Of Helmet and Hamlet in Haider
A few minutes before Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider arrived on the multiplex screen in Bengal’s Siliguri, two male voices began speaking in the dark.
First male voice: Ei, Hamlet porechhish? (Ei, have you read Hamlet?)
Second male voice: Na, helmet porechhi awnek baar. (No, but I’ve worn a helmet several times. Aside: The Bangla word “porechhish” means both “to wear” and “to read”.)
The two voices could have been Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Bhardwaj’s Salman Khan and Salman Khan, and for a moment I was tempted to believe that Bhardwaj had planted these two men, or men like these, in theatres showing Haider all over the world. It is a fantastic thought, I know, but so are Salman and Salman, the amateur spies in 1990s Kashmir. I cursed my university education — I wish I hadn’t read Shakespeare. The baggage of Shakespeare literary criticism made it difficult for me to indulge another fantasy — that Bhardwaj and Basharat Peer, the scriptwriter, were acknowledging another pair of fumbling detectives, Thomson and Thompson, from Herge’s The Adventures of Tintin. The Belgian cartoonist had based the pair on his father and uncle, who were identical twins, and I was curious to know whether Vishal Bhardwaj sometimes mistook his father for his uncle or vice versa. It is a thought that came to me often as I watched the uncle-as-father motif play out in the film.
Salman Khan and Salman Khan are Bhardwaj’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of course. They are, what literary hierarchy calls, ‘minor characters’. In the play they are Hamlet’s “excellent good friends”, used by the king to spy on his movements. The rhetoric that Shakespeare gives them is sycophancy, and Peer and Bhardwaj transplant that into the State-pleasing machinery that is now survival tactic in the rotten state of Kashmir. Why Salman Khan and not Shahrukh or Aamir or even Amitabh Bachchan?
Salman Khan catapulted to fame with the 1989 film, Maine Pyar Kiya, where his whisper-sweetened accent and I’m-innocent eyes turned the romance between a wealthy boy and a middle class girl into a thing of wonder, like desi ghee that needed to enter the national bloodstream. Much before Facebook, Salman Khan had shown pre-internet India that the basis of all relationships was ‘friendship’. And so the black cap with “Friend” embossed on it that became a national rage. Everyone wanted to wear that cap, everyone wanted to be everyone’s friend.
Like Kashmir and India. Like Salman & Salman and Haider.
During the promotion of their film, when asked to comment on their relationship on the sets, Shahid Kapoor and Shraddha Kapoor said something that made me to look at the Salman Khan trope in a new way. Here is Shraddha: ‘When we were wanted, someone would say, “SK”, and both of us would rush to the set. Actually, both of us are SK — Shahid Kapoor and Shraddha Kapur’. And so are the Salman Khans, I thought to myself. Is that what the film is about then, a world of SKs, with similar acronyms but different head gear? And different beginnings with similar endings, like death, like obedient rhyme schemes: ‘Law and Order … India Pakistan … Border Border’. And ‘Haider’. Ah, that rhymes.
It is a masterstroke to spoof India’s most masculine film actor and turn him into not one but two Kashmiri Salmans. Wasn’t one Salman Khan enough to deal with the Indian ‘original’? (Basharat Peer, in Curfewed Night, had written about the actor’s striking popularity in the Kashmir valley — in the book too, his hairstyle from the 2003 film, Tere Naam, had been mentioned.)
Even more striking is Bhardwaj transposing the saccharine “Friend” of the Maine Pyar Kiya cap onto the heads of the two Salmans, the friend-as-stalker operations that drive two things, the plot in Haider and our Facebook lives. (Thomson and Thompson are never without their hats too, lest we forget.) Headgear, I notice later, has annotated my viewing of the film: the way Arshia covers her head at an Army check post or the way Ghazala, Haider’s mother, pulls at her dupatta from time to time, how the prayer cap saves uncle Khurram’s life temporarily, not to mention the extra-film attention that was paid to Shahid Kapoor’s shaved head.
The most important headgear in the film — as it was in 1990s Kashmir — is of course the black mask that both the State and the militants pull over the heads of men to take them to places where their destinies are imprisoned (“All of Kashmir is a prison,” says young Haider). The film begins with two such masks: a masked man sits at the steering wheel of an army vehicle and decides the fates of the civilians assembled. The other is the mask that will be pulled over Haider’s father’s head as soon as he is identified as a ‘traitor’ of the Indian state.
The use of headgear also hinges on irony: towards the middle of the film, when his uncle Khurram tells Haider about his extensive plans to get his brother back from the police, Haider pulls a red woollen topi over his own head. It was the idiom going literal: ‘Topi pehnana…’. The most extravagant headgear is of course in the “Bismil” song, the film’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s mousetrap scene. Shahid wears a hat with colourful feathers, as if motley were a rich signifier of insanity, and then a mask (which he later pulls up to his head) that resembles a bird’s face. The birds, the bulbuls, his parents, the falcon, his uncle, and now him, Haider, man-as-bird, surveying, looking for his father and for signs of guilt on the faces of his mother and her newlywed husband. Birds of the same feather? It’s all in the decorations on the head.
[caption id=”attachment_1977" align=”alignnone” width=”690"]
Still from the song “Bismil”[/caption]
The neck looms near: Arshia later dies with the red scarf she knitted for her policeman father, the scarf the man discovers on the snow as a sign of Haider’s escape from the police van. This is when Haider, in what is perhaps Shahid Kapoor’s best scene in the film, hits the Salman Khans on their heads with stones. Yes, that hitting by a stone is Bhardwaj and Peer’s footnoting of stone pelting in Kashmir, but what is amazing is how it all comes together — the ‘Friend’ turning enemy and the Friend-cap wearing head being smashed by Haider.
In a television interview, where the anchor told Shahid Kapoor that he looked “horrible” as Haider, his co-actor Shradha Kapoor justified his going bald: Not everyone has a well shaped head, she said. Shahid did, and that is why his hairless head looked good, her argument went. Human heads look largely indistinguishable from behind, I thought to myself for a moment — isn’t it what is inside them that marks their owners out?
The human skull, who almost parodies Haider’s baldness, does not need any headgear.
Or did it need a helmet?