The Oedipus in Haider

Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest film, Haider, an adaptation of William Shakespeares Hamlet, has garnered mixed reviews. While mostly critics are raving about Tabu (Ghazala) and Shahid Kapoor’s (Haider) performances and commenting on the abilities of the director to adapt Shakespeare on screen in the backdrop of Kashmir, this write up focuses on a slightly different facet of the movie which is being ignored both by critics and audience at large. Though one can and has the liberty to critique Bhardwaj’ interpretation of the Hamlet, one must salute the director for portraying one of the most complicated relationships in the Indian context. The usual feeling one gets after reading the Hamlet or watching Haider, is that it is a tale of revenge. As that is true the more intricate theme that both the play and the movie highlight is the Oedipus complex. The term Oedipus complex indicates the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic subjugation, that concentrate upon a child’s desire to have sexual relations with the parent of the opposite sex.

. The reason why Hamlet and Shahid Kapoor took time to kill Cladius or Kay Kay Menon (Khurram) is because Khurram has done exactly what he Haider had wished to do from childhood. Hamlet’s hesitation in killing Claudius, according to Freud, has to do with his deeper association with him. Claudius serves as a flesh and blood expression of his own repressed childhood fantasies, and to kill him would be to murder a part of his own inner self already associated with self-loathing. The scene where Haider is back from college and sees his mother Ghazala, laughing with his uncle and the pain in his eyes is simply for the reason that after his father, it was his uncle that she loved. In another scene Ghazala fondly remembers how Haider as a child wished to marry her when he grows up and would not let his father touch her, by sleeping in between his parents. Bhardwaj very aesthetically captures this very complex relationship and it was painful for me as an avid film lover to see that this aspect was not mentioned in any of the reviews.