O bardo vai a Bollywood: Hamlet e Haider entre espelhos

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss the Indian film by Vishal Bhardwaj, Haider (2014), which is an adaptation of both William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1604-5/2016) and Basharat Peer’s novel Curfewed Night (2008). Haider presents Kashmir’s political struggles in the mid-1990s as a mirror of the Elizabethan conflicts that inform Hamlet. Our aim is to identify in Bhardwaj’s film some political, cultural and aesthetic motivations that may be intrinsically associated with the Indian rewriting. As we trace cultural marks and narrative changes between the play and the film, we try to emphasize that cultural and social contexts, along with linguistic-textual aspects, are essential in the production of rewritings.