ABSTRACT
In Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, a young man stands at the doorway to his house seemingly incapable of crossing the threshold until he is “searched” for identity documentation. This scene, borrowed from Akhtar Mohiuddin’s short story, “The New Disease,” speaks to the trauma and debility experienced by disenfranchised communities even as it pathologizes disabilities such as dysfluency, stilted movements, processing disorders, or inaction. Though the film is set in the late twentieth century in the Indian subcontinent, its exploration of pain, violence, and revenge brings it surprisingly close to its original, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like Hamlet, Haider demonstrates a concern with disabled bodyminds that must be identified and “cured” of disabilities that it perceives to be impairments. Haider’s presentation of disability, however, not only provides us with an opportunity to think of the violent “grafting” necessary for the cultural apparatus of Shakespeare but the processes through which disabilities are imagined, reimagined, and enacted. The chapter considers how the film’s “disability-craft” allows for the interrogation of various scripts of cognitive and physical capacity (or lack thereof). The film’s disability aesthetic makes visible its own desire for compulsory able-bodiedness both within and beyond the film.
