‘Haider’ Revisited: The Tragedy of Kashmir

“Do you remember what you used to say as a child?” Ghazala (Tabu) asks her son Haider (Shahid Kapoor). “What?” Haider asks. His mother wears bridal red with fresh henna on her hands; she is set to marry Haider’s uncle, Kuram Meer. The Indian Army in Kashmir, after all, has snatched and killed his father on suspicions of militant sympathy. “When I grow up, I will marry my mother,” Ghazala says. “Every night, you’d sleep between your father and me on our bed. If your father even touched me, you’d pick fights with him.”

“But now his brother touches you,” Haider says. “What should I do now? I don’t have it in my heart to share you.” He turns to wrap his mother in his arms, plants a kiss on her bare neck, marking his territory on her body, his first home. “Your beauty is venomous,” he sighs, gazing at her reflection in the mirror. The territorial agony underlying this moment in Haider, the sexual undercurrent to the mother-son dynamic, is straight from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the tragic play of a prince devastated by his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage to the man he assumes is the killer. But the idea of “venomous beauty” is also Bhardwaj’s pointed reference to the land of Kashmir — a place so beautiful and desirous, yet also the site of decades of violence.