ABSTRACT
The unique conditions of Haider’s year of production and the violence that has subsequently overtaken Kashmir, as well as the change in political power and rise of extreme sensibility in India since the film was released bracket the ‘impossible moment’. To watch Haider is to take part in an impossible moment—“a time out of joint”—that forever breaks the curfews the film itself documents and those of the present reality it pre-empts. This moment is both memoriam and utopia; it offers potential futures based on retrospective understandings of a dramatically realised past. A sign advertising ‘Dignity Sales’ behind him, Haider delivers a protest speech that lays bare the devastating trauma of being human in a place where nationalism at any cost has been uneasily overwritten by the universalising impulses of international law. The films of Salman Khan make another appearance in Haider as backdrop for torture.
