cashier, the burglar threatened, “Give me the money or die”. The

cashier gave him all the money. He went to the next counter and asked the man to open

an account for him. That is chutzpah. Such audacity! Such stupidity! Like AFSPA.

AFSPA. Attention! Armed Forces Special Powers Act, section 5, rule 4, point A. Any

commissioned officer, warrant officer, on-commissioned officer or any other person of

equivalent rank in the armed forces may, in a disturbed area, if he is of the opinion that it

is necessary so to do for the maintenance of public order, after giving such due warning

as he may consider necessary fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of

death against anyone acting in contravention with law or order. Law and order. Law and

order. Order order. Law and order. There is no law, there is no order. Whose laws?

Whose order? Law and order. India! Pakistan! A game on the border. India clings to us.
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Pakistan leeches on. What of us? What do we want? Freedom! Freedom from this side.

Freedom! Freedom from that side. Freedom! We will be free! Freedom!1 (Haider 2014).

This almost anti-state speech, with its rhetorical resemblance to the “To be or not to be”

soliloquy in Hamlet is delivered not in isolation but in front of his uncle Khurram (the Claudius

counterpart in the film) and even in front of members of the security forces, making it clear that

Bharadwaj’s protagonist wants to let the authorities know what he is thinking. Even in the

domestic sphere, he has little regard about masking his thoughts. In his first meeting with his

mother and uncle, he accuses them of having an intimate relationship in his father’s absence

whereas in the Shakespearean play we find Hamlet concealing his disgust and showing the

appearance of a grief- stricken son. In response to Gertrude’s question of why his grief seems so

particular, Hamlet responds:

“Seems,” madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'

Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,

That can denote me truly. These indeed “seem,”

For they are actions that a man might play.

But I have that within which passeth show,

These but the trappings and the suits of woe (1.2.13-14).

1
The translation of the speech has been taken from the English subtitles used in the film.
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The protagonist’s struggle to conceal his real emotions in Hamlet is reversed in Haider.

Unlike Hamlet soliloquizing whether to kill Claudius at prayer, Haider threatens Khurram with a

gun and explains why he didn’t kill him while he was praying. Throughout the film, Haider

shares his plans with Salman and Salman but Hamlet, realizing what Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern want to find out, resists:

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of

Me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know

My stops; you would pluck out the heart of my

Mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to

The top of my compass: and there is much music,

Excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot

You make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am

Easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what

Instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you

Cannot play upon me (3.2.73).

There is a significant difference in how the protagonist in Shakespeare’s play acts against

surveillance and how Bhardwaj’s character fights in the face of it. In Bharadwaj’s film it is more

like the resisting of the objectification of the self that the French existentialist philosopher Jean

Paul Sartre explains in his Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.

Sartre makes the distinction between the unconscious being (en-soi, being-in-itself) and the

conscious being (pour-soi, being-for-itself) showing that human beings can become aware of

themselves only when confronted with the gaze of another. Sartre believes that we perceive

ourselves being perceived and come to objectify ourselves in the same way we are being
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objectified. Thus, the gaze of the other takes away from us our inherent freedom and causes us to

deprive ourselves of our existence as a being-for-itself and instead learn to falsely self-identify as

a being-in-itself. Sartre points out:

This relation which I call “being-seen-by-another,” far from being merely one of the

relations signified by the word man, represents an irreducible fact which can not be

deduced either from the essence of the Other-as-object, or from my being-as-subject. On

the contrary, if the concept of the Other-as-object is to have any meaning, this can be

only as the result of the conversion and the degradation of that original relation. In a

word, my apprehension of the other in the world as probably being a man refers to my

permanent possibility of being-seen-by-him; that is, to the permanent possibility that a

subject who sees me may be substituted for the object seen by me. “Being-seen-by-the-

Other” is the truth of “seeing-the-Other.”(257)

This objectification of the self causes a certain type of anguish which forms the basis of

our existence in relation to others. In Sartre's famous example, he is peeping through a keyhole,

wholly and pre-reflectively engrossed in this act: “But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall.

Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my

being and that essential modifications appear in my structure-modifications which I can

apprehend and fix conceptually by means of the reflective cogito” (260). The object of Sartre’s

own attention becomes the other's look for which he himself is the spectacle as he finds himself

the shameful object of the other's attention. The transformation of the watcher into an object of

watch has been depicted as a form of resistance in Bhradwaj’s film. As the state with its panoptic

surveillance and control method tries to confine the individual into conformity, Haider fights
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against that power using the same method. The play within the play, is used in the film (in the

form of a dance performance) to disparage his opponent instead of catching the conscience of the

King. Feeling objectified by the State’s tightening of surveillance on him, Haider struggles

throughout the film against the robbing off his freedom; resist the reduction of his self into a

being –in- itself. In the face of the State’s demand for conformity, Haider appears as a rebel who

deliberately makes the panoptic centre of power aware of his resistance. Haider tries to reverse

the panoptic order of control by transforming them from a watcher to an object of watch.

In Haider, Bhardwaj has deviated a lot from the Shakespearean play for which he has

been criticized. At the end of the film neither Haider dies, nor does he kill his uncle. Bhardwaj

makes Haider abjuring revenge to convey a message that has been repeatedly uttered in the film

initially by his grandfather who admonishes violence and doubts whether it can ever bring peace

in Kashmir and towards the end of the film by this dying mother saying: Intiqam se sirf intiqam

paida hota hai. Jab tak hum apne intiqam se azad nahi ho jati, tab tak koi aazadi humein azad

nahi kar sakti (Revenge begets only revenge. Until we become free from our desire for revenge,

no “freedom” will be able to set us free)2 (Haider 2014). The moral dilemma of the protagonist

or the revenge motif which forms the core of most Hamlet productions or screen adaptations are

not the focal points in Bhardwaj’s Haider, it is the existential anguish of the protagonist and his

struggle against the panoptic surveillance and control of the State that makes the grafting of the

Shakespearean tragedy in Indian soil a unique adaptation.

2
Translation by author.
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Works Cited

Eliot, T.S. “Hamlet.” Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.

Faunce, Wendy. “Strict and Most Observant Watch: Hamlet’s Ghostly Postmodern Supervision.”

Digital Literature Review. <https://bsudlr.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/strict-and-most-

observant-watch-hamlets-ghostly-postmodern-supervision> Accessed 21 October 2016.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan

Sheridan. London: Penguin Books, 1979.

Haider. Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj. UTV Motion Pictures, 2014.

Mirola, Robert S. Introduction. “Imagining Hamlet.” Hamlet by William Shakespeare,

New York, London W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. xi-xxxiii.

Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on

Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 2001.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited and with an Introduction by Robert S. Mirola. New York,

London : Norton,2011.

Singh, Harmeet. “‘Kashmir is the Hamlet of my film,’ says Vishal Bhardwaj on Haider.” The
Indian Express 5 Oct 2014. < http://indianexpress.com/article/entertain
ment/bollywood/kashmir-is-the-hamlet-of-my-film/> Accessed 20 October 2016.