NEW DELHI: “I am opposed to the very idea of film censorship, be it in India, Pakistan or anywhere in the world,” said celebrated filmmaker Kumar Shahani on Wednesday as news reports came in of uncertainty over the release in Pakistan of an Indian interpretation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The Larkana-born Mr Shahani has won several Indian and international awards for his avant garde cinema, and though he hasn’t seen Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider based on the tragedy of Hamlet, he said no film from India should be banned in Pakistan or vice versa.

“Film censorship should be enforced only for children, to protect them from visual violence, but adults shouldn’t be deprived of their right to watch the cinema of their choice,” Mr Shahani told Dawn in Delhi.

Haider, the third interpretation of a Shakespeare play by Vishal Bhardwaj after Maqbool and Omkara, will be released across the world on Thursday. It recasts the Shakespeare play into an Indian counter-insurgency against Kashmiri militants fighting for independence or to join Pakistan.

Mr Bhardwaj, who previously reworked Macbeth and Othello into Indian settings to critical acclaim, is said to be fielding queries about whether Haider will be seen as an anti-India film.

“I’m also an Indian, I’m also a patriot, I also love my nation. So I won’t do anything which is anti-national,” Mr Bhardwaj told the Times of India newspaper on Tuesday. “But what is anti-human, I will definitely comment on it.”

India’s Central Board of Film Certification cleared Haider for release after asking for seven cuts to the film. None of these, however, is reported to have altered the thrust of the movie or its criticism of the Indian state’s actions in Kashmir, reports said.

Based on Curfewed Night, a memoir by Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer about growing up in Kashmir in the 1990s, Haider depicts the Ikhwan-i-Muslimoon, a counter-insurgency militia armed and funded by Indian security forces.

Formed in 1994 and at its most active for three to four years, Ikhwan exemplified, for Mr Peer, the abuses perpetrated by the Indian state in Kashmir. In Curfewed Night, he recalled that Ikhwan “tortured and killed like modern-day Mongols. Ikhwan … went on a rampage, killing, maiming and harassing anyone they thought to be sympathetic to the Jamaat [the Jamaat-i-Islami, a religious body supportive of Pakistan] or the separatists.”

In Pakistan though, going by local reports, it seems that the film might not get the much-needed NOC (No Objection Certificate) by the Pakistan Film Censor Board.

The film which stars Shahid Kapoor, Tabu, Kay Kay Menon and Shradha Kapoor in the lead has been shot in Kashmir, which led to reservations about its release in Pakistan, reports said.

Apparently the film was previewed and was sent to Pakistan’s Censor Board for approval. However, after watching Haider’s preview, the body, according to reports, decided not to go ahead with the release because of some controversial elements related to Kashmir.

Haider was slated for its release on October 2 alongside Hrithik and Katrina starrer Bang Bang, but while the shows for Bang Bang are scheduled in Pakistan, the much-awaited Haider is evidently nowhere to be seen.

It is expected that the distributors would not face a loss as they had already anticipated that the film might not be released in Pakistan.

Earlier, a film based on the Indian Army, Holiday, was screened in Pakistan but Salman Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger could not make it to the screens because of the portrayal of anti-Pakistan elements.

Though the reasons were different, Rani Mukherjee’s Mardaani also saw a similar fate.

Published in Dawn, October 2nd, 2014