Usually, when a book is adapted into a film, the scriptwriters don't assume that their viewers have read the source text; the movie should work on its own terms. But it can get trickier when a film tries to do new things with the template of a very well-known tale, and a certain degree of familiarity is presumed. I enjoyed Vishal Bhardwaj's Hamlet adaptation, Haider, but I do wonder how I would have felt about the film if I had watched it knowing nothing about Shakespeare's play. The thrill of connecting the dots was central to my viewing experience - noting, for instance, how Bhardwaj and screenwriter Basharat Peer had wittily turned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into buffoons who idolise Salman Khan. Or anticipating the famous grave-digger scene where Haider holds up a skull, and the goofy little song ("So jao" - a take on the relationship between sleep and death in Hamlet) that would probably have delighted Shakespeare's own plebian heart.
Would the descent into madness of Haider's girlfriend, Arshia, have been credible if one weren't prepared for it by Ophelia's tragedy, I mused. Possibly not: the film is cantering along at this point, and the abrupt cut to the scene where Haider sees Arshia's funeral procession might puzzle an unprepared viewer - I remember a few murmurings in the hall - especially since being reduced so quickly to a nervous wreck doesn't seem consistent with Arshia's personality (unlike the sheltered Ophelia, she is a journalist working in Kashmir, accustomed to seeing bad things happening).
To some extent, the question "How important is pre-knowledge?" applies to all of Bhardwaj's Shakespeare adaptations. The first and still arguably the best of them, Maqbool (Macbeth), began with a brilliantly atmospheric scene where two corrupt cops gossip about the Bombay underworld and use astrology to predict a gangster's rise and fall. The scene works well enough by itself, but gains in depth and dimension once you realise that these are versions of Shakespeare's witches, commenting from the sidelines while also helping to engineer and direct events.
What got me thinking about this subject was a recent re-encounter with Shyam Benegal's 1981 film Kalyug, which is a modern-day version of the Mahabharata centred around a business family split into rival factions. I loved Kalyug when I was 10 years old (back then, it was the only Benegal film I would have touched with a long spoon), or at least I thought I loved it. Possibly what really stimulated me was the Mahabharata dot-connecting game (I was obsessed with the epic), and especially seeing my hero, Karna, portrayed in sympathetic terms by Shashi Kapoor.
Watching it again now, I was disappointed. It certainly is enjoyable in bits and pieces - the cast is full of interesting people, and the plot is busy enough: the rivals keep raising the stakes until things get out of control; Amrish Puri plays a Krishna who doesn't have anything like the agency and influence of the charioteer-God; Kulbhushan Kharbanda is a permanently priapic Bheema. But these elements rarely add up. Minus the Mahabharata-awareness, this is a confused story with too many characters, most of whom are underdeveloped and don't get enough screen time. The film vacillates between the big picture - a caution about how, in the machine age, everyone sinks into moral quicksand - and trying to evoke sympathy specifically for one character, the underdog Karna, and those two things don't quite gel. There are unarticulated tensions and meaningful silences that don't seem to stem from anything - except, well, as a viewer you are simply supposed to know that Karna was rejected by Draupadi at her swayamvara, or that Yudhisthira is a bit of a non-entity who is over-fond of gambling.
And those who don't know all this are naturally foxed. A non-Indian friend, who loves old Hindi movies but hasn't read Ved Vyasa's epic, had this take on Kalyug: the film, she felt, played like a sort of dramatised home video where a viewer has all the relevant information beforehand about the people, and then indolently watches little dramas play out. Interestingly, there's a home-video scene in the film itself, where the characters sit together and watch themselves in a wedding footage on TV. Perhaps Benegal was trying to suggest that the Mahabharata is already omnipresent in our lives and living rooms!
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
