Shakespeare in the Postcolonial World: Re-imagining Hamlet, a Pakistani Perspective

Abstract

Shakespearean Hamlet, one of the well-known representatives of world tragedy through the lens of  the postcolonial and non-Western approach, the reader is offered a new aspect to understand the trauma, identity, and resistance. This paper analyzes Haider (2014), a recent film adaptation of Hamlet directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, set in the embattled region of Kashmir and examines the adaptation of Hamlet to South Asian politics and cultures.The paper aims to examine the connection of Shakespeare's text to the South Asian readers by analysing the thematic transformation from Hamlet to Haider. It seeks to discover the nature of adaptation as a postcolonial exercise of cultural resistance.Adopting a qualitative research design, the paper focuses on an in-depth textual analysis of Hamlet and Haider in combination with the body of postcolonial theory (Said, Bhabha, Fanon). There were also 30 semi-structured interviews with South Asian literature students and theatre practitioners to attain audience perceptions.The results indicated that Haider recontextualizes the indecision as well as the madness of Hamlet as military occupation under political trauma. The South Asian postcolonial circumstances were associated with the motives of control, treason, and gendered silence. Participants did not perceive Shakespeare as a colonial imposition, but rather, they turned it into a narrative form.The study concludes that the transformation of Hamlet into Haider makes Hamlet a culturally situated story about resistance. This represents the potential of adaptation as a kind of decolonial practice and the necessity to reconsider the Western literary canons with the help of localization.