‘Jhelum hua laal’: Critically analyzing the ending of the Bollywood reworking of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Haider
(in partial fulfilment of my research paper, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Ahmedabad (2015–2017))
The image of final act of a Shakespearean tragedy is the exact replica of a graveyard. All the central characters of the play meet their end by the end of the final act of the play. It is death, blood and inanimate body mass that rules the stage in the end. The catastrophe engulfs the lives of the central characters. Is death the final culmination of a tragedy? Is it action or direction of thought which rules the end of a tragedy? Can a tragedy end in some greater sense if the hero and the villain of the revenge tragedy stay alive? What happens in the end of Haider and how is it different from the last act of Hamlet? Does the ending of Haider challenges the genre limitations of a tragedy? Does the ending of Haider take a political or philosophical stand? The paper is an attempt to critically analyze and question the ending of the Bollywood reworking of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Haider. The paper also critically questions A.C Bradley’s theory of a Shakespearean tragedy, its fundamental traits and genre composition.
Haider was released on 2nd October 2014 (in India) and is directed by Vishal Bhardwaj. Haider is a Bollywood reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet was originally published in 1603. Hamlet was a tragedy set in the Kingdom of Denmark and the play focused on Prince Hamlet’s dilemma of the ‘instructed revenge’ against his father’s murderer, his uncle, Claudius. Haider, on the other hand, is set in 1995 during the Kashmir conflict of civilians disappearing after random trials and arrests by the Indian Army under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) 1990. Haider which is a modern day Bollywood reworking of the play Hamlet ends quite differently from the famous Shakespearean tragedy. Unlike Hamlet where Hamlet’s entire family dies, along with Hamlet, in the end and the setting of the play in itself gives a peripheral imagery of a graveyard, in Haider though the last scene is ironically set in a graveyard but neither the tragic hero, Haider, nor the villain, Khurram, dies before the last scene fades away into the end. Also the way Gertrude meets her ‘accidental death’ stands on a paradigm way different from that of Ghazala’s decision of suicide. Hamlet’s last words in the play are, ‘The rest is silence,’ (5.2.356, 132) whereas Haider keeps shouting, crying and whispering ‘Mauji!’ (Mother!) repeatedly till he finally decides not to kill Khurram. Khurram on the other hand chooses his last words, Bhaijaan. Why does Haider end differently? And now that it does, what new is it trying to say or show? Does Haider remain in the set framework of a classical tragedy when the tragic hero and the villain remain alive in the end and are probably the only main characters to survive? What is the end of Haider then if the tragic hero and the villain survive? Who/What dies in the end? Hamlet is not only the most famous Shakespearean tragedy but it is also one of the most famous revenge tragedies. It is the delayed action of revenge that yields the death of almost all the main characters of the play. But what happens to revenge in Haider? In the scheme of revenge, Haider seems to stand diametrically opposite to Hamlet because Haider is not about the delay of the action of revenge but about the action of revenge. Then does Haider fit inside the borders of tragedy as a genre or does it in some way extends it by changing it and in turn challenging its limits? The paper focuses on all these questions in relation to just the ending of the movie, Haider.
Ghazala tells Haider that ‘Intequam se sirf intequam paide hota hai’ (revenge spearheads the cycle of death) (2:28:02). Seeing Haider resolved and unmoving, Ghazala kisses Haider and leaves only to reveal that she’s wearing a suicide suit. Haider and Khurram rushes towards Ghazala to stop her from pulling the strings of the hand grenade but it is all too late. Ghazala pulls the strings and a huge blast follows in which Khurram gets terribly wounded. Haider runs towards the ashes and remains of Ghazala’s body and cries. He finds Khurram, wounded but alive at a distance and rushes towards him in rage and agony with the intention to kill him. But as he tries to kill Khurram, Haider’s head spins with the last words of Hilaal (Mera intequam lena) and Ghazala (Intequam se sirf intequam paida hota hai) and he chooses not to kill Khurram. Khurram realizing Haider’s decision asks him to fulfil his revenge. Seeing Haider go away in opposite direction, Khurram cries in agony and shouts Ghazala’s name in pain followed by ‘Bhaijaan’ (beloved brother) (2:34:33) in regret, remorse and guilt and the final scene fades away into the end.
Haider’s reason for killing Khurram is his father’s murder; he wants to avenge his father’s murderer. But this same reason is Haider’s conflict too as the protagonist of the story. Roohdaar’s message (paiguam) to Haider from his father was-
Badla. Intequam. Khooni se khoon k liye. Unn do ankhon mein goliyan daagna jinse usne tumhari mauji par phareb dale the… wo ankhien jo tumhe yateem bna gayin. (1:17:40)
And we also listen Ghazala telling him towards the final encounter between Haider and Khurram,
Intequam se sirf intequam paida hota hai Haider. Jab tak hum apne intequam se aazaad nahi honge na, tab tak koi aazadi hume aazaad nahi kar payegi. (2:28:02)
Both Ghazala’s and Hilal’s last words to Haider echo in his ears when he finally gets to shoot Khurram in gunah (crime). This is not his first encounter with his conflict. His conflict is peripherally reflected when he wakes up from his anesthetic state and gets a chance to kill Khurram in the prayer room. Though he justifies his not killing Khurram by saying that had he killed him in the prayer hours then even a swine like Khurram would have been blessed with Heaven after his death, we somewhere can see that Haider is educated and not quite believes in something as superstitious as that. The confusion and conflict is clearly reflected on Haider’s face when he is trying to aim Khurram with his gun in the prayer room. Hence, Intequam becomes Haider’s personal conflict and his reason to punish his father’s murderer. The other conflict for Haider is the growing closeness between Ghazala and Khurram. Many scenes in the movie have elaborately shown the subtle possessiveness which Haider tries and wishes to exercise over Ghazala but it unable to (Oedipus complex). Khurram’s conflict on the other hand is Ghazala’s happiness (which is that Haider’s safety and security) and Haider’s knowledge of Khurram’s plan of Hilaal’s murder, which can rob Khurram of his power, property, position as an upcoming politician, and Ghazala.
Haider’s life is a major threat to Khurram but he cannot do anything about the same because of Ghazala’s extreme attachment with her son and her happiness. He planned his own brother’s murder to win Ghazala and he cannot just let her against him by going against her wishes. So, throughout the movie, Khurram is in constant search for one reason to ‘ethically’ go against Haider. And he finally gets one opportunity too when he promises Liyaqat that he would help him avenge the death of his father and that Haider will have to pay the price by his life. Khurram’s conflict resolves here. Whereas Haider’s conflict, Intequam, too resolves when he chooses not to kill Khurram and walks away into opposite direction before the movie fades away into its final closure. Unlike the troubled part of Hamlet’s life, revenge, Haider’s troubles do not consume his life.
According to A.C. Bradley, in a Shakespearean tragedy, the troubled part of the tragic hero’s life is usually the reason for his death. Also he mentions that a true tragedy will be the one where the tragic hero dies in the end. ‘No play at the end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy’ (Bradley, 25). Haider’s conflict and troubles do not become the reason for his death, he does not die in the end in the very first place then how does Haider qualify the classic standards of a Shakespearean tragedy? Till the end we see Haider’s mind midst mayhem of what to choose, how to act and in the end he chooses not to act the revenge. The aesthetics of logic and cynicism are indeed scrutinized throughout the movie because nothing big really happens ‘accidently’ in the movie as opposed to what Bradley has to say about the same, ‘Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to ‘chance’ or ‘accident’ an appreciable influence at some point in the action’ (Bradley, 31). Gertrude’s ‘accidental death’ might have ignited and influenced Hamlet to finally take the last slash of death for Claudius but we see that Ghazala’s death was not accidental in nature rather thoroughly planned. Even before she meets Roohdaar, somewhere Roohdaar understands the whole situation and while she talks to Roohdaar on phone we see Roohdaar’s allies preparing a suicide bomb jacket which Ghazala wears and reveals in the end and pulls the trigger and suicides. Ghazala’s plan indeed is far greater in sense and impact than Gertrude’s life left to ‘accident’ or ‘chance.’ Ghazala’s character in the play is indelible and takes a firm philosophical stand. Her perspective of aazadi (freedom) serves the epitome of her character catharsis and the peripheral conflict of the setting of the play, Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. Ghazala refuses to play the game; she doesn’t want the death game to keep going on. She first became a ‘half widow, half bride’ then became a widow followed by her marriage with Khurram, an alliance Haider is not happy with and as his revenge would finally resolve to kill Khurram. Ghazala does not want to be a widow again. She wants freedom from the never ending cycle of death and its effect on her life. She wants Khurram and Haider to make peace with one another.
One of the first fundament traits of a tragic hero (mentioned by Bradley) is his familial background, that the Hero should belong to an aristocrat family because it is the final fall of the hero that reflects the helplessness of the masses. Hamlet is a prince and is of noble birth too. Haider on the other hand belongs to a Muslim family in Kashmir. He is a literature student whose family is a middle class Muslim family. Haider then belongs to a minority group whose existence is threatened every second by the AFSPA Act in Kashmir. Haider himself belongs to the lowest status of the masses in Kashmir, being one of them and yet being the hero of the movie. What then is a better representation of the masses, a noble birth prince whose problems and complexities of life are way different from the masses or a hero from the masses who belongs to the minority and in turn represents their problems and the problems faced the masses in general?
Even what seems very logical and right in Haider’s case to avenge Khurram for his betrayal, Haider does not kill him unlike Hamlet. The apparent predisposition from the movie was that Haider should remain determined about his revenge but we see that slowly fading away in the end and what looked like being on the logical side since the beginning because Haider does have all the right reasons to kill Khurram, turns to go on the other side, the side of cynicism, the side of freedom from one’s own Intequam. This too does not comply with the criticism of Shakespearean Tragedy, ‘In almost all we observe a marked one sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait’ (Bradley, 36). There is no predisposition in the movie, nor does mere ‘accidents’ or ‘chances’ influence actions and neither does the troubles or conflicts of the tragic hero leads to his death in the end in this adaptation of the play. Then does Haider even qualify as a tragedy? What makes Haider a tragedy then? Is death the only fundamental trait of the tragedy?
Death is all over the play and the movie. But is death the only kind of end or conclusion? Often Hamlet’s decision is scrutinized as on one hand ‘there is no fault in his logic’ (Knight, 271) and on the other something that lead to the failure of his character. ‘His vengeance against Claudius though it is achieved is still improvised in the confusion of a conspiracy not of his own devising. Hamlet had been commanded to kill Claudius; because he failed to do so at the right moment, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Polonius and Laertes, Ophelia and Gertrude have all met their deaths. The holocaust accuses him, and it seems in the justice of the things that he, too, should die’ (Speaight, 51). On one hand where this tragic hero is gathering his sympathies for his situation on the other hand he is also being accused for making up his mind and for delaying the action of revenge. Hamlet’s conflict therefore in a way reflects the audience’s conflict too. ‘The subject of literature is often conflict, often conflict of values; but, though the agonies of decision, knowing, and valuing are often the objects of an audience’s concern, an audience rarely undergoes or even approaches such agonies itself. That it should enjoy doing so seems unlikely, but in Hamlet the problems the audience thinks about and the intellectual action of thinking about them are very similar. Hamlet is the tragedy of an audience that cannot make up its mind’ (Booth, 335). The conclusion to the play still, after so many years, remains dubious. We do get to know what the end of the play was but Hamlet’s actions are still debatable. There seems no conclusion to the argument of what happened in the end of the play.
The ‘the end’ of life is death, of a story it is the denouement, and of a conflict is the resolution.
Till the final scene of the movie and even after the final closure, neither Haider nor Khurram dies. Both are alive till the denouement of the movie. So, there is no death for them, they live. As for their personal stories, since they live till the end of the movie, we cannot say what happens to their lives. There is no denouement in their personal stories. And as for the conflicts, both of them get their conflicts resolved before the movie ends. Then what ends in the end of the movie?
Hussain Meer: Bandooq sirf intequam lena jaanti hai. Jab tak hum apne intequam se aazaad nahi ho jaate, tab tak koi aazaadi hume aazaad nahi kar sakti. Yaad rahe, intequam se sirf intequam paida hota hai. (53:15)
(to Zahoor Hussain, politician, leader (militant) in presence of Hilal Meer)
In the madness of taking revenge for his father’s murder, Haider unintentionally kills Parvez. Parvez’s death is a shock to Arshia so she suicides. The death of Parvez and Arshia agitates Liyaqat and he swears a revenge for his father’s death with Khurram against Haider. Haider when comes to know about Arshia’s death turns out of his senses and gets into a dual with Liyaqat to claim the body of Arshia and in the process accidently kills Liyaqat. The final confrontation is between Haider and Khurram which is broken abruptly by Ghazala who suicides with body bomb jacket in order to protect her son. After seeing his mother evaporating into nothing and the bloodshed all around, Haider runs toward terribly wounded Khurram with the intention of finally taking his revenge but he doesn’t. Instead, he walks away in opposite direction and we see Khurram asking for death in pain. With Ghazala’s abrupt suicide explosion, the cycle of intequam breaks. It was because of revenge that more retaliation was being born and the only way to end the root of Haider’s revenge was to make him see it. No one dies in the end but intequam. The end of the movie Haider is the end of intequam. Even during end of the movie, when one of the old allies of Haider sees the other one dead in the one- to- one bullet confrontation with Khurram’s forces, he picks up a grenade in his hand and charges openly in rage at Khurram’s force. He is butchered with bullets and his grenade too kills a lot of Khurram’s people. That small scene of revenge and the fulfilment of seeking revenge reflected how revenge would only lead to a greater and uglier kind of revenge that will consume lives after lives and would only lead to death always.
Hussain: Bada quadeem marz hai yeh beta, sadiyoon purana, kitni nasslein hazam kar gaya hai hamari. Khuda jaane kahan jaa k rukega, maut kay eh kurrez bhadiya. (52:26)
Hamlet’s revenge resulted in the end of his family and of Polonius’s family. The end of Act 5 is also the end of both the families, their bloodlines consumed by revenge. ‘Hamlet was of course born into the culture of Western Europe, our culture, whose every thought- literary or nonliterary- is shaped by the Platonic presumption that the reality of anything is other than its apparent self. In such a culture it is no wonder that critics prefer the word meaning (which implies effort rather than success) to saying, and that in turn they would rather talk about what a work says or shows (both of which suggest the hidden essence bared of the dross of physicality) than talk about what it does’ (Booth, 327). Haider’s ending as compared to Hamlet’s ending, goes beyond the parameters of the logic and cynicism attached to the actions of character roles and truly makes Haider the tragedy of revenge because it is the cycle of revenge which is put to bed in the end. What ended with the end of revenge in Haider? It is Ghazala, the peacemaker, who puts the cycle of death to an end and is the one who is engulfed by the catastrophe of the film. ‘Do haati jab ladte hain na, toh ghaas hee khuchali jaati hai,’ (46:04) does that mean that the price paid to make peace is the price of life of the one who initiates it? It was Jhelum River where the revenge took its birth in the movie and it was Ghazala’s blood that marked the end of revenge. Hilal and Roohdaar were one of the minority masses people who were thrown into the river as they were of no use or benefit to the Army anymore. The movie shows the perspective of wrong use of AFSPA Act to torture innocent masses for personal benefit of the Army. ‘Jhelum hua laal,’ (1:50:00) then becomes the phrase of harsh reality in Kashmir (POK). Similarly in Haider’s story, it is Ghazala, the innocent mother, who has to pay the price of her life for the ‘animalistic’ revenge conflict to conclude. Jhelum laal hua is the sad reality of Ghazala’s life too.
The end of the movie neither takes a ‘a predisposition in some particular direction’ (Bradley, 36) i.e. taking sides with the righteous son or with the guilt stricken brother, nor does it leave the actions and choices of the characters to ‘accidents’ or ‘chances.’ Haider then becomes the tragedy of revenge and not a revenge tragedy.
Bibliography
Booth, Stephen. “On the Value of Hamlet.” 1969. Shakespeare Through the Ages Hamlet. Ed. Harold Bloom. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2010. Print.
Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. England: Penguin Books, 1991. Print.
Haider. Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj. Per. Tabu, Shahid Kapoor, Kay Kay Menon. 2014. Film.
Knight, G. Wilson. “The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet.” 1930. Shakespeare Through the Ages Hamlet. Ed. Harold Bloom. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2010. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New Delhi: Peacock Books, 2010. Print.
Speaight, Robert. Nature in Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Collier Books, 1962. Print.
