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ANCIENT AESTHETICS AND CURRENT
CONFLICTS: INDIAN RASA THEORY AND
VISHAL BHARDWAJ’S HAIDER (2014)
MELISSA CROTEAU
The aim of art is not to discover the nature of reality but
to secure for us the highest experience of life.
(Mysore Hiriyanna, ‘Indian aesthetics 2’)1
On many levels, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play about
acting. When considering styles of theatrical perfor-
mance, our eponymous Prince exhorts the players
to perform their parts ‘gently’, with ‘temperance’
and ‘smoothness’, ‘hold[ing] . . . a mirror up to
nature’ (3.2.5, 8, 22). This acting philosophy has
been theorized and realized in diverse ways on
stage and screen in the Eurocentric West, but it
stands in stark contrast to one of the foremost
ancient aesthetic theories of India – that of rasa,
which refers to the emotion an audience member
experiences during a performance, be it drama,
dance, poetry or music. Simply put, rasa theory
posits that all the acting in a performed narrative
must focus on eliciting powerful emotion from the
audience; thus, ‘robustious’ acting is frequently
found on stage and screen in India, as is often
noted by critics of Bollywood, or, more accurately,
Indian popular cinema, which is not restricted to
film made by the Mumbai-based industry.2
Furthermore, rasa theory dictates that every theatri-
cal work should be governed by one primary rasa,
out of a group of eight designated emotions, which
may appear in the piece but must serve to support
the dominant rasa.3 In 2014, Indian director Vishal
Bhardwaj adapted Hamlet into the Hindi film
Haider, transforming Shakespeare’s ‘rotten’ state of
Denmark into the beleaguered, divided North
Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir in the turbulent
1990s. In Haider, Bhardwaj uses rasa aesthetics
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powerfully to express the suffering of the mainly
Muslim population of the Kashmir Valley at the
hands of the occupying Indian military as well as
Pakistani and home-grown militants.
Though rasa theory has not been widely used to
analyse film, a few scholars have noted that it is, in
fact, a vital shaping force in Indian popular cinema.4
The earliest claim to this effect that I could find is in
an article entitled ‘What did Bharata mean by rasa?’
written by S. S. Barlingay, a professor of philosophy
at Poona University, which digs deeply into the
ancient founding text of Indian aesthetic theory, the
Natyasastra (NS), believed to have been written by
a Brahmanic sage called Bharata some time between
1
Mysore Hiriyanna, ‘Indian aesthetics 2’ [1951], in Indian
Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence, ed.
N. Bhushan and J. L. Garfield (Oxford, 2011), pp. 207–18;
p. 210.
2
‘Bollywood’ refers to Indian popular cinema that is made by
the film industry based in Mumbai, and its films are predo-
minantly made in the Hindi language. While the majority of
the nearly 1,000 films produced in India annually are made by
the Mumbai-based industry, there are strong film industries in
other parts of the nation, such as a thriving Tamil-language
industry in the South, and a unique Bengali industry based in
Kolkata in the North-east. The term ‘Bollywood’ is some-
times used to describe all ‘popular’ – as opposed to ‘art’ – films
produced by India; however, this is a misrepresentation of the
diverse cinema produced by this incredibly heterogeneous
country.
3
Patrick Colm Hogan, ‘Rasa theory and dharma theory: from
The Home and the World to Bandit Queen’, Quarterly Review of
Film and Video 20 (2003), 37–52; p. 39.
4
See, for example, Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of
Desire (London, 2002), p. 50.
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MELISSA CROTEAU
200 BCE and 200 CE. The title of this article alludes
to the fact that arguments about the meaning and
nuances of the lengthy and minutely detailed NS
have been ongoing for about two millennia, as can
be seen in the 2016 compilation A Rasa Reader:
Classical Indian Aesthetics, which, at nearly 500 folio-
sized pages, covers only the responses to Bharata’s
concept of rasa and is limited from the time of the NS
to the year 1700.5 In the conclusion of his careful
analysis, Barlingay asserts: ‘[p]erhaps the nearest
approach to “Rasa” would be a cinematographic
film’, which includes both aural and visual
elements.6 Alisha Ibkar, of Alighar Muslim
University (coincidentally, the university attended
by the character Haider in the film), strongly affirms
that ‘Indian cinema is completely based on
Performance aesthetics. The depiction of rasa and
channeling it to the audience is the quintessential
aspect of Indian theatre and cinema. Rasa theory is
the very essence of what makes Bollywood unique
and eternal and it constitutes but the very structure
and backbone of Indian cinema.’7
In addition, scholar Patrick Colm Hogan has
used rasa theory in his cognitive theory-oriented
work on Indian cinema and culture.8 These scho-
lars concur that rasa theory has an integral impact
on Indian popular cinema; however, these aca-
demics, and scholars over the centuries, have not
agreed on the basic definitions of a few key terms in
the theory, to which we now turn.
rasa theory: complexity and
paradox
Before engaging in a rasic reading of Bhardwaj’s
Haider, we must delve into some of the complexities
of rasa theory, as it is our specific approach that will
govern the analysis. It has been particularly helpful to
examine the work of philosophy, theatre history and
aesthetics scholars to acquire an understanding of the
NS’s theory of rasa as a contested field in which the
meaning of the Sanskrit in the NS has been inter-
preted in various ways; then those readings were
taken up and understood differently, etc. This article
takes the perspective of S. S. Barlingay and Bharat
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Gupt, a current classicist and theatre theorist at the
University of Delhi, who both return to the Sanskrit
of the NS and find that rasa theory applies most
specifically to performed media, and not, as a great
many have claimed, to poetry on the page. The
importance of this point lies in the relationship
between the rasas and the other elements of Natya,
and their roles in the theatrical experience. Barlingay
contends that the three main characteristics of rasa
are: (a) it designates a staged or performed medium,
(b) ‘it is composite in nature’, and (c) it essentially
‘represents movement and is extended in time’.9
These characteristics, of course, are found in cinema.
It is helpful to understand that rasa more literally refers
to ‘juice and flavour’, and ‘flow’ is one of its ‘basic
meanings’.10 Therefore, the theoretical definition of
rasa as an emotion experienced by the spectator of
a performance carries with it the idea that the feelings
evoked are a type of distillation, or ‘pure’ liquid
essence, of one of the eight rasas. Plus, the ‘flowing’
nature of these rasas underscores that the experience
of a rasic emotion is always a part of an open, creative
process that begins with the emotion and message of
the author/artist, which is communicated through
the various elements of stage language, and finally
received as rasa experienced by the spectator, who is
a co-creator of the rasa as she interprets the perfor-
mance for herself but shares experience of the rasa
collectively with the actors and other spectators.
5
Sheldon Pollock, trans. and ed., A Rasa Reader: Classical
Indian Aesthetics (New York, 2016).
6
S. S. Barlingay, ‘What did Bharata mean by rasa?’ Indian
Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1981), 433–56; p. 452.
7
Alisha Ibkar, ‘The Natyasastra and Indian cinema: a study of
the rasa theory as a cornerstone for Indian aesthetics’,
International Journal of English Language and Translation
Studies 3 (2015), 80–87; p. 87.
8
Hogan has used rasa theory effectively in his book
Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and
Cinematic Imagination (Austin, TX, 2008), and journal article
‘Rasa theory and dharma theory’. Hogan also references
Darius Cooper’s book The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between
Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge, 2000), which applies
rasa theory to the work of the eminent Indian art cinema
director.
9
Barlingay, ‘What did Bharata mean by rasa?’ p. 452.
10
Barlingay, ‘What did Bharata mean by rasa?’ p. 452.
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Eminent Indian scholar Kapil Vatsyayan asserts that
the ‘worldview’ of the NS ‘proceeds through para-
dox: impersonality and intensity; the specific and the
universal; the inner and the outer; the bindu (point)
and its projection into infinite variety; stillness and
movement; the physical body and its
transcendence’.11 Vatsyayan declares that ‘[t]he artis-
tic experience [of rasa] is acausal and whole, a state of
beatitude and bliss in the mind of the experiencer, the
creator . . . [Rasa is] the highly charged state of
momentary freedom and emancipation which moti-
vates, inspires creation . . . [and] this experience . . .
facilitates an abstraction of life into its primary emo-
tions and sentiments’.12
In this sense, rasa is intensely personal, but for the
experiencer of rasa, the emotions are a ‘meta-
experience’, detached and distanced from one’s
own life, as they are externally produced or chan-
nelled through a performance and shared with
others.13 It is this meta-experience which creates
empathy in the spectator and allows her to experi-
ence pleasure and freedom, even when experiencing
rasic emotions of sorrow or disgust. This has led some
theorists to compare the rasic experience to Aristotle’s
notion of catharsis, and, indeed, there is a ‘purgative’
effect posited in the enjoyment of a ‘universalized’
emotion.14 Finally, it is important to understand that
one experiences rasa; it is not a mental or intellectual
recognition, but rather is related to tasting
a wonderful meal, something with which the rasic
experience is often compared, a tradition starting
with Bharata himself. Theatre practitioner and scho-
lar Richard Schechner declares: ‘[r]asa is flavor, taste,
the sensation one gets when food is perceived,
brought within reach, touched, taken into the
mouth, chewed, mixed, savored, and swallowed . . .
Rasa is sensuous, proximate, experiential.’15 In plain
terms, rasa is visceral, not cerebral.
In rasa theory, most pundits agree about the mean-
ing of rasa and the idea that the bhavas (‘emotions’)
evoke the rasas in the audience/experiencer.
However, current scholars utilizing the theory,
whether as an analytical lens or a practical tool for
the theatre, tend to focus on the sthayi bhavas – usually
translated as ‘standing or dominant emotions’ – as
embodied by the actors, who then serve as the primary
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conduit for rasa.16 This view centres on acting styles
or approaches that express emotion, which are a vital
part of rasa, but not the whole picture. Gupt states
clearly that ‘bhava is not to be taken simply as emo-
tion, but as a psychological theory about the nature of
emotions’, which opens up the complexity of the
term and leads us beyond the actor’s expression into
the larger arena of the theatrical experience.17 Again,
Barlingay and Gupt offer the most complete and
helpful view on the subject, as they both return
directly to the sixth chapter of the NS, which focuses
on rasa theory, and lead us through the Sanskrit,
rather than oversimplifying for an Anglophone or
European audience, or presenting readings filtered
through the NS interpretations of the highly influen-
tial tenth-century Shiavite Abhinavagupta and his
successors.18 Moreover, it is crucial to comprehend
the larger significance of Natya, and how it partici-
pates in the communication of bhavas, to perceive its
substantial connection to the specific elements of
cinema. ‘Natya’ refers to a combination of media,
namely ‘dance–theatre–music’, and Barlingay con-
cludes logically that Bharata’s aesthetic theory is
about the totality of ‘stage language’ and its effects
(rasas). The rasic emotion is communicated to the
experiencer/spectator by and through ‘[t]he set of
actors and environment, and the acting and the bodily
expression, the direction and the director – all these form
the material of the Natya language’ (my emphasis).19
Gupt also quotes the NS passage summarizing what is
included in Natya, and contends that the word abhi-
naya in the list, usually translated simply as ‘acting’,
11
Quoted in Susan L. Schwartz, Rasa: Performing the Divine in
India (New York, 2004), p. 14.
12
Schwartz, Rasa, p. 14.
13
See Barlingay, ‘What did Bharata mean by rasa?’ p. 444.
14
See Bharat Gupt, Dramatic Concepts: Greek and Indian:
A Study of the ‘Poetics’ and the ‘Natyasastra’ (Delhi, 1994),
pp. 271–3.
15
Richard Schechner, ‘Rasaesthetics’, The Drama Review 45
(2001), 27–50; p. 29.
16
See Hogan, Understanding, p. 107; and Schechner,
‘Rasaesthetics’, p. 29.
17
Gupt, Dramatic Concepts, p. 86.
18
See Schechner, ‘Rasaesthetics’, p. 28.
19
Barlingay, ‘What did Bharata mean by rasa?’ p. 443.
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MELISSA CROTEAU
‘may be taken as acting in common parlance, but for establish mood, which are paramount in the main-
Bharata . . . it represents the whole gamut of visual and taining of one primary rasa throughout a film.
aural semiotics’ in the staging of a performance (my Editing, perhaps, has the least direct connection to
emphasis).20 It is also significant that three of the rasa theory, as it does not exist per se in the theatre.
eleven elements in the Natya description refer to Nonetheless, editing is a pivotal element of visual
music – song, instruments and svara (breathing, semiotics in film and, therefore, can be a potent
sound or musical notes) – which ‘cover[s] all the communicator of emotion, as Kuleshov’s and
literary and musical content of a performance text’; Eisenstein’s work proved in the first half of the twen-
the ‘theatre-house’ appears on the list as well.21 tieth century. Editing can be broken down into the
With the full meaning of Natya in mind, it is not three elements of collage (the placement of shots next
difficult to identify the analogues between the lan- to one another), tempo (shot length and transitions)
guage of the stage and the language of cinema. Much and timing (the coordination of cutting with other
has been theorized regarding the semiotics of film, aural and visual elements).23 As observed in techni-
and, with its focus on the spectator’s experience, ques such as juxtapositional editing, quick-cutting
apparatus theory lines up very well with rasa theory. (short shot lengths), lap dissolves, and cuts coinciding
This study will endeavour, however, to interact with major sound effects, editing frequently evokes
more directly with rasa theory, rather than to filter rasic effects in an audience.24
it through later Western concepts. Therefore, what As previously stated, Bharata identifies eight
are the visual and aural signifiers that communicate rasas in the Natyasastra, which are listed in Table 6
rasa? Clearly, this is done powerfully by all the ele- with their translations.
ments of mise-en-scène: setting, the human figure, As pointed out by Hogan and Jones, Indian films
lighting and frame composition.22 The use of the are most commonly dominated by the rasas of
term ‘mise-en-scène’, imported from the theatre romance (shringara) and sorrow/pathos (karuna).25
into film studies, illustrates film’s inheritance from
that ancient art and represents the move of this study, Table 6
among others, to apply theatrical aesthetic theory to
cinema. The ‘theatre-house’, a part of Natya, can be Rasa Emotion
compared meaningfully to frame composition, as it is Shringara Love in union and separation
analogous to the shape and boundaries of the stage, Hasya Humour
but it could also be expanded to refer to the material Karuna Pathos, sorrow, compassion, grief
conditions of spectatorship, i.e. where, when and Raudra Anger, wrath
how one is viewing the performed text. Sound is Vira Heroism
another element that is imperative to film and to Bhayanaka Fear/panic
Natya, with its emphasis on music as a storytelling Bibhatsa Distaste/recoil/disgust
Abdhuta Wonderment/surprise
device and interpreter and instigator of emotion. In
film, there are three types of sound to consider –
dialogue, sound effects and music – and these three
work together to evoke intense emotional responses. 20
Gupt, Dramatic Concepts, p. 86.
Indian popular cinema is known particularly, of 21
Gupt, Dramatic Concepts, p. 87.
course, for its vivid use of music that does not con- 22
Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical
form to the construction of ‘reality’ expected in most Introduction, 2nd edn (New York, 2008), p. 88.
23
Western film. Concomitant with music is cinemato- Pramaggiore and Wallis, Film, p. 199.
24
graphy, especially in Indian film. Camera movement Schwartz, Rasa, p. 15.
25
See Hogan, ‘Rasa theory’, p. 40; and Matthew Jones,
and the use of various lenses and filters create the ‘Bollywood, rasa and Indian cinema: misconceptions, mean-
perspective and tone of a shot, and patterns estab- ings and Millionaire’, Visual Anthropology 23 (2010), 33–43; p.
lished cinematographically help define characters and 39.

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Not surprisingly, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider is governed
by karuna – the rasa of sorrow, pity and grief – from
start to finish, an emotional landscape that is under-
girded by the rasas of disgust (bibhatsa), as represented
by the extreme, grisly violence in the film, and
romance, which, as in the case of Hamlet and
Ophelia (here Haider and Arshia), increases the pathos
of the narrative. In her book Rasa: Performing the
Divine in India (2004), Schwartz lists the colours and
deities associated with each of the eight rasas.
Importantly, karuna is associated with the colour of
doves or pigeons, a hue ranging from dull white to
warm, pinkish grey, to deeper shades of grey; and it is
connected to Yama, the god of death, king of ghosts,
and the ‘moral judge and punisher whose assistants
[monsters and demons] torture the wicked in hell’.26
Depictions of Yama are dominated by red and black
colours, and he is related to Rudra and Agni, the gods
of terrifying wrath (bringing both disease and healing)
and fire, respectively. These colours and motifs appear
prominently in Haider. Dove-colour is particularly
apposite for this tale of lost and betrayed familial and
romantic love; it is the colour of sadness and melan-
choly, of a muted world, and of twilight, that liminal
moment between day and night, life and death, being
and not being. The red and black colours that accom-
pany rage, bloodshed and destruction feature predo-
minantly in the latter half of the film, in which Haider
seeks to kill his uncle, Khurram, who is responsible for
his father’s death at the hands of pro-Indian govern-
ment militia. Throughout Haider, karuna is evoked
vividly through mise-en-scène, particularly in the cold,
harsh, awe-inspiring terrain of the valley of Kashmir,
nestled into the soaring Himalayas. It is a dramatic
landscape, to say the least, and the film opens in the
dying season of fall and moves into a snowy winter.
A frosty grey mist blankets the valley throughout
Haider, which can be seen in nearly every exterior
long-shot in the film.
rotten/romantic kashmir
Kashmir typically has been used very differently in
Hindi cinema, as a magnificent and exotic backdrop
for romantic passion. Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel
identify Kashmir as a ‘specific chronotope of
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romance’ in Indian cinema, and note that the ‘tradi-
tional paradise of Urdu literature is associated with
that of Kashmir’.27 Consequently, after the first use of
the region in Raj Kapoor’s Barsaat (Rain, 1949),
‘Kashmir featured as a location for romance for sev-
eral decades, until the political situation made shoot-
ing there almost impossible’ in the late 1980s.28 One
element that has been highlighted particularly in the
romantic Kashmiri landscape is water (e.g. rivers and
waterfalls), which is frequently used as a symbol for
eroticism in Indian film, leading to the practice of
using spring and the rainy season to express romantic
love: ‘spring for love in union and the rainy season for
love in separation’.29 Tellingly, Bhardwaj has chosen
the opposite seasons for Haider: autumn and winter,
where snow serves as a substitute for rain in marking
the doomed love of Haider and Arshia, who, unlike
Hamlet and Ophelia, have one beautiful scene of
union in the typical Bollywood ‘log cabin’ romantic
chronotope.30 Bhardwaj’s choice to set Haider in the
heart of Indian cinema’s celebrated romantic land-
scape, following its decline into a terrifying police
state, highlights Bhardwaj’s message in Haider. Like
Akira Kurosawa in his twentieth-century
Shakespeare adaptations, Bhardwaj makes a brave
statement in Haider condemning the appalling cor-
ruption and gruesome violence perpetrated by offi-
cial authorities in his own nation, as well as militants
from within and outside the country. After years of
encroaching Indian government control over the
majority Muslim region, Kashmir erupted in vio-
lence after the blatant rigging of Kashmiri elections
in 1987, after which ‘furious Kashmiri leaders went
underground. Soon afterwards, the bombings,
strikes, assassinations and stone-throwings began.’31
26
Sukumari Battacharji, ‘Yama’, in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd
edn, ed. Lindsay Jones (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 9868.
27
Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual
Culture of Hindi Film (London, 2002), p. 61.
28
Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, p. 61.
29
Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, p. 60.
30
Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, p. 70.
31
William Dalrymple, ‘Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer’,
20 June 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/20/
curfewed-night-basharat-peer-dalrymple.
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In response, the Indian government militarized the
state of Jammu and Kashmir, and used its troops,
largely from outside the region, to perpetrate ‘sys-
tematic torture’ on the state’s citizens, including ‘a
series of horrific rapes and atrocities’ which ‘radica-
lized a population who were vaguely pro-Pakistani’
but previously not energized to act against Indian
forces; however, the ‘massacres of the early 1990s
changed Kashmir forever: militant groups sprung
up in every village’.32 In Imagining Kashmir (2016),
Patrick Colm Hogan describes Muslim citizens of the
area being compelled to leave their homes and
‘forced to pass before concealed informants for pos-
sible denunciation’.33 If an individual was implicated
in terrorist plots, without any further proof, he or she
would be ‘disappeared’ into a ‘camp’ or a prison,
tortured and, often, killed. Kashmir itself ‘has been
turned into a sort of prison, with a massive apparatus
that dwarfs that of any actual prison’.34 As one Haider
reviewer observes: ‘[p]acked with perfidy, passion
and pathos, Hamlet is seemingly the perfect canvas
on which to project a fresh perspective of the reality
of living in an open-air prison’ (my emphasis).35
Bhardwaj clearly saw in Hamlet a text that parallels
the disintegration of a family with that of a state, and
pursued this project to make a statement about the
atrocities committed by the Indian government
against the Muslim citizens in this region. To do
this, he invited Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer –
who wrote Curfewed Night (2010), a ‘searing memoir
about the bloody struggle for justice in Kashmir’ – to
co-author the film’s screenplay with him, and it
shows.36 Haider’s father, the surgeon Hilaal Meer,
‘disappears’ in one of these ‘crackdowns’, in which
a masked informer signals that Hilaal is involved in
terrorism against the Indian government. In this case,
the informer is Hilaal’s own brother, Khurram, who
represents Muslims who aid and abet the Indian
forces in order to gain power and money. Since the
troubles began in Kashmir, the subject of Muslim
terrorism, by both Pakistani insurgents and local
militia, has appeared in several Indian films, most
notably in Roja (Mani Ratnam, 1992), Mission
Kashmir (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2000) and LOC:
Kargil (J. P. Dutta, 2003). In their article ‘Hamlet–
Haider: from rotten Denmark to rotten Kashmir’
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(2015), three Pakistani scholars aver that these
Bollywood films kept ‘the rotten Kashmir pot
blazing’: ‘elements like war hysteria, fanatic
patriotism and jingoism are thoroughly stimu-
lated in the name of commercial entertainment’.
Consequently, they praise Haider for not ignor-
ing this ‘shocking and terrible history, about
which India knows slightly and cares even
[less]’.37 The rasic process is highlighted in their
claim that the power of these Indian films lies in
their ability to ‘stimulate’ rasic emotions such as
heroism, fear and anger. Even in the most
humanitarian of these films, Roja, the grotesque
and deadly human rights abuses perpetrated by
the Indian government are almost entirely
absent. Bhardwaj must have recognized that
‘revenge turns up frequently as a personal
motive in Kashmir terrorist films’,38 and he
decided to turn the tables in his Kashmiri narra-
tive, using the revenge tragedy of Hamlet as
a model for the revenge of the wronged
Kashmiris.39 Haider, as with a great many didac-
tic performative works in India, employs the
pathetic rasa to impart its ethical meaning and
to stir audiences to think, and perhaps act, dif-
ferently, by inspiring empathy towards the suf-
fering Kashmiris.
32
Dalrymple, ‘Curfewed Night’.
33
Patrick Colm Hogan, Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and
Colonialism (Lincoln, NE, 2016), p. 29.
34
Hogan, Imagining, p. 29.
35
Nandini Ramnath, ‘Haider: desperately seeking Hamlet in
the Valley of Kashmir’, 2 October 2014, http://scroll.in
/article/681740/haider-desperately-seeking-hamlet-in-the-
valley-of-kashmir.
36
Dalrymple, ‘Curfewed Night’.
37
Gohar Ayaz, Zia Ahmed and Ali Ammar, ‘Hamlet–Haider:
from rotten Denmark to rotten Kashmir’, International Journal
of English and Education 4 (2015), 116–23; p. 117.
38
Hogan, Imagining, p. 26.
39
In her insightful review of Haider, Ramnath notes that at least
two films have offered views of the Kashmiri crisis that are
sympathetic to those suffering under India’s police state:
Harud (2010), directed by Aamir Bashir, who plays Liyaqat,
the Laertes character in Haider; and Valley of the Saints (Musa
Syeed, 2012), which also deals with environmental issues in
Kashmir.
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haider through the lens of
karuna
Indeed, Haider is set in a very specific milieu for
a purpose, and, therefore, its thematic, stylistic and
plot elements conform to the narrative of Kashmir
in the 1990s, despite the fact that it is an adaptation of
Hamlet. The commonalities mentioned above,
including the dominant rasa of karuna, connect
these two texts; however, their differences have
inspired some critics to complain that the film
works better as a tragic tale about Kashmir than as
an adaptation of Hamlet, while others have griped
that Bhardwaj ‘invoked the Bard’ too much and
thus compromised what would have been a better
film without Shakespeare.40 The beauty or ugliness
of the level of ‘Bardiness’ in Haider is surely in the
eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, I believe
Bhardwaj and Peer’s screenplay weaves the elements
of Hamlet into Haider quite adroitly and to great
effect. Haider begins with white titles on a black
screen announcing that we are in the Kashmiri city
of Srinagar in 1995, expecting the audience to know
that this was at the height of violence in the region.
The first image in the film is of Dr Hilaal Meer,
Haider’s father, being shoved through claustropho-
bic grey stone alleys by Muslim terrorists with
machine guns. The mise-en-scène strongly evokes
the karuna rasa, as the shots are dominated by grey
tones, lacking any warm colours (perhaps through
use of a filter), and there is a pale, chilly grey light
pervading these frames. We soon learn that Hilaal is
being taken to a terrorist leader suffering from an
infected appendix, and he agrees to operate on the
man to prevent his death. Interstitial – one could say
lyrical – shots of the landscape around Srinagar
bridge between film sequences, starting here and
running throughout the film, and these allow the
audience to take a pause outside the narrative and
soak in the atmosphere of sorrow and grief that
pervades the countryside in Kashmir. Long and
extreme long shots reveal the cold, misty terrain,
marked by a muddy river and generally dreary
environs, which seem both hostile and entrapping.
Here at the beginning, we meet the true star of this
narrative, Ghazala Meer, played by Tabu in the
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Gertrude role, as she is teaching school children
about what family is: ‘brothers and sisters and fathers
and mothers. It is unselfish acts and kindly sharing.’
This ironic introduction warns us of the explosive
unravelling of her family as the narrative unfolds.
A little later, at home, Ghazala is unhappy when she
helps her husband prepare to operate on the terrorist
who is now in their attic. She takes a telephone call
during the procedure, which we will later learn is
from her brother-in-law, the crooked lawyer
Khurram, who is complicit in the oppression of his
Muslim neighbours. The next morning, there is
a ‘crackdown’ in their village, and Hilaal is identified
as a ‘threat’ to the Indian government by a masked
man and whisked away roughly to an undisclosed
location. He is ‘disappeared’, and his house is
bombed to smithereens with a rocket launcher as
Ghazala watches in horror. The couple’s son,
Haider, then comes up from Aligarh Muslim
University, where he is studying Indian revolution-
ary poets of the colonial era, and begins to search for
his father in camps and prisons. His search is emo-
tionally presented to the audience through
a montage of images of him going from camp to
camp, prison to prison, rendered extraordinarily
poignant by the film’s first musical number,
‘Jhelum’ (after the river running through the valley),
sung in plaintive, minor tones by the clear tenor of
Arjit Singh. Along the way, we learn that many
people are, like Haider, on arduous quests to find
loved ones. At one point, as song lyrics declare
‘Blood, blood, blood, blood has become the colour
of time’ and ‘Blood is a molten ember’, we see shots
of bloody corpses heaped in the back of
a government truck. For nearly four minutes of
this song, there is no diegetic sound, only the mel-
ancholy voice of the singer narrating the region’s
tragedy. The montage ends with a shot of Haider in
the grey gloaming, throwing pictures of his father’s
face he used in the search into a blazing fire. Here
we see sorrow and anger, shades of karuna, Rudra
and Agni. The images are enough to tell the story,
40
See Ayaz et al., ‘Hamlet–Haider’.
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and the song radiates the rasa into the soul of the
spectator.
Accompanying Haider on this journey is his dear
childhood friend, Arshia, daughter of the head of
the Jammu and Kashmir police in Srinagar, Parvez
Lone. Arshia is a newspaper writer in the area and
uses her press pass to gain access for them into the
facilities that house prisoners. In Haider, Arshia
evidently fills the role of the bosom confidant
Horatio, as well as the thwarted love interest
Ophelia. She is clearly in love with Haider, but
he seems oblivious to her charms as he is obsessed
with finding his father. Meanwhile, Parvez has
been tasked with leading the efforts of the
Indian government to further brutally subdue
Muslim militants – a project called ‘Operation
Nightingale’ – and co-opts Khurram to conscript
his ‘terrorist’ clients into counter-insurgency mili-
tia forces. Khurram also runs for local political
office in order to consolidate his power, although
he tells Haider he is seeking office in order to find
his beloved brother Hilaal. A fast-paced montage
then rapidly shuttles the viewer between heated
speeches at two Kashmiri political rallies, one fea-
turing Khurram, and a press conference in Srinigar
led by Captain Murthy of the Indian Army, who
arrogantly tells the crowd that India is fighting for
peace in the region against the ‘enslavement to
Pakistan’, not against Kashmiris. Martial-sounding
music featuring prominent drums heightens the
tension of this sequence, which is punctuated
with black-and-white footage of earlier revolts
against Indian aggression. The rasa evoked by this
precisely choreographed collage of imagery is that
of disgust, primarily the disgust of the filmic narra-
tor and the Kashmiris towards the deadly politics
being played by the government and politicians;
however, one can also see the disgust of the mili-
tary industrial complex towards the Kashmiris, in
the form of disrespect and dehumanization.41
As a bridging extreme long shot of the valley
reveals that it is now bleakly snow-covered and
blanketed with pale blue-grey mist, we are intro-
duced to the ‘ghost’, Roohdaar, played by the
ubiquitous Irrfan Khan, accompanied by pop-
style instrumentation reminiscent of a Bond or
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Mission: Impossible film. He is thus coded as
a mysterious but not malevolent operative. With
a pronounced limp, dark sunglasses and dull white
robe draping his entire figure, he is, indeed, phan-
tasmal, reminding us of Yama, king of ghosts. We
learn about his purpose after we see Haider kid-
napped by Muslim militants and taken to
a graveyard. Here, Roohdaar tells Haider that he
has a message from his father: ‘Revenge’. In a dark,
grey-toned flashback, Roohdaar then unfolds the
dolorous tale of Hilaal’s incarceration, torture and
eventual murder by Khurram’s militia. Roohdaar
claims to have been Hilaal’s cellmate in prison,
sharing in his sufferings, and announces to Haider
that he vowed to become Hilaal’s ‘soul’ and carry
his message to his son. In the end, Haider is told
where his father is buried, and, in an icy, misty
graveyard, he weeps over his father’s grave, driving
the pathos home. It is at this point that Haider
begins to behave as if he were insane, but always
with a bit too much reason in his madness. His
change is marked graphically by appearing next
with a shaved head and a beard on his face in one
of the most memorable scenes in the film, his ‘to
be, or not to be’ analogue, in which he speaks to
a crowd at Laal Chowk, a prominent market where
politicians give stump speeches. He wears a rope
around his neck tied in a noose and talks into its
frayed end, beginning: ‘Do we exist or do we not?
If we do, then who are we? If not, then where are
we?’ The speech is markedly aimed at the identity
and situation of Kashmiris, who are colonized in
the North by Pakistan and China, and by India
everywhere else in the state. The scene is primarily
shot with a chaotic hand-held camera, often in
extreme close-ups where the bumping and canting
create a sickly vertigo. Haider chants with rap-style
delivery: ‘There is no law; there is no order. Whose
laws? Whose order? Made on order, law and order.
India! Pakistan! A game on the border’. And here
there is a cut to an extremely low-angle medium
long shot of Haider, distorted by a wide-angle lens.
‘India clings to us. Pakistan leeches on. What of us?
41
See Hogan, Imagining, pp. 31–2.
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What do we want?’ The crowd chants,
‘Freedom!’ Underscoring the complexity of that
concept in Kashmir, Haider responds: ‘Freedom
from this side; freedom from that side. We will be
free!’ As he sings ironically, ‘A world better than
the world, our India / We are her children’,
Khurram, who is in the crowd, calls out to him
‘Mother!’ trying to communicate that his mother
is there and wishes to speak to him; however, the
syntax of this exchange firmly establishes that
Ghazala embodies the riven relationship between
India and the Kashmiris. Pathos, disgust and anger
are evoked in this scene as Haider rails against the
system that has caught them all in an inescapable,
mortiferous trap.
It is at this juncture, perhaps surprisingly, that
Bhardwaj treats us to that ineluctable Bollywood
romance montage, as Arshia is the only one with
whom Haider can share Roohdaar’s message and
his own confusion, though he does confront his
mother with a photo of the dead Hilaal, leading
swiftly to the announcement of Ghazala and
Khurram’s wedding. Bhardwaj falls back on the
romantic Kashmiri ‘log cabin’ trope long used in
Indian popular cinema, which ‘features as a space
offering . . . privacy, allowing the audience the
pleasure of imagining complete solitude and
remoteness’.42 Finally, the shringara (romantic
love) rasa is the focus, and this montage, with its
beautiful love song ‘Khul Kabhi Toh’, sung by the
dulcet voice of Arjit Singh, depicts the union of
these lovers remarkably graphically for an Indian
film. The montage begins with the two playing in
heavily falling snow, then moves into the dark
interior of a log cabin with only the golden light
of the fire illuminating parts of their entwined
bodies. This overwhelming moment of warmth
and intimacy ends with Haider weeping in sorrow
and holding a gun to his head (see Michael
Almereyda’s Hamlet, 2000). We are swiftly ushered
back into the cold world of karuna, which is all the
more jolting following our romantic escape.
At Ghazala and Khurram’s wedding, Haider
plans a special finale: he will shoot the groom.
We see him hiding the pistol he will use, creating
suspense. However, it is also here that we are given
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the flamboyant spectacle of Haider’s ‘Nightingale’
song and dance sequence, the equivalent of the
Mousetrap play. Haider’s donning of a large, red
bird-beak-shaped hat throughout the festivities
leading up to the performance reveals that he
knows his uncle is collaborating with Operation
Nightingale. In the elaborate performance, featur-
ing a group of male dancers wearing light grey and
red-clothed puppets representing Ghazala,
Khurram and Hilaal, Haider sings an allegorical
song about two birds – his mother (a nightingale)
and father. The male was poisoned by ‘a falcon of
bad intention’, who then imprisoned and killed the
male bird. In the dramatic finale of the song, a giant
black puppet representing the falcon emerges onto
the ‘stage’ of the Martrand Sun Temple, where the
performance is taking place, and when he turns
around, we see the falcon is truly a satanic red
demon. Haider is visibly seething with anger as he
sings of his father’s demise, and ends the song by
pointing at Ghazala and Khurram in a full shot from
Haider’s perspective, shifting focus from his hand
to the perpetrators’ faces, so the blame lands where
our eyes do. The cinematography in this impress-
ive Bollywood number is characteristically elabo-
rate, but even more baroque than most, featuring
sweeping crane shots, bird’s-eye long shots from
above, and extreme low angles leading to exagger-
ated wide-angle shots with Haider’s angry face and
movements in the foreground and distorted back-
grounds. The giant black and red falcon/demon
puppet is a coup de théâtre, and Haider wipes pro-
minent red and black paint in stripes on his face
during the performance; these colours connect
with both the imagery of Yama and the rasa of
raudra (anger).
This act of aggression is the climax that sets the
falling action in motion. Haider, like Hamlet, balks
from shooting Khurram when he is at prayer. He is
caught by Parvez, who gives Haider to his idiot sons,
Salman and Salman (after the action star Salman
Khan), to kill. Salman and Salman, our Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, end up being brutally murdered by
42
Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, p. 70.
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Haider, who savagely bashes each of their heads in
with rocks in the open snowy, mist-bound landscape.
Haider, at this point, believes he has no choice but to
join the insurgency and cross over to Pakistan, so he
plans to meet Roohdaar’s men in the graveyard
where he first met his father’s ‘soul’. On the way,
he cannot resist stopping one last time in the dark,
shadowy ruins of his home, where he encounters his
mother and they play out a version of the ‘closet
scene’, in which Haider confronts his mother with
her guilt, but she explains that she had no idea that
Khurram was a government informant when she told
him of the terrorist in their attic. Haider insists he
must leave but she begs for him to shoot her, ending
her ‘agony’; at that moment, Parvez arrives to kill
Haider, but Haider is quicker on the draw. Arshia
falls apart emotionally after her father’s death, as we
see her, in a dull white gown, unravelling the yarn of
a blood-red scarf she had given to her father and
wrapping herself in it. She is trapped in this inescap-
able web of violence and finally shoots herself in the
head. Haider flees to the graveyard, and there
encounters Roohdaar’s men cheerfully digging
graves in the snowy ground, enclosed by misty forest
and grey skies. What follows is the most excessive and
delightful version of the grave-digging scene ever
filmed; it is a Bollywood tour de force, with the three
diggers singing jovially of life and death in a rock-
style song rhythmically matched to the striking of
their shovels in the cold graves. As they cry, ‘Not
twilight or sunset / Just darkness, only darkness’ in
the dove-coloured setting, the smooth crane shot
flies fluidly above the men then pulls closer to them
at an odd, slightly canted eye-level shot in which the
skeletal, black branches of the trees in the back-
ground finally come into focus behind them. It is
a masterful song and ‘dance’ number that provides
some much-needed levity before the horror that is
to come. Despite its drab colour, this is the most self-
conscious, over-the-top use of music and choreo-
graphy in the film, because there is no excuse for it
in the narrative, as there is in the wedding scene;
thus, it is not characteristic of Bhardwaj’s work,
which tends to avoid flashy Bollywood numbers in
general and any musical interludes that are not
seamlessly integrated into the narrative fabric. One
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can see this in his other Shakespeare adaptations,
Maqbool (2003) and Omkara (2006), as well as his
non-Bardic work, such as Kaminey (2009) and
Rangoon (2017). Bhardwaj chose Shakespeare’s
gravedigger scene to launch into a flight of
fancy, and it does bring humour, strangely, while
maintaining the karuna rasa in its mise-en-scène and
its lyrics. When the song concludes, there is
a rather interesting on-the-nose translation of
Shakespeare’s gravedigger scene between the men
and Haider, but it is the ‘So Jao’ gravedigger
number that dazzles, even if as a guilty pleasure
in this karunic (my word) environment.
From this point on, the tragedy escalates apace.
Haider, hiding in the dark house adjacent to the
graveyard, spots Arshia’s funeral procession, and
he and her brother Liyaqat fight, resulting in the
latter’s death. Khurram and his militia arrive,
coming at the house armed to the teeth with
machine guns, grenades and a rocket launcher.
The full-scale battle that erupts in the snowy
graveyard is shot in a stylistic combination of
a 1980s Hollywood action movie and a shoot-
out in a classic Western: quick cutting between
jerky hand-held shots of individual fighters, inter-
mittent slow-motion shots to dramatize action
and gore, high-angle extreme long shots over
the bloody, body-strewn graveyard, and occa-
sional silent pauses to ratchet up the tension.
When the scene abruptly shifts to a quiet shot of
the back of a white SUV stopping on a road, we
are startled to see Roohdaar and Ghazala in the
vehicle. Wearing a red hijab, a long black wrap,
and no make-up, she looks in the depths of despair
as she exits the SUV and walks silently up to
Khurram directly after he has launched a rocket
into the now-collapsed and smouldering house
where Haider remains. Khurram begrudgingly
grants her a chance to bring Haider around, so
she enters the half-incinerated, gloomy house as
her bloody son stumbles down the stairs to meet
her and they clasp on to each other for dear life.
Needless to say, this is the most heart-breaking,
pathos-inducing moment in the film, intensified
by the dark shadows surrounding them and the
flashes of deep scarlet in his blood and her hijab,
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captured so poignantly by a shot/reverse-shot ser-
ies of hand-held extreme close-ups, each shot
containing both heads so we sense their intimacy
as we feel their grief. There is no music on the
soundtrack as they exchange their final words; the
silence between the dialogue augments the
despondence. As Haider tells her of his drive for
vengeance, a tearful Ghazala expresses what we
know to be true: ‘Revenge begets revenge.
Revenge does not set us free.’ As Haider still
refuses to surrender, Ghazala walks slowly out of
the dark house into the grey, snowy graveyard,
stopping at its edge, just in front of Khurram and
what is left of his soldiers. Music creeps back into
the scene here in deep, weeping cello notes, as
Ghazala, in super-slow motion, calmly throws off
her long black wrap in a medium long shot from
behind her. Diegetic sound has disappeared as
there is a cut to a high-angle long shot above
her, showing the soldiers turning to run from
her in slow motion, then a shot of Khurram yell-
ing and running towards her. The music is now
moving in a quick pattern of three ascending notes
repeating over and over, building the suspense as
we finally see the source of the response: Ghazala
is wearing a suicide vest containing eight grenades
and her hand is on the pull trigger. The close-up
on the vest moves up her body into a bird’s-eye
crane shot looking down on her as she raises her
head to gaze at the grey sky as if in silent prayer,
the camera mimicking the movement of a soul
rising after death. A high-pitched violin note is
sustained as she pulls the trigger in an extreme
close-up on her hand, which still bears the red
circle of her wedding paint. In a moment, it is
over. Diegetic sound returns, cruelly, with the
tinkling sounds of the pins leaving the grenades
and the massive explosion. Chaotic hand-held
shots show Haider stumbling through the black
smoke towards a pile of dark grey ashes and body
parts, crying ‘Mother!’ When Haider spots
Khurram crawling on the ground, his legs having
been blown off below the knee, Haider lurches
towards his uncle with a crazed look. As he hovers
over Khurram holding a pistol to his uncle’s head,
the camera captures him in a series of chaotic,
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jerky canted-angle close-ups, which move
between him and Khurram’s blackened face;
Haider hears his father’s voice in his head telling
him to avenge Hilaal’s murder, and then his
mother’s voice layered on top of that saying that
‘freedom lies beyond revenge’. This cacophony is
accompanied by the same three quickly ascending
violin notes in a loop, rising in volume with the
tension. This is the most melodramatic moment in
an unapologetic melodrama, and, in my opinion,
Bhardwaj has earned it. Haider suddenly throws
the gun away, cueing the abrupt cessation of the
ascending notes, leaving one quietly sustained
high pitch. Haider rises and limps off, crazed and
blood-stained, moving away from the graveyard
as his uncle begs for a mercy killing. The final shot
of the film is a high-angle extreme long shot
revealing the chilling carnage of the scene: bro-
ken, bloody bodies strewn everywhere, smoke
and fire, a true hellscape. This image strikingly
reflects the gods of Yama, Rudra and Agni, and
the overwhelming grief and loss of the karuna rasa
is palpable. Haider passes through the gate and
back into the world as the screen fades to black.
Hamlet lives to die another day.
Outside the diegetic world, Bhardwaj ends the
film with white titles on black screens announcing
that there is now ‘relative peace’ in Kashmir and
that the Indian Army saved thousands of civilian
lives there during the disastrous floods in 2014,
but a melancholy song sung by a plaintive female
voice haunts us in the soundtrack, intensifying the
feelings of grief and sorrow even as we are told
that there is hope. Savouring this mix of sorrow
and pleasure is at the core of rasa theory; we
experience the pure pathos of the rasa while tak-
ing joy in the aural and visual artistry of the film
(and, for Shakespearians, taking delight in the
departures from and translations of our beloved
Hamlet). This article has attempted to demonstrate
that the most significant concept in Indian aes-
thetics, rasa theory, can be a fruitful and revelatory
tool for analysing cinematic texts. Bhardwaj’s
Haider provides a lucid and stimulating illustration
of this as it compellingly evokes empathy and
introspection through rasas, in true paradoxical
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fashion. As for the message of the film, tragically,
violence in Kashmir continues on all sides of the
conflict. A New York Times article in late 2016
declared that Kashmir was ‘paralyzed by an
“adored” band of militants’,43 and so the tragedy
continues, but now it also affects those of us who
have been moved by our experience of the karuna
rasa through Bhardwaj’s film to care about the
people who call that beautiful, violence-plagued
valley of Kashmir home.
43
Geeta Anand and Hari Kumar, ‘Kashmir is paralyzed by an
“adored” band of militants’, 14 November 2016, www
.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/world/asia/kashmir-india-
pakistan-militants.html.

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