Haider

About the film

Haider is a 2014 Indian Hindi-language political action thriller film directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, who co-produced it with Siddharth Roy Kapur, and written by Bhardwaj and Basharat Peer. It stars Shahid Kapoor, Tabu, Kay Kay Menon, Shraddha Kapoor and Irrfan Khan.

Set amidst the insurgency-hit Kashmir conflicts of 1995, Haider is a modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. It is also based on Basharat Peer's memoir Curfewed Night. Haider, a young student and a poet, returns to Kashmir at the peak of the conflict to seek answers about his father's disappearance and ends up being tugged into the politics of the state. Haider is the third installment of Bhardwaj's Shakespearean trilogy after Maqbool (2003) and Omkara (2006).

Plot

During the insurgency in Kashmir, which continues through 1995, Hilaal Meer, a doctor based in Srinagar, agrees to perform an appendectomy on Ikhlaque, the leader of a terrorist group; to avoid detection, he performs the surgery at his house, much to the chagrin of his wife Ghazala, who questions his allegiance. The following day, during a military raid, Hilaal is accused of harboring terrorists. A shootout ensues at his home, during which Ikhlaque is killed and Hilaal is taken away for questioning. The doctor's house is subsequently bombed to kill any other terrorists hiding inside.

Sometime later, Ghazala's son Haider returns from Aligarh Muslim University to seek answers about his father's disappearance. Upon arrival, he is shocked to find his mother singing and laughing along with her brother-in-law, Khurram, Hilaal's younger brother. Unable to understand Ghazala's behavior, he begins searching for Hilaal in various police stations and detention camps with the help of his childhood sweetheart Arshia Lone, a journalist, whose father, Pervez, is a police officer.

Winter arrives in Kashmir. Saddened by the growing closeness between Ghazala and Khurram, and still unable to find any leads, Haider begins to lose hope. However, Arshia encounters a stranger, Roohdaar, who has Haider contact him to receive information regarding his missing father. Roohdaar, who is part of a pro-separatist group, explains that he and Hilaal were both imprisoned in a detention camp by a counterinsurgency militia formed by Khurram. The group had both Hilaal and Roohdaar executed, but Roohdaar survived and is meeting Haider to pass on Hilaal's final wish: for Haider to take revenge on Khurram for his betrayal.

Production

Initially, Vishal Bhardwaj and Shahid Kapoor were in talks of making a sequel to their previous collaboration, the action drama Kaminey (2009). The project was put on hold and a new project with Kapoor in the lead was confirmed, titled as Haider, which was reportedly based on an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The adaptation was made to portray the political intrigue and history of Kashmir as well as the play's sexual conflicts.

Bhardwaj was initially developing the play as a contemporary espionage thriller with author Stephen Alter. They wrote a 30-page synopsis that was sent to Gulzar. Though Gulzar liked the synopsis, he enquired Bhardwaj of the missing tragedy of Hamlet in the penned thriller. The synopsis had incomplete details about the life, authenticity and the Official Secrets Act of RAW agents. On his return to India, Bharadwaj's wife Rekha Bhardwaj was reading Basharat Peer's memoir, Curfewed Night, a book based on life in violence-wrecked Kashmir. Rekha was deeply moved after reading the book. Bharadwaj didn't immediately read the book but was aware about its content. Later, Bhardwaj desired to change the synopsis. Remembering Peer's book, he contacted him and they started working on the script. Bhardwaj quoted Peer's importance in the film as, "If Basharat was not a part of the film, Haider wouldn't be made or it wouldn't be made this way." The film is Peer's first film project. On co-scripting the same, he stated that writing Curfewed Night was a response to caricatures of Kashmiris in Indian political writing whereas he wrote Haider in the same spirit, with the same feeling with Bhardwaj.

Bhardwaj and Peer agonised a lot over the soliloquies required. There were sections of the To be, or not to be speech that was translated directly in Hindi. Due to constraints of time they had to omit the Apparel maketh a man soliloquy though. They retained and translated the section where Hamlet meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and speaks about Denmark being in prison. Further, new soliloquies were created to convey Hamlet's madness and the veiled political satire in it. This was brought in when Haider with his head shaved, dressed in torn, shabby clothes rants on a traffic roundabout in Srinagar and apart from a few senseless jokes, reads out the bare act of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Apart from this, Peer explained that an adaptation doesn't exactly follow the original, like the part of Fortinbras was barely there in Haider. The world of King Claudius and Polonius is portrayed as the counter-insurgency and government-run, counter-insurgent militias in Haider and thematically dominates the action.

Music

The original songs and film score are composed by Vishal Bhardwaj. The soundtrack has nine songs whose lyrics are penned by Gulzar, except for 2 songs "Gulon Mein Rang Bhare" and "Aaj Ke Naam" that were written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Shahid Kapoor and Shraddha Kapoor launched the music of the film along with Vishal Bhardwaj at Radio Mirchi studios in Mumbai in mid-August 2014. The soundtrack had a digital as well as physical release on 12 September 2014. The film score was digitally released on 24 October 2014.

Key details