Vishal Bhardwaj, the successful director of many notable Hindi movies like Maqbool, Omkara, Kaminey, etc., is at it again—he’s doing what he does the best, making the kind of offbeat movies that literarily justifies its context. He’s one of those very few directors in India who don’t shy away from the concept of adapting his stories from foreign literature.
With the brilliant success of Maqbool, which was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Omkara, an adaptation of his Othello, Vishal has established himself as an ‘intellectual’ director and writer. He knows the art of transforming the timeless pieces of foreign literature into the Indian background, keeping its integrity intact and giving Indian audience a chance to relate to it.
On being asked why Vishal insists on Shakespeare’s work more than anybody else’s, he said that he finds Shakespeare’s writings very dramatic, which can very well be used to entertain Indian audience and also they are quite timeless, relevant to every culture at any given point of time.
He’s making yet another adaption named Haider, which finds its true essence in Shakespeare’s most famous play Hamlet. It is one of the most anticipated and controversial movie of this year, and rightly so since Vishal has set Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Kashmir’s context.
The Prince of Denmark of Hamlet is a Philosophy student from Kashmir in Haider and the character is played by Vishal’s favorite Shahid Kapoor. There’re other big actors in the movie as well like, Tabu, Irrfan Khan and Shraddha Kapoor. The film revolves around the controversies that have affected Kashmir since the time India and Pakistan achieved their Independence from the British rule.
Vishal along with Basharat Peer, a Kashmir-born author and journalist, who has written the adaptation, has tried to portray the truth behind the continuing uprising which has caused the violent friction between the Kashmiri militants and security forces for more than two decades. The movie will include explicit scenes of suffering in Indian army camps and other human rights abuses by Indian officials in Kashmir.
Peer is of the view that Haider will be successful in confronting the narrative created by earlier Indian movies about the Kashmir controversy and provide audience with a different perspective on it. He said "Kashmiris have always been portrayed as crazy fanatics or Kashmir simply seen as a picturesque tourist destination. This is a very different view."
The honest political, social and culture depiction of Kashmir in the movie is bound to raise a dialogue all over the world but it seems as though Vishal has never been more prepared.