Abstract
This chapter studies the adaptation and appropriation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014). The film is set in the Kashmir of the 1990s and is inspired by the screenplay co-writer, Basharat Peer’s, memoir about militancy in the state, Curfewed Night. Focussing mainly on the graveyard scene, the climactic ending of the film, this essay examines how omnipresent surveillance and violence have overturned the usual connections between private and public, introspection and demagoguery, life and death. The world of Haider is one in which soliloquies become public speeches and intimate familial spaces are blasted with machine gun fire.
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Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare, edited by Harold Jenkins, 1982. Routledge, 1992.
Hamlet. Directed by Olivier Lawrence, performances by Olivier Lawrence, Universal, 1948.
Hamlet. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, performance by Branagh, Colombia, 1996.
Peer, Basharat. Curfewed Night. Random House India, 2009.
Gopal, Sangeeta. “The Audible Past, or What Remains of the Song-Sequence in New Bollywood” New Literary History, vol. 46 no. 4, 2015, pp. 805–822.
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Panja, S. (2017). Curfewed Night in Elsinore: Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider. In: Rao Garg, S., Gupta, D. (eds) The English Paradigm in India. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5332-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5332-0_7
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
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Online ISBN: 978-981-10-5332-0
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