Paper-1 sem-1 assignmen

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Name: Joshi Riddhi
Topic: Hamlet v/s Haider
Roll no: 37
Paper no 1: The Renaissance Literature
M.A: Sem-1
Enrolment no. : 2069108420180028
Year: 2017-19
E-mail: Www.riddhij8@gmail.com
Submitted to:
S.B. Gardi Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University

 

Plot of Hamlet:

On a dark winter night, a ghost walks the ramparts of Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Discovered first by a pair of watchmen, then by the scholar Horatio, the ghost resembles the recently deceased King Hamlet, whose brother Claudius has inherited the throne and married the king’s widow, Queen Gertrude. When Horatio and the watchmen bring Prince Hamlet, the son of Gertrude and the dead king, to see the ghost, it speaks to him, declaring ominously that it is indeed his father’s spirit, and that he was murdered by none other than Claudius. Ordering Hamlet to seek revenge on the man who usurped his throne and married his wife, the ghost disappears with the dawn.
Prince Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his father’s death, but, because he is contemplative and thoughtful by nature, he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent madness. Claudius and Gertrude worry about the prince’s erratic behavior and attempt to discover its cause. They employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to watch him. When Polonius, the pompous Lord Chamberlain, suggests that Hamlet may be mad with love for his daughter, Ophelia, Claudius agrees to spy on Hamlet in conversation with the girl. But though Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to love Ophelia: he orders her to enter a nunnery and declares that he wishes to ban marriages.
A group of traveling actors comes to Elsinore, and Hamlet seizes upon an idea to test his uncle’s guilt. He will have the players perform a scene closely resembling the sequence by which Hamlet imagines his uncle to have murdered his father, so that if Claudius is guilty, he will surely react. When the moment of the murder arrives in the theater, Claudius leaps up and leaves the room. Hamlet and Horatio agree that this proves his guilt. Hamlet goes to kill Claudius but finds him praying. Since he believes that killing Claudius while in prayer would send Claudius’s soul to heaven, Hamlet considers that it would be an inadequate revenge and decides to wait. Claudius, now frightened of Hamlet’s madness and fearing for his own safety, orders that Hamlet be sent to England at once.
Hamlet goes to confront his mother, in whose bedchamber Polonius has hidden behind a tapestry. Hearing a noise from behind the tapestry, Hamlet believes the king is hiding there. He draws his sword and stabs through the fabric, killing Polonius. For this crime, he is immediately dispatched to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. However, Claudius’s plan for Hamlet includes more than banishment, as he has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sealed orders for the King of England demanding that Hamlet be put to death.
In the aftermath of her father’s death, Ophelia goes mad with grief and drowns in the river. Polonius’s son, Laertes, who has been staying in France, returns to Denmark in a rage. Claudius convinces him that Hamlet is to blame for his father’s and sister’s deaths. When Horatio and the king receive letters from Hamlet indicating that the prince has returned to Denmark after pirates attacked his ship en route to England, Claudius concocts a plan to use Laertes’ desire for revenge to secure Hamlet’s death. Laertes will fence with Hamlet in innocent sport, but Claudius will poison Laertes’ blade so that if he draws blood, Hamlet will die. As a backup plan, the king decides to poison a goblet, which he will give Hamlet to drink should Hamlet score the first or second hits of the match. Hamlet returns to the vicinity of Elsinore just as Ophelia’s funeral is taking place. Stricken with grief, he attacks Laertes and declares that he had in fact always loved Ophelia. Back at the castle, he tells Horatio that he believes one must be prepared to die, since death can come at any moment. A foolish courtier named Osric arrives on Claudius’s orders to arrange the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes.
The sword-fighting begins. Hamlet scores the first hit, but declines to drink from the king’s proffered goblet. Instead, Gertrude takes a drink from it and is swiftly killed by the poison. Laertes succeeds in wounding Hamlet, though Hamlet does not die of the poison immediately. First, Laertes is cut by his own sword’s blade, and, after revealing to Hamlet that Claudius is responsible for the queen’s death, he dies from the blade’s poison. Hamlet then stabs Claudius through with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies immediately after achieving his revenge.
At this moment, a Norwegian prince named Fortinbras, who has led an army to Denmark and attacked Poland earlier in the play, enters with ambassadors from England, who report that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Fortinbras is stunned by the gruesome sight of the entire royal family lying sprawled on the floor dead. He moves to take power of the kingdom. Horatio, fulfilling Hamlet’s last request, tells him Hamlet’s tragic story. Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be carried away in a manner befitting a fallen soldier.

Hamlet V/S Haidar:

Two years ago to the day, the world erupted with joy celebrating 450 years of entertainment courtesy our favourite media mogul. You know the man who launched a 1,000 movies, books, plays, ads, websites, graphic novels, games, actors, writers — William Shakespeare.
The Globe Theatre embarked on an ambitious project on April 23, 2014. The Globe to Globe Hamlet took Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy on a two-year tour to perform in 205 countries around the world culminating with a performance at the Globe Theatre on April 23, 2016 marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
Globe to Globe Hamlet was performed at Bengaluru’s Ranga Shankara last October. With 12 actors, including Nigerian Ladi Emeruwa playing Hamlet, the play at two hours and 40 minutes moved at a rapid pace. The iconic lines and scenes were all there. The elegance of iambic pentameter cascading down the stage reiterated the beauty of the Bard. If Hamlet felt like a rather self obsessed young man that worked too, as isn’t ironic narcissism the default setting of the modern age?
October 2014 also saw the release of the third of Vishal Bharadwaj’s movies inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedies, Haider. To say the movie is inspired by Hamlet would not convey the splendour and subtlety of the adaptation. There are the obvious similarities — Haider for Hamlet or Pervez for Polonius and Liyaqat for Laertes. Or the energetic, angsty ‘Bismil’ being the Mouse trap. There is even a grave digger song, Haider meditating on life and death with a skull and the famous ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy as ‘Main rahoon ki main nahin.’
Set in the insurgency-torn Kashmir of 1995, the film tells the story of an idealistic youngster Haider, who returns home from Aligarh Muslim University (not Wittenberg), to find his father missing and his mother, Ghazala, consorting with his uncle, Khurram, a lawyer with political ambitions.
Haider makes two major departures from Shakespeare — both dealing with the women in Hamlet/Haider’s life. By choosing to combine Hamlet’s best friend, Horatio and love Ophelia in Arshia and making her a journalist playing an active role in Haider’s life, Bharadwaj has made her a woman of substance. Eschewing the Nunnery scene however, detracted from the poignancy of Arshia’s suicide even while the unravelling red wool presented a powerful symbol of things falling apart.
The other change, the more radical one, is looking at the tragedy from Ghazala/Gertrude’s eyes. The Shakespearean Gertrude always seemed rather vapid. Ghazala on the other hand (played by a luminescent Tabu) is a conflicted character. She respects her husband, is attracted to Khurram and worries about her son. She wants to do the right thing by her family. She tells Khurram about her husband operating on a militant not knowing that he is an informer. It is the wrong deed for the right reasons and results in a chain of events that ends in blood and tears. Finally, it is Ghazala who convinces Haider about the futility of revenge.
Two characters that Hamlet junkies (like yours truly) would relish and enjoy are the Salmans and Roohdaar. Calling Haider’s childhood buddies Salmans recalls the interchangeable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The extraordinary conversation Haider has with them where he elaborates on chutzpah is deliciously wicked. Haider’s ruthless slaying of the two when he realises they have betrayed him reveals how far gone he is.
Roohdaar, played with extraordinary stillness and strength by Irrfan Khan (with the most amazing guitar riff for theme) is a play on the ghost. Rooh means soul or spirit in Urdu.
He is the one who tells Haider that his uncle, Khurram, betrayed his father. But like Hamlet’s ghost, Haider doesn’t know if Roohdaar is telling the truth or trying to brainwash him into becoming an outlaw.
Haider, like the best of Shakespeare, is this perfect package — a complex thriller, a tender love story, a historical document backed by amazing cinematography, music acting and writing. Watching any of the many adaptations of Hamlet or reading the loaded lines confirms that increase of appetite grows by what it is fed on.

 

Thread of Oedipuse complex’ binds Haidar and Hamlet:

It is not just the two letters ‘H’ and ‘A’ that are common between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Vishal Bhardwaj‘s much-talked about film ‘Haider’ nor is the fact that the famous lines ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark‘ is equally applicable to the state of Kashmir. Haider deals with the problems of terrorism in the troubled state but I personally did not go to watch the film for that. terrorism has not been dealt with earlier in Hindi cinema and even better than what Vishal has done. It is the central theme of the film the ‘Oedipus complex‘ ( the forbidden love between a mother and a son) that bind together the play and the film.
‘Oedipus’ to the uninitiated was introduced in literature by the ancient playwright Sophocles when he wrote the Oedipus Tyrranus a story of a tragic hero who is forced to sleep with his mother through a set of circumstances that was unknown to him and out of his control.
But ‘Oedipus Complex’ was used for the first time for Hamlet in 1910 when Ernest Jones, a contemporary of Freud came out with his theory in the American Journal of Psychology. He argues that even though Claudius , the usurper of the throne of Denmark by killing King Hamlet his son Prince Hamlet was prevaricating in taking revenge because secretly he wanted no one between him and his mother Gertrude. At the same time Hamlet was jealous of Claudius for marrying Gertrude. His various soliloquies in the play support this.
There’s no mistaking this thread through the film. There is a war going on between the terrorists and the militia and Vishal has been accused of siding with the terrorists by lobbyists. But they forget that the film ends with the note ‘Inteqam se sirf Inteqam milta hai. Inteqam is bahar nikloge tabhi Azadi milegi.’
And the fact that Haider throws away his gun even when his arch enemy his uncle is lying injured and unarmed before him in the last scene proves that Vishal is with the pacifists.

The most engrossing parts of the film are those between The mother played so sincerely by Tabu, and Shahid:
When Tabu marries K K Menon, her son Shahid stages a play which shows the entire audience how the two had betrayed his father, he decides to take his revenge.
In an honest conversation both of them talk about their childhood days and she asks him” Do you remember you did not like even your father to touch me and slept between the two of us at night” to which replies ” Yes and just imagine how I will tolerate his brother touching you? Why did you remarry so soon after his death.”
And even if there is some ambiguity, it is the stand of Gertrude in Hamlet, there is an honest admission about the secret desires of Tabu who has to pretend to be the silent suffering mother. In the Kashmir of Vishal Bhardwaj the wives of ten missing citizens are called Half widows till the time their bodies are discovered. In a scene Tabu’s face is blowing with joy as she tells K K once his body is discovered, I will become a full widow and them we can marry. It is another kind of Azadi for her and several like her in the troubled valley.
And just as Ophelia in Hamlet has no place in his life, in ‘Haider’ the lovely and refreshing Shradha Kapoor has no place in the scheme of things.
In ‘Haider’ Vishal Bhrdwaj draws from ‘Hamlet’:
The Bollywood director Vishal Bhardwaj has made his name by adapting Shakespear into film, using the plays to reflect the violence and vicissitudes of modern India. “Maqbool,” an adaptation of “Macbeth,” was set in the Mumbai underworld; “Omkara” transported “Othello” to the feudal badlands of northern India. His latest effort, a loose adaptation of “Hamlet” called “Haider” that takes place in Kashmir during the turbulent 1990s, has become one of the most acclaimed and contentious Bollywood movies of the year.
The film, which opened on Oct. 2, sparked a fierce reaction from Hindu nationalists, many of whom called for a boycott on social media. Kashmir remains a sensitive subject in the Indian subcontinent, a disputed territory claimed by both India and Pakistan.
“Any movie that sympathizes with terrorists, glorifies them; insults Indian Army & justifies ethnic cleansing, goes to the bin. BoycottHaider,” one tweet read. The boycott campaign’s Facebook page included a photograph of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. That was not an accident: The election of the conservative Mr. Modi this year has emboldened Indians who advocate a muscular, unapologetic nationalism.
Most journalists in India, meanwhile, gave the movie a rapturous reception. The columnist Mukul Kesavan, writing in the Kolkata Telegraph, said its “great achievement is to bring Kashmir out of the closet.” The Mint newspaper termed it an “immensely effective reimagination of Shakespeare.”

Rachel Saltz, writing in The New York Times, said the film “grafts its source story less convincingly to its setting” than Mr. Bhardwaj’s previous efforts but does provide “the occasional sharp reminder of how cinematically he can construct Shakespearean moments.”
The movie’s portrait of conflict-ridden Kashmir is radical by the standards of Bollywood. Avoiding nationalist rhetoric, “Haider” portrays the tragic human cost of the conflict and its nether world of disappearances, military torture and extra-judicial killings.
“When we saw the final edit, we prayed the movie would make it through the censor,” said the journalist Basharat Peer, who helped write the script. Censors cleared “Haider” after 41 cuts. (Mr. Bhardwaj says he made 35 of those cuts “voluntarily” for narrative purposes.)
Even as “Haider” enters its fourth week in theaters, the controversy surrounding it shows little sign of abating. It has been banned in Pakistan, where the censors claimed — surprisingly for a movie that casts a negative light on the Indian state — that “Haider” was “against the ideology of Pakistan.”
The Hindu Front for Justice, a group of rightist lawyers, petitioned India’s Allahabad High Court to seek a similar outcome in India, arguing that “Haider” was against the “national interest.” Mr. Bhardwaj and Mr. Peer have until Nov. 15 to reply. A ban would mean little, with the movie likely to complete its theatrical run in India by mid-November.
“Haider” had its origins last year, when Mr. Bhardwaj was looking to conclude a trilogy of movies based on Shakespearean tragedies. He happened upon “Curfewed Night” by Mr. Peer, a memoir of growing up in Kashmir amid the conflict, and realized his search had ended. “The stories in the book gripped me,” he said. A few weeks later, Mr. Bhardwaj met Mr. Peer in New Delhi. They began a collaboration on the screenplay, combining Mr. Bhardwaj’s knowledge of Shakespeare with Mr. Peer’s journalistic realism.

Mr. Peer was an unusual choice for a Bollywood screenwriter. Bollywood movies are, for the most part, loud rambunctious affairs, far removed from Mr. Peer’s literary sphere. Mr. Peer had his reservations too. “I knew Vishal as an accomplished filmmaker, but I did not know much about his politics.”
Bollywood has, for the most part, not been kind to Kashmir. In the years before conflict erupted in the late 1980s, it served as little more than a tourist backdrop for romantic dance numbers. In recent years, the region has been portrayed through a nationalist prism, often as a sinister haven seething with terrorists.
Yet Mr. Peer said that he felt that this project could chart a new direction. “When I told Vishal the basic premise, he had no problems with it,” he said. “I felt this is already a big start. Nobody in Mumbai, nobody in the last 25 years in the film industry, had even come close.”
Mr. Peer and Mr. Bhardwaj prepared in their own ways. Mr. Bhardwaj, who had never visited Kashmir, made several trips. “I wanted to see it from the inside,” he said.
On a trip to New York, Mr. Peer, who had never worked on a screenplay, left the Strand Bookstore with a bag of scripts, including “The Battle of Algiers” and “The Road to Guantanamo.” “I set about reading them like an earnest graduate student,” he said.
Mr. Bhardwaj said he and Mr. Peer “immediately clicked as writers.” Mr. Peer wove in tales from his experience covering the decades-long conflict in Kashmir: stories of boatmen who retrieve bodies from the Jhelum River and of heroic doctors tortured for not denying treatment to militants.
In perhaps the most chilling scene of the movie, a truck full of bodies arrives at a morgue and, as onlookers examine the grisly scene, a boy jumps from the bloodstained pile, dazed to discover he is still alive. “I was taking material from stories I had reported on and grafting them onto Shakespeare,” Mr. Peer said.
Autobiographical elements from Mr. Peer’s life seeped into the narrative. Like Mr. Peer, Haider is sent away by his parents to Aligarh, a university town in north India, to shelter him from the violence overtaking Kashmir. The movie’s plot is set in motion when he returns to his homeland to search for his father, who has been abducted by the military.
Through Haider’s search, the movie plunges into a looking-glass world, where lies and deception are common, and the government has abandoned human rights and the rule of law to crush the armed insurgency.
During an interview with Mr. Peer at a cafe in New Delhi, he checked his Twitter account almost continuously; dozens of tweets were pouring in every minute. It was mostly strong praise or vile abuse.
“I’m not apologetic, or scared, or afraid,” said Mr. Peer, who has faced these situations several times for his journalistic work. “I’m proud of a lot of stories and moments in this film. Within the limits of Bollywood, we pushed things as far as we could.”
Mr. Bhardwaj, who was preparing to take “Haider” to the Rome Film Festival at the time of this interview, spoke with the relief of someone who had survived despite flying too close to the sun. “I like to fire the shots from Shakespeare’s shoulders,” he said. “That gives me a lot of license.”

 

Works Cited:
http://indiaopines.com
http://www.thehindu.com
http://blogs.tribune.com
https://www.nytimes.com