‘ACCENTS YET UNKNOWN’: HAIDER AND

HAMLET IN KASHMIR
POMPA BANERJEE

Recent adaptations of Hamlet, in ‘accents yet advanced Shakespeare’s plays and the English lan-
unknown’1 in early modern England, draw attention guage to reinforce cultural and racial hierarchies.2
to the way global reworkings of the play realign the Haider, however, destabilizes the role of English in
cultural authority of Shakespeare and, in doing so, modern, multilingual India by reminding audi-
revise the role of the English language in a newly ences that, far from being the master language,
reconfigured world. Vishal Bhardwaj’s film, Haider, English is only one language among many. But, if
a 2014 adaptation of Hamlet co-written with English cannot adequately express the fractured
Basharat Peer, is a case in point. The film is set in reality of Kashmir, neither, the film suggests, can
Kashmir in the 1990s, at the contested border other languages bear the burden of expression.
between India and Pakistan. Haider yokes Hamlet to Consequently, language itself is put under scrutiny.
the concerns of the militarized zone of conflict and These realignments of cultural authority and
violence in Kashmir. In this way, the film renegoti- language produce a rich afterlife for Hamlet, one
ates Shakespeare’s cultural authority in the global achieved through a process of ‘transformation and
marketplace. Shakespeare’s play about a melancholy renewal’.3 As Derrida’s note on Benjamin’s trans-
Danish prince, left restless by the meddlesome ghost lator suggests, such an adaptation ‘modifies the
of his father, becomes one among many ‘foreign’ original even as it also modifies the translating
bodies that complicate seemingly local concerns in language’.4 By offering up Shakespeare’s play in
Kashmir. While Hamlet is made to engage in new languages and new geopolitical realities,
a conflict that many still consider to be a regional
skirmish between India and Pakistan, the play’s ico-
nic status and Shakespeare’s cultural capital among 1
global audiences ensure that Kashmir’s tense war- Julius Caesar, 3.1.114. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are
from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells,
zone, agitated by decades of hostilities between two Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford,
states armed with nuclear weapons, is projected as an 1986).
international, not a regional, concern. 2
Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British
Haider’s insertion of Shakespeare into Kashmir Rule in India (New York, 1989), pp. 57–80; Jyotsna Singh,
repositions the English language as well. Displaced Colonial Narratives, Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the
Language of Colonialism (London, 1996), p. 121; Michael Neill,
in a diverse linguistic community of multiple lan- ‘Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the centre’, in
guages (Kashmiri, Urdu, Arabic, and Hindi, among Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin
others), English is detached from the civilizing (London, 1998), pp. 168, 180; and Ania Loomba, Gender, Race,
mission that brought Hamlet and English studies and Colonialism (Oxford, 2002), p. 22.
3
to colonial India. Nineteenth-century colonial Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, 1968), p. 73.
4
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography,
intervention in Indian education, such as Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques
Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835), Derrida, ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln, NE, 1988), p. 122.

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 ‘ACCENTS YET UNKNOWN’: HAIDER AND HAMLET IN KASHMIR
Haider creates disruption; it shifts ‘the founda- and foreign words to create a language of disrup-
tion so that new angles, vantages, and perspec- tion that calls attention to its own inadequacies.
tives are created’,5 and Shakespeare in revised Words become indeterminate; their import does
form reaches unanticipated audiences across lin- not always attach to concrete objects or places.
guistic and cultural borders through the global In some instances, words do not always indicate
reach of Bollywood. the same meaning to every speaker (or listener).
The most effective example of the film’s destabili-
zation of both language and space appears in
wording kashmir
Haider/Hamlet’s response to the security force’s
Shakespeare’s play shifts to a new terrain in Haider. question at the roadblock outside his hometown
Adopting Craig Latrell’s commentary on in Kashmir: ‘Which town do you belong to?’
Indonesian theatre, one might say that, to tell the When Haider responds that he is from Islamabad,
story of Kashmir, Shakespeare’s play has been ‘stu- the soldiers detain him. An explanation arrives
died, borrowed, reworked, reinterpreted, and with his fiancée Arshee: Islamabad does not
combined with pre-existing local styles to produce refer to the capital city of Pakistan, but to
something which is novel yet recognizable to local a place in Indian-controlled Kashmir known to
audiences’.6 Shakespeare is enmeshed in indigen- the locals as both Anantnag and Islamabad. Some
ous concerns where ‘[L]ocal particularities’ – in this Hindus call the town Anantnag, and some
case, the chronicles of blood and loss in Kashmir – Muslims call it Islamabad. Words, in this instance,
‘become transplanted to new ground, and some- telescope the unstable history of space and time.
thing new and hybrid results’.7 This new ground, In a place where people frequently disappear,
Haider’s Kashmir, is riven by decades of conflict. words do not necessarily designate a precise geo-
A harsh military outfit disciplines this claustropho- graphical marker of space. By redirecting our
bic, heavily armed zone through an emergency focus to the land, ‘This other Eden, demi-
decree, AFSPA, the Armed Forces Special paradise’ of Shakespeare’s history plays (Richard
Powers Act. AFSPA suspends civil liberties in the II, 2.1.42), Haider also indicates that, while the
Indian-controlled part of Kashmir under a special disputed land of the film, this other Paradise of
emergency anti-terrorism measure. The army rou- Kashmir, can be fenced off, bordered variously,
tinely performs body searches and compulsory roll- fought over, blood-sodden and called by different
calls of residents to ferret out terrorists, insurgents names, it endures beyond language.
and sympathizers with suspected agitators seeking Paranoia accompanies a further destabilization of
freedom from Indian control. People are ‘disap- language as Haider continues to search for his
peared’ or go missing without official explanation. father in burial grounds where words are often
Haider/Hamlet has been at university, far from his replaced by something else. Signs and placards
home in Indian-controlled Kashmir. When his flag the missing body of Dr Meer. In Illustration
father, Dr Meer, disappears after performing sur- 1, at top right, nailed to a tree, the anonymous
gery on a suspected insurgent, Haider returns to gravesites are overseen by a green sign. In Urdu,
Kashmir to look for his missing parent. the words spell out an address: Shahid Chowk,
Haider’s search for his father in the brutal geo- Regee Pura. While the space of the bleak cemetery
political reality of Kashmir is parallelled by a steady
destabilization of language. The film words
5
Kashmir by pressing language into new forms. Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and
Shakespeare’s English is unable to express the Contemporary America (Oxford, 2011), pp. 17–18.
6
Craig Latrell, ‘After appropriation’, The Drama Review 44.4
scope of violence and loss in Kashmir; other lan- (Winter 2000), 52.
guages falter as well. Haider employs linguistic dis- 7
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn with
locations, word replacements, signs, neologisms Siobhan O’Flynn (London, 2013), p. 150.

19
 POMPA BANERJEE

1. Haider finds an address for mourning. Screen capture from Haider, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (2014).

2. Haider kneels before Grave 318. Screen capture from Haider, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (2014).

is marked and named, the corpses in the graves In Illustration 3, a new tombstone replaces the
remain unclaimed and unmemorialized. number 318. Several languages collectively offer
In Illustration 2, numbers appear as placeholders context and identity for the body under the slab.
for words: one sees the faint appearance of the On the top of this image, the first underlined text
number 318 instead of a headstone with words, engraves the number 786, the numerical represen-
which are delayed. tation of the Arabic ‘Bismillah’ (in the name of
Eventually, Dr Meer’s remains shift from the anon- Allah/God). The text below the number declares
ymity of a ‘disappeared’ corpse assigned a numbered in Arabic, ‘Ho’val–Baaqi’, or ‘He [Allah] is that
grave to a burial place marked with a headstone who remains’ or ‘only He is the immortal one’.
inscribed in multiple languages. Below the Arabic inscription, the body under the

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 ‘ACCENTS YET UNKNOWN’: HAIDER AND HAMLET IN KASHMIR

3. From number to word. Screen capture from Haider, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (2014).

headstone is finally identified. The name Hilaal pursued by the army, the tension of the moment is
Meer appears, first in English, accompanied by transferred to a telephone call that is not answered,
‘Dr.’, the abbreviated sign of his profession, and at least not then. The wanted militant needs emer-
then in Urdu. The ensuing text in Urdu notes the gency surgery. The hospital is not an option.
vafaat, the date of death, as 15 December 1995. Haider’s father, Dr Meer, brings him to his home
A small sign after the date indicates the initial letter for surgery. His wife Ghazala/Gertrude is terrified.
for ‘Eesavi’ (of Christ) distinguishing the Christian The patient’s companion silently places a container
calendar from the Islamic or Hijri calendar. Below with bloody napkins on the bed by her. She
the date, the inscription ‘Allah aap ko jannat naseeb vomits. The phone rings. She descends the stairs
kare’ [May Allah grant you peace and paradise] and looks at the telephone that continues to ring in
bestows a benediction on the spectator viewing the silence. The lack of communication between
the tombstone, and the film.8 The viewer must Ghazala and the unseen caller at the other end of
piece together the narrative of Haider’s missing the telephone line points to her unspoken fears
father in Urdu, Arabic and English. In this multi- about the hunted militant her husband insists on
lingual graveyard, English depends on Urdu and healing and the official retribution that must surely
Arabic to draw out the context surrounding follow.
Dr Meer’s death. The inevitable reprisal recasts the dialogic rela-
The film employs other ways of placing lan- tionship between Shakespeare’s play and the reality
guage under scrutiny. It reminds viewers that of Kashmir. A wordless exchange passes for
Haider and Kashmir are not ‘passive receivers of a ‘conversation’ that resists language by substituting
Western ideas and images but active manipulators words with sounds that telegraph meaning. A non-
of such influences, that intercultural borrowing is vocalized or mechanical sound replaces language –
not simply a one-way process, but something far in this case, a car horn. The army rounds up the
more interestingly dialogic’.9 This dialogue does
not necessarily lead to an exchange or negotiation.
Instead, at particular moments, the film pointedly 8
I am grateful to Sheeraz Mohammed, Rahul Bjorn Parson,
refuses to enter an exchange. In the scene leading and Rob Adler Peckerar for their kind assistance with
translations.
up to Dr Meer performing surgery on the insurgent 9
Latrell, ‘After appropriation’, p. 46.

21
 POMPA BANERJEE

4. A lesson in power: Wajura Primary School. Screen capture from Haider, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (2014).

citizens in search of the militants known to be in the proceedings, and he has absolute power over the
the village. The viewer is aware that Dr Meer has man called before him. The only prominent back-
refused to turn away a wanted man because he was ground sound is the vicious beating of the nameless
in need of surgery. As Dr Meer joins the stream of person in line before Dr Meer, a person identified as
men holding up their identity cards for roll-call, a problem by the car horn. The few words heard in
each man is forced to pause in front of a parked response to the beating of the nameless man are
vehicle. A silent, masked figure sits inside the jeep ‘I don’t know.’ Words are uttered only to deny
and watches the men pass in single file. If he shakes knowledge and deflect communication, which
his head to indicate ‘no’, then the car horn stays bypasses language and is decided by the arbitrary
silent, and the man before him is allowed to pass. If, horn controlled by the masked figure inside the jeep.
on the other hand, the masked man nods his head Haider/Hamlet’s search for his father, the missing
to confirm the man’s guilt, then the car horn blares Dr Meer, also tracks the shifting role of the English
this verdict, and the soldiers seize upon him and language in Kashmir. On road signs, billboards, and
drag him to a room to administer punishment. shop fronts, English words are usually accompanied
Words are redundant in this impromptu military by translations in Urdu and other languages. On the
trial, which does away with language as a direct rare occasions when English appears without the
means of communication. Words do not articulate support of other languages, the intended viewers of
or affirm guilt, pronounce judgement, or invite those signs reside outside of Kashmir.
retribution. No dialogues punctuate the action In Illustration 5 the crowd outside the gates of the
with words justifying the violence. No verbal tes- United Nations compound in Kashmir holds up
timony is offered, and the accused do not speak. English-only signs. The mostly handwritten notices,
When words appear, they flash on signboards, ask- posters, and placards chronicle the plight of the
ing viewers to draw their own conclusions. disappeared people and their families: ‘My father,
In Illustration 4, the signboard in the background where is he?’; ‘Where are our loved ones?’; ‘Stop
locates the summary trial and punishment in Wajura crime against humanity’; ‘What am I posthumous or
Primary School, reinforcing the educational value, orphan?’ The absence of the other languages that fill
the lesson, of this exercise in power. The car horn billboards everywhere else in the film suggests that
speaks for the masked figure. He is the sole judge of the crowd employs English to mediate the transfer

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 ‘ACCENTS YET UNKNOWN’: HAIDER AND HAMLET IN KASHMIR
In Kashmir, English is inadequate, behind the times,
because ‘[S]tandard English is simply not capable of
giving adequate expression to the fractured narrative
of our times.’11 Words bend to the needs of the
moment. New words are coined and thrown into
the circulation: ‘half-widows’, for instance – the
wives of disappeared men – or ‘suffocracy’,
a suffocating democracy. No language offers words
to describe the perplexing symptoms of a ‘new
disease’ that compels men to stand by their
door, unable to cross the threshold into their own
home. In Illustration 6, victims of the yet-unnamed
‘new disease’ are able to enter their homes only after
they have been patted down, searched and declared
‘safe’.
Perhaps the film’s most significant dislocation of
both Shakespeare and English occurs in its radical
implantation of a foreign word, chutzpah, in
Haider/Hamlet’s supposedly deranged rant in the
town square. Speaking before an appreciative audi-
ence, Haider uses the word chutzpah to draw atten-
tion to the violence and the contempt of civil law
permitted under AFSPA. Mispronouncing the
word as CHutzpah, Haider explains the meaning
of the foreign word with examples – for instance,
the chutzpah of the bank robber who steals cash
from one bank counter, then saunters to the next
counter to open an account with the stolen money.
Pronounced as CHutzpah in the film, the word
may sound like a local swearword, but there is also
another form of disruption that is worth examin-
5. Where did they go? Screen captures from Haider, directed by ing. Chutzpah as brazen insolence is relatively
Vishal Bhardwaj (2014).
recently recorded – in 1892 – in the Oxford
English Dictionary. As insolence, chutzpah appears
of their seemingly local concerns to a global body of after ‘mouth’, as in ‘mouthing off’, in 1891, and
viewers. Through these scenes, Haider takes a ‘broad before ‘crust’, also as in insolence, in 1900.12 In the
ownership of Shakespeare’, making Hamlet ‘produc- Kashmir of the 1990s, this deliberate (and awk-
tively intertextual’, and allowing Shakespeare ‘to ward) implantation of the word as CHutzpah alerts
function as a collocation of meanings that resonate the viewer that English may be irrelevant in this
with the world’.10 Addressed to an international
audience, the United Nations, as well as the world-
wide consumers of televised wars and disasters, the 10
Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema
English words register their authors’ loss on the (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 1, 55.
11
Jatinder Verma, ‘Classical Binglish in the twenty-first cen-
consciousness of the world.
tury’, in Shakespeare, Race, and Performance: The Diverse Bard,
Away from the UN gates, however, no single ed. Delia Jarret-Macauley (New York, 2016), p. 40.
language, such as English, can bear witness to events. 12
chutzpah, n., OED Online, September 2016.

23
 POMPA BANERJEE

6. Permission to enter my home. Screen capture from Haider, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj (2014).

situation, because it is unable to mediate between translators and audiences. In such performances,
cultures and languages. There is no English pho- ‘Local and foreign sources of authority coexist in
netic equivalent to the Hebrew CH/KH sound. performance, with neither authority subsuming, or
However, the KH sound does exist in Urdu, for erasing the other.’15 This sort of hybridity, Linda
example, as in ‘Khuda Hafiz’ (‘May God be your Hutcheon suggests, produces a dialogue between
guardian’, and/or ‘good bye’).13 In that sense, the adapted text (Hamlet) and adaptation (Haider),
CHutzpah/chutzpah bypasses English altogether. as well as the cultures that produced them. Together
In the Kashmiri marketplace, Hebrew – through both text and adaptation negotiate a new kind of
Yiddish – speaks to Urdu. The foreign word chutz- language, and ‘both are in dialogue with the words
pah is transported in contested Kashmir to transfer themselves’.16
the concerns of one embattled diaspora to another. Haider complicates the idea of English as the
It illustrates the way words and ideas migrate in master language of the colonist, and allows us to
different forms to mediate between local and glo- think about cross-cultural transfers. The film does
bal. Moreover, Shakespeare is estranged. Both not silence or erase the language of Shakespeare but
chutzpah and Shakespeare are foreign entities in adds to it in significant ways; it is ‘not a Shakespeare
the Kashmiri market square. Shakespeare is made emptied of words’, but one ‘with added languages
unfamiliar but becomes uncannily familiar and and additional resonances, both linguistic and
recognizable in an altered and renegotiated afterlife performative’.17 The film makes a case for
in Kashmir.
Haider’s realignment of Shakespeare’s cultural
authority and the English language helps us under- 13
I am grateful to Rob Adler Peckerar for his lively commen-
stand that Shakespearian adaptations are not one- tary on chutzpah.
way transmissions from West to East but collabora- 14
Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York,
tions across time, culture and language.14 Through 2006), p. 47.
these ‘collaborations’, the film creates a space to James R. Brandon, ‘Other Shakespeares in Asia: an over-
15

refashion the dynamic community of early modern view,’ in Re-Playing Shakespeare in Asia, ed. Poonam Trivedi
and Minami Ryuta (New York, 2010), p. 31.
theatre that produced texts voiced severally by the 16
Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, pp. 149–50.
multiple authors, actors, censors, editors, publishers, 17
Trivedi and Ryuta, eds., Replaying Shakespeare in Asia, p. 15.

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 ‘ACCENTS YET UNKNOWN’: HAIDER AND HAMLET IN KASHMIR
a renewed Shakespeare. Adaptations are, after all, many of whom are under the age of 35, and for
‘about seeing things come back to us in as many whom English is only one language among many.
forms as possible’.18 The film also renegotiates Transculturated and indigenized, Hamlet, in turn,
Shakespeare’s place in the global market. On the reenergizes both cultures. Haider then evokes
one hand, Shakespearian texts are catalysts, ‘for- a web of influences and offers the capacity to foster
eign’ bodies that animate specifically indigenous a genuine conversation, in multiple languages, in
concerns. On the other hand, through ‘the act of which Hamlet informs Kashmir, and Kashmir
siting’, the foreign becomes local.19 If Hamlet was inflects Hamlet, even as the film expands the inter-
once a British import instrumental in expressing pretation of Shakespeare’s play.
the colonizer’s values, then Haider transforms the
once-familiar text into a specifically Indian cultural
export. Shakespeare is stretched, challenged, and
made ‘the sum of the critical and creative responses 18
Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 160.
elicited by his work’.20 In 1817, Hazlitt asserted, 19
Sonia Massai, ‘Defining local Shakespeares’, in World-wide
‘It is we who are Hamlet’,21 but Haider rewrites the Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed.
Sonia Massai (London, 2005), p. 3.
‘we’ of Hazlitt’s confident assertion. Shakespeare’s 20
Massai, ‘Defining local Shakespeares’, p. 6.
play is made new and meaningful, and assured 21
William Hazlitt, The Round Table: Characters of Shakespeare
a ‘continued life’22 among multilingual and diaspo- (London, 1969), p. 232.
22
ric audiences numbering hundreds of millions, Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 71.

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