Defanging and Radicalising Hamlet: Riz Ahmed, Haider and the Politics of Adaptation
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As the final chants of the Gayatri Mantra fade out on screen, a distressed Riz Ahmed watches as the corpse of his beloved father is cremated. Hollowed out, exhausted and dressed in a white kurta, he looks like any other Hindu in mourning. Well-meaning relatives and friends offer condolences in Hindi as he returns home. He stands unmoving for a second before a young boy approaches him. ‘My Lord?’ says the boy. ‘He desires to speak with you.’
This is the beginning of Hamlet, reimagined in Aneil Karia’s and Riz Ahmed’s 2025 adaptation as the tale of a young South Asian man in contemporary Britain experiencing the loss of his father – a titan in the prime real estate business – as his mother, Gertrude, and uncle, Claudius, prepare to marry. Karia and Ahmed make the audacious decision to cut any scene that does not directly involve Hamlet, adhering closely to the protagonist’s perspective. This decision proves effective: the film becomes a tightly focused study of grief and tragedy that edges towards madness.
The film resolves the longstanding ambiguity surrounding Hamlet’s madness by removing the aspect of performance from his character entirely. The ghost of Old Hamlet appears once in the film and is seen only by Hamlet. Is Hamlet hallucinating from his grief, or are there truly supernatural forces at play? The film splits Horatio’s role between Ophelia and Laertes, and omits Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, isolating Hamlet and leaving him without witnesses to validate his vision. The adaptation also removes Claudius’s iconic contemplation of heaven and hell as a sign of his guilt. Thus, until the middle of the film, we are left wondering whether this is a Hamlet who has truly gone mad and whether Claudius is, in fact, guiltless. By keeping Hamlet in the same white mourning kurta, the film blurs the audience’s sense of time and emphasises the persistence of his grief.
A week before booking a ticket for this new adaptation of Hamlet, my YouTube home page recommended an intriguing video. It was titled ‘@RizAhmed: Why Hamlet holds a mirror up to today’s society’ and as someone who’d been interested in watching this new South Asian adaptation of Hamlet since its trailer dropped, I clicked on the video eagerly. In the video, Ahmed presented the story of Hamlet as that of a man fighting against injustice and the state’s powers, and realising that the world wasn’t a fair place – a sentiment he believed that many people across the world were also grappling with. As he spoke, the video showed clips of police arresting pro-Palestine protestors; ICE officers assaulting US citizen Aliyah Rahman and pulling her from her car; Just Stop Oil activists graffitiing private jets; and crowds marching in pro-LGBTQ+, pro-immigration, anti-Fascist and anti-racist demonstrations beneath chants of ‘Never Again’. The most famous speech in the English language, Ahmed claimed in the video, had been defanged, deradicalised and rendered safe, even though it was actually a collective call to action. I left the cinema having thoroughly enjoyed the film, but with a hint of dissatisfaction. As I took the train home, I thought about another South Asian adaptation of Hamlet that seemed to be the radical vision Riz Ahmed outlines. A film released twelve years earlier that still rang true and succeeded where Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet faltered.
Released in 2014, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider completes his Shakespeare trilogy alongside Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello). Bhardwaj sets the Hindi-Urdu political drama in insurgency-era Kashmir in 1995. The film follows Haider (Hamlet), who returns from Aligarh to search for his missing father and uncover the truth behind his disappearance, only to find his fate bound up with the politics of the conflict-driven state. The film is brutal and stripped of pretence, exposing the human rights abuses and torture committed by the Indian armed forces in Kashmir; the abuse, manipulation and fearmongering by Pakistani militants and terrorists; and the unending daily suffering of Kashmiris, whose very existence the conflict politicises. The film sustains this visceral intensity throughout: Haider looks for his missing father among droves of Kashmiris similarly looking for their ‘disappeared’ loved ones; slaughtered and tortured bodies are stacked atop each other in trucks and fished from Jhelum using bribes in hopes of identification; and police officers torture and extra-judicially murder anyone suspected to be a terrorist.
Constant searches and surveillance dehumanise citizens. In his first scene, the military suspects Haider to be a terrorist for referring to the city of Anantnag in Kashmir by its Muslim name, Islamabad. ‘But for us, there’s only one Islamabad we know,’ says the officer who’s detained him. ‘Over there,’ he says, gesturing towards Pakistan, before cheerfully praising Haider’s poetry. Haider’s grief becomes inseparable from the wider grief of Kashmir and its people. The film beautifully explores the relationship between surveillance, performance and authenticity in Hamlet through a scene in which Haider searches for his missing father by holding up signs at protests. The scene is unflinching, mirroring how Kashmiris are forced to stage their losses in hopes of being seen and prompting real change.
In a particularly charged scene, Haider appeals to Pervez (Polonius), a police officer. He invokes the law regarding missing persons, but Pervez responds frankly that if the law had been followed, Kashmir would not be in its current state. He references the plebiscite that Jawaharlal Nehru – India’s first prime minister – had promised the Kashmiris, but which never happened. And neither India nor Pakistan fulfilled the first condition of this plebiscite: demilitarisation. In the same breath that Pervez delivers this surprisingly self-aware statement, he threatens Haider if he decides to file a First Information Report (FIR) to initiate a police investigation. After all, Pervez is responsible for the disappearance of Haider’s father.
Unlike Haider, which removes Fortinbras entirely, Ahmed’s Hamlet retains Fortinbras as a foil to Hamlet’s indecisiveness, underscoring Fortinbras’s propensity for action. Elsinore in the film is the company owned by Old Hamlet and later Claudius, as the family deals in prime real estate, offering the first hint toward Fortinbras and the story of ordinary people against elite power. Aside from a rather humorous ‘Fuck Elsinore’ graffiti, however, the film gives little indication of class tensions until Fortinbras arrives heroically to save Hamlet from being beaten to death on Claudius’s orders. He informs Hamlet that Elsinore, under Old Hamlet’s leadership, evicted countless tenants whose cause Fortinbras now leads. Moved by this underdog narrative and ashamed of his own inaction, Hamlet decides to leave them his entire fortune. The moment left me wondering, ‘Is that it?’ as the film abruptly shifted from questions of class exploitation and corruption back to its more familiar sequence of Shakespearean deaths and betrayals.
This abrupt transition exposes the film’s broader structural difficulty in reconciling psychological tragedy with collective political resistance. Although Ahmed’s Hamlet repeatedly invokes anti-establishment rhetoric through Fortinbras and the discourse surrounding Elsinore’s exploitative real estate empire, these themes remain structurally marginal to the narrative. Unlike Haider, where militarisation and state violence permeate nearly every frame, Ahmed’s adaptation confines political critique to brief, isolated moments of exposition set in gritty streets and the ramshackle accommodations of Fortinbras’s group, before returning to Hamlet’s private psychological deterioration. The film’s class politics, therefore, feel less integrated into the narrative than intermittently appended to it, reducing systemic injustice to a backdrop for Hamlet’s moral awakening. His eventual decision to surrender his inheritance so Fortinbras and his group can reclaim the tenants’ land resolves structural exploitation through an individual act of benevolence, rendering the film’s anti-establishment politics politically superficial and dramatically unconvincing. As a result, collective struggle remains secondary to Hamlet’s individual grief, existing more as subtext than as a fully realised political framework.
Although the film leaves a largely positive impression, it also generates a series of conceptual tensions, particularly in relation to the political narrative outlined by Riz Ahmed and Aneil Karia in interviews. The promised emphasis on resistance to entrenched power structures remains only partially realised within the film itself. Moments that gesture toward anti-establishment critique are fleeting, raising questions about whether the narrative meaningfully engages with the politics it invokes. This absence becomes especially pronounced given the film’s diasporic South Asian framing, particularly as diasporic groups have often engaged in classist and exclusionary practices through proximity to whiteness and institutional power. Such dynamics offer the potential to interrogate class hierarchies, assimilation, internal stratification and the politics of belonging, but ultimately leave this potential unrealised. The film’s social setting, which suggests an intersectional framework, thus remains largely unexplored, limiting its critical depth.
The film’s diasporic framing presents another unresolved tension. While it incorporates certain cultural references with care – the evocation of historical Hindu practices surrounding widowhood and remarriage, for instance, gestures toward deeply embedded social structures – their integration into the narrative appears more ornamental than essential.
Similarly, the film reworks The Mousetrap as an Indian wedding dance sequence with aesthetic precision, yet leaves its thematic function within the broader narrative ambiguous. Rather than reshaping the narrative’s dramatic stakes, the diasporic setting often feels like an afterthought. As a result, the narrative appears capable of functioning without these elements, raising the possibility that the diasporic context is insufficiently theorised and underutilised within the film’s broader political and cultural ambitions.
Ultimately, Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet contains two stories. One: a fascinating case study of the human psyche as grief turns it to madness and the tragedies that follow; the other: a half-formed underdog narrative centred on resistance to institutional power, led by Fortinbras. The transition feels jarring, as the film abruptly shifts from Hamlet’s psychological deterioration into an underdeveloped narrative of class struggle, which ends once Hamlet gives up his inheritance to Fortinbras – a bandage on a bullet wound. The unfortunate reality, then, was that the story Riz Ahmed appeared most invested in – the supposedly radical narrative embedded within Hamlet – was also the film’s most underdeveloped thread, where the film unmistakably faltered while Haider succeeded. Unlike the other two Hamlets – one a dethroned prince and the other the aimless son of a wealthy businessman – Haider is subordinate to multiple structures of power: his family, the Indian military, the Indian state and Pakistani militancy. Denied justice not only by individuals but by the legal and political systems governing Kashmir itself, he becomes the ultimate outsider.
It felt somewhat incongruous to watch Riz Ahmed’s videos lauding the anti-establishment themes embedded in Hamlet, only to encounter his comparatively defanged adaptation. By contrast, Haider owes much of its political force to Basharat Peer, the film’s co-writer and author of the memoir Curfewed Night, on which the film is based. Peer, whose own experiences informed the character of Haider, also penned the fiery essay ‘Kashmir unrest: A letter to an unknown Indian’ four years before the film’s release. In the piece, he urges the citizens of the world’s largest democracy to confront their apathy toward the atrocities committed in Kashmir by the Indian army. ‘The faces of the murdered boys,’ he writes, ‘might disappear from the headlines, but they have already found their place in our collective memory.’
Collective memory – a shared body of knowledge shaped through acts of remembrance, commemoration and selective forgetting – is continually reconstructed to serve present political needs. For Kashmiris, this memory is inseparable from repeated violence, daily suppression and the constant struggle to assert their dignity and humanity. Haider channels this history by reworking Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy into a meditation not on abstract philosophy but on the legal and political conditions governing Kashmiri existence. ‘UN Council Resolution No. 47 of 1948, Article 2 of the Geneva Convention and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution bas ek sawaal uthata hai, sirf ek: hum hain ki hum nahi? … Hum thay bhi, ya hum thay hi nahi?’ (‘UN Council Resolution No. 47 of 1948, Article 2 of the Geneva Convention and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution raise just one question: do we exist or do we not? . . . Did we ever exist, or did we never exist at all?’). The film reframes Haider’s existential crisis as a political one, asking whether Kashmiris can meaningfully exist as a people when the constitutional and international frameworks meant to safeguard that existence have repeatedly failed them.
By reframing Hamlet’s existential crisis through the legal and historical realities of Kashmir, Haider realises the radical political dimensions that Ahmed attributes to Shakespeare’s play, yet largely leaves unexplored in his own adaptation. Where Ahmed’s adaptation merely gestures toward the radical political possibilities he locates within Shakespeare’s text, Bhardwaj’s film actualises them by grounding Hamlet’s crisis in the material realities of occupation, legal abandonment and political suppression. The comparison between the two films, therefore, illustrates how postcolonial reinterpretations do not merely inherit Shakespearean meaning but actively construct, constrain and radicalise it.
Ultimately, the contrast between Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider and Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet illustrates that while Shakespeare’s text contains the radical political possibilities Ahmed identifies, those possibilities remain inert unless an adaptation is willing to ground them in lived social and historical realities. Ahmed locates radical anti-establishment politics in Hamlet and attempts to recover them through a contemporary diasporic lens; his adaptation remains caught, however, between psychological tragedy and gestures towards collective resistance, never fully integrating the two. Its political critique, therefore, appears intermittent and dramatically subordinate to Hamlet’s personal grief.
In contrast, Haider grounds Hamlet’s crisis and Shakespearean tragedy in the material realities of occupation, militarisation, political suppression and juridical abandonment, transforming existential crisis into a question of political existence itself. In doing so, Bhardwaj demonstrates how postcolonial adaptations can reclaim Shakespeare not as a universal symbol of colonialism and elite culture but as a vehicle for articulating histories of violence, dispossession and resistance that exceed the boundaries of the original play. The film’s enduring power lies precisely in this transformation. Haider does not merely transpose Hamlet into Kashmir; it reconstructs the play through Kashmiri collective memory, legal precarity and postcolonial trauma.
The comparison between the two films illustrates that postcolonial reinterpretations do not passively inherit the political meanings embedded in Shakespeare’s text but actively produce, constrain and radicalise them according to the political realities they choose to confront – or avoid.
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Ira Bhattacharjee is an Indian undergraduate creative writing student at Goldsmiths, University of London. She primarily writes prose fiction and is interested in literary criticism, film adaptation, and sociopolitical themes in contemporary literature.
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