For over four decades the resonant voice of Ameen Sayani was the voice of Indian radio entertainment. On Radio Ceylon’s Geetmala and then All India Radio or Akashwani’s Vividh Bharti, Sayani’s radio hours brought us the pick of Hindi film songs interlaced with his attractive commentary in Hindustani. A child of the freedom movement, born into a family that hailed from Gujarat and was especially influenced by Gandhi, Ameen Sayani journeys through 60 years of India’s experiment with public broadcasting, culture and entertainment.

I was initiated into radio broadcasting at the age of seven by my elder brother Hameed who was a very fine broadcaster with the English section of All India Radio (AIR), Bombay. He used to take me along with him for smaller programmes and gradually I started lending my voice to radio plays and later on, to other broadcasts. It was not until 1949-50 that I shifted towards full-fledged broadcasting in Hindustani. I was a student from the Gujarati medium, then an English broadcaster and later I graduated towards broadcasting in Hindustani.

In expanse, my career has spanned decades of broadcasting. Geetmala was aired on Radio Ceylon for 38 years after which, in 1989, it started as a half-hour programme on Vividh Bharti. The material was the same in both but the songs were reduced in length for the half-hour version. On Radio Ceylon the entire song was played but as reception of Radio Ceylon became difficult in later years, I shifted to AIR. Vividh Bharti ran until quite recently, 1993-94. In fact, we celebrated Geetmala’s 42nd birthday on Doordarshan through a 31-episode series. I was also producing programmes and commercials for seven or eight countries across the world, countries like the UK, Mauritius, Fiji and Canada, Swaziland and Dubai.

The atmosphere at All India Radio in those days, pre and post-independence, was special. A motto hung over the entrance of the building: “Bahujan Hitai Bahujan Sukhai” – for the benefit of the people, for the happiness of the people – this was the proclaimed aim of broadcasting. AIR had, in those days, an army of the best writers, performers, musicians, and the best producers. The cream of talent used to gravitate towards AIR and it was considered a matter of great pride to be able to participate in any AIR programme. This was through the late forties and early fifties when AIR was perhaps one of the finest broadcasting organisations in the world, on par with the BBC.

They broadcast fabulous plays and features backed by first-rate newsreaders. Though the formal name, Akashwani, was adopted later, AIR was indeed like an akash wani (broadcast through the skies). Anything that was broadcast on radio was the absolute last word. It carried weight and creativity.

It was only about a decade after independence that AIR started receiving the first shock waves of bureaucratic and political interference that slowly began to affect its functioning. The first shock came of course with partition, the greatest tragedy we faced. Partition took the best of our talent away; many writers and producers migrated to Pakistan.

Finally, after all that bloodshed, on the night of August 14-15, with the hoisting of the national flag for the first time, I heard Nehru’s great “Tryst with Destiny” speech. Less than six months later, in January 1948, it was the shattering news of Gandhiji being killed that AIR broadcast on its airwaves. For us in the Sayani family, passionately fond of and devoted to Gandhiji, for me, growing up in the laps of the great leaders of the freedom movement, it was a very personal tragedy. Why this man, who was so peaceful, so non-violent, a man who spread love and goodness and goodwill? Why did anybody have to kill him off? As a schoolboy, my reaction was one of pain and bewilderment.

At the New Era School in Bombay, where I studied for seven years, I learnt Gujarati from the Balpothi (primer) from kindergarten onwards. These formative years were critical. Our school song, for instance, it was in Gujarati and its words, which made a lasting impression on me, embodied a fantastic concept of unity – love, affinity, neighbourliness and humility – it’s all there. I remember at New Era we also had a four-line motto that was, in fact, a four-language motto because it had all the four main languages of Maharashtra! The first was English, the name of the school, which was in English, the second was a Gujarati line, the third line was in Marathi and the fourth line was in Hindi. This is how it went: “New Era, Nau Jawan Badho Aage, Aami Jagat Che Nagreek Ho, Bharat Bhumi Jai Jai Ho (New Era; Youth, forge ahead; We are citizens of the world; Hail, hail to India)”.

So this fusion has always been part of my life and a part, I think, of the life of all Indians. As I keep saying, if we had been more inclusive and creative on the issue of language there would have been less separateness, less tension, we would have engendered an ability to understand the other. The maulvi saheb who used to teach me taught me about the opening prayers in the Koran, “Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alamin”, which means, Praise be to Allah, lord of the worlds – master of the entire universe, not only the god of Muslims. Similarly, in the Rig Veda you will come across a line, “Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti” – there is only one truth, we look at it from different points of view. There is also a famous Sanskrit saying, “Vasudeva Kutumbam” – the whole world is one family.

As a schoolboy and a keen listener of the radio, I remember listening to all the beautiful film songs in all the farmaishi (request) programmes. The farmaishi list would be about a mile long and in school all of us youngsters used to wait in the common room hoping that our names and choice of song would sometimes feature. What music it was, the golden years of Hindustani music!

Slowly, with the golden age of Hindi cinema producing songs and music of incredible quality, I shifted over to broadcasting film music. I started with Radio Ceylon where thanks to my brother I got my breakthrough. Initially, it was difficult, as I had to speak neither English nor Gujarati but Hindi and I did not know Hindi or Urdu very well.

I inched my way into broadcasting in Hindustani with determination and hard work. I did have a background of written Hindustani. My mother was a shishsya (student) of Gandhiji and he had instructed her to start a regular publication, a fortnightly on adult education for neo-literates. Inspired and guided by him, she began it from our home and ran it for several years. Gandhiji had instructed her to start it in three scripts, the Hindi script (which is the Devanagari script), the Urdu script and the Gujarati script, which were the three main scripts used in Maharashtra. What vision! What simplicity of integration! Whilst three distinct scripts were used, each line read the same in simple, spoken Hindustani. It sounds trite and obvious but it was this vision that made Gandhiji what he was. It was an incredible stroke of genius from Gandhiji and reflected his awareness of the importance of a common language, a simple language that can bring people together, through which they can communicate with each other, which can build up a sort of affinity and integrate people into one whole body of people.

You see, in those days the only lingua franca was English and although Hindi, Urdu, were widely used and simple Hindustani was being promoted quite a bit, it was not officially the Indian language. I remember that at a very important session of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), Gandhi proposed that Hindustani be the national language, not Hindi. But at a subsequent CWC session after his death, by a majority of just one casting vote from the president, Hindi was chosen instead of Hindustani. Thereafter, we began to use a language that was barely understood by millions of our people.

So when the challenge of broadcasting in Hindustani was thrown at me, I found that my mother’s publication and its basis in and affinity with Hindustani helped me to slip into the role of broadcaster quite easily. Through Radio Ceylon I was communicating not only with Indians and the whole of Asia, Radio Ceylon used to be the popular radio station as far as the east coast of Africa. As producer and presenter of Geetmala, my main programme, I was learning how to speak simple Hindustani. I already knew how to write it but I was learning the correct accent of speech and the communication and nuances along with my listeners, using rich material that my mother used in Rahbar (Showing the Way), the magazine she published from our home right up to 1960. I used a lot of the material she used, the philosophy of life that this fascinating experience, the publication of Rahbar, provided, to link my Geetmala programme between songs, thematically.

My own experience with the Hindustani language, my learning it, grew with my programme and with my listeners. My listeners would write back with their choice of film songs and their views, sometimes in Marathi or in Punjabi or Gujarati or Telugu or Bengali. Gradually, as the programme grew in popularity, Hindustani was the language that the listeners shifted to.

My listeners and I grew together with a simple, common denominator language that was a tremendous connecting point between them and me. I believe that if the simple language of Hindustani had been our national language, many of our complications as a nation would not have arisen.

There is a very simple saying in Hindustani that has been part of my life and also an intrinsic part of the leadership of early India, “Todo Nahi, Jodo” – Don’t break, Unite.

All my life in broadcasting, which spans four decades, that’s what I’ve been trying to do, simplify concepts and communicate them with social relevance as connections between songs.

Why break up this beautiful nation, why break up this lovely conglomeration of cultures, of philosophy, of social habits, of colours, taste and attitude? There is no country anywhere in the world with so many diversities, so many colours and so much variety.

Instead of getting all that dynamite together, moulding it into an actual Saare Jahan Se Achcha, Hindustan Hamara (Our India, Unequalled in the entire universe), we have been breaking it, dividing its people. What is the point of the Sensex booming if our farmers are committing suicide? There are two or three main reasons for this disparity, this tension, this hatred. We do not know our own faith or religion and neither do we know the faith practices of our neighbours. I can say this because of my experience in holding the listener through Geetmala; my programmes always had an undercurrent of social relevance. No entertainment can ever exist or succeed without being close to life and no socially relevant programming can ever be successful unless it has a little or lots of bits of entertainment, a little bit of lure. So there has to be a mix, of both good and bad. Whether calamity or great achievement, both always got talked about on my programme.

For instance, man’s first step on the moon, Armstrong taking the first step, I made a whole programme on Geetmala, weaving this theme through everything with couplets referring to the moon, references to the moon, what repercussions this would have on us and so on. If there was a famine or calamity or a great leader died or a big festival, it was reflected somewhere in the programme and interspersed with songs or listeners’ comments.

In all my broadcast programmes, communication for me was the essence. I never let my listeners feel that I was preaching any kind of integration because integration can never be preached. For example, during the emergency, the government introduced its 20-point programme when an order was issued to both Doordarshan and AIR to make programmes on the 20-point programme! There were hundreds of proposals but none saw the light of day. Another time, there was this bureaucrat who called all of us producers and directed us to produce a television programme on humour! I remember saying, Sir, humour is always the soul of all conversation, you can put humour into as many things as you like, why do you say that you want only a humorous programme? Say you want an interesting programme. How interesting programmes are made is the producer’s lookout. If you like it, take it, if you don’t like it, don’t take it but don’t put a kind of maniacal handcuff on them, it will not work. Good work originates from within.

All India Radio still has the potential, it has the physical potential, it also has a tremendous number of excellent people still there and if they were allowed to come together and work in a conducive and creative manner it could have tremendous scope and reach, giving the new FM channels (whose chatty styles are quite interesting, actually) a run for their money.

So as a broadcaster I would narrate anecdotes, poetry, which spoke of my experience of our people, the goodness, sweetness, beauty, gentleness, affinity, getting together is the big thing for me. This is what I tried to do everywhere, I can’t pinpoint that I did this or that for integration. Everything I was saying was for integration.

When we started the programme it was as an experiment and I got to have a go at it because I was the juniormost in the group and they were only going to pay 25 rupees to the person who presented, produced and scripted the programme and even checked the mail it received! After the very first broadcast, we got 9,000 letters in response and I went mad checking them. Within 18 months, when the weekly listeners’ mail jumped to 65,000 letters a week, it became impossible to faithfully monitor so we decided to convert it into a simple countdown show.

We used our unique way of rating the most popular songs. First, we tied up with the 20-25 major record shops all over India that used to receive clear reports of popularity ratings and sales. We then discovered that we could still miss accurate ratings because there was often about a fortnight’s gap between demands for records (78 format) being expressed and stock being delivered. We then started depending upon the farmaishi list but realised at the end of six months that a lot of pulls and pushes were influencing this selection – film producers, music directors, who bought postcards in bulk and sent them to us (postcards, some ostensibly from Pune, some from Delhi, some from Kanpur, some from Madras, had actually been posted from one post office in Kalbadevi, Bombay, the postal franking showed us!).

So finally we hit upon a very good idea – lining up several small groups of listeners from all over India who were writing to us very regularly. They had formed radio clubs and they met every week, listened to the programme together and engaged in other related activities. So I started encouraging them and we built up as many as 400 clubs all over India, which used to regularly send us their weekly or fortnightly ratings and numbers. We used these as a basis to be collated with sales reports from record shops and voilà, we got 99.9 per cent accurate ratings.

Coming back to my form of communication, my method was simple, my language was simple. See, I feel communication must be straightforward, honest, understandable and simple. There should be no double meanings; there should be no kind of equivocation as they say. It should be a direct matter of one heart to another. You say what you mean and the other person understands what you are saying. There are two things wrong with our country, our lack of understanding of each other’s faiths coupled with our very confused communications. Especially official communication. I have also started a movement on the need for a national anthem that is understood by one and all.

(As told to Teesta Setalvad.)

Archived from Communalism Combat,  February 2008  Year 14    No.128, Culture

The post The sound of music appeared first on SabrangIndia.

MK Raina is a well-known theatre director, actor and filmmaker, and a founder member of SAHMAT. In this account, recounted to Teesta Setalvad in 2005,  he describes his rediscovery and re-engagement with his home in the Kashmir Valley and his determination to forego the fear and the anger so as to reclaim and preserve a precious multi-cultural heritage.

I have just returned to my home in Noida after watching a play at the National School of Drama’s national festival. It was a Kashmiri entry; a production of Waiting for Godot directed by one of my students and judged one of the six best plays at the festival. The play’s director, Arshad Mushtaq is from the Valley and the entire caste is from rural Kashmir. They come from a place called Gandarbal outside Srinagar, and most of them are Kashmir peasants.
 

This account is a glimpse of the whole story – Of what is happening there, bit by bit. It is also the story of my re-engagement with my birthplace, my home. My parents lived there right up to the tumultuous 1990s when events overtook the people and the place. I left Kashmir as a student to study in Delhi, at the NSD. I stayed on as a theatre person and director, making documentary films and working in theatre. My parents and some of my extended family still lived in Srinagar at the time.
 

It was in the summer of 1990 that my return to Kashmir began, painfully. My brother-in-law suddenly called to say that my mother had suffered a serious haemorrhage. I flew to Srinagar immediately and went straight to the hospital. Though I had been following the developments in Kashmir, it was during my drive to the hospital that the reality of what the Valley had become hit me. Things were bad, there was shooting and counter-shooting on the roads, even just outside the hospital.
 

For days the three of us siblings were stuck in the government hospital where my mother’s condition remained serious, she had sunk into a coma. No proper medical attention was possible as doctors were deserting the hospital due to the atmosphere of violence and intimidation. We were desperate to take her to Delhi but the one local doctor attending to her said that she was in too precarious a condition, she could not be moved for at least three weeks.
 

The next few days were an endless string of anxious hours of waiting. My brother, my sister and I took turns in attending to our mother, watching for the relaxation of curfews to rush home and return. We had no time for more than a few hurried words to ensure that the basics were being looked after, that my father at home was all right. There were no beds for us at the hospital. We stayed by her side, lying on the cement slab by her bed just to stretch our backs. Two weeks passed that way.
 

My father, poor man, was at home all through this period. And then, as sudden as the haemorrhage itself, my mother passed away in the hospital just as we, my brother, sister and I were making plans to take her to Delhi. I returned to hospital one evening, aur dar bhi lagta tha, it was frightening once the sun was down, expecting to sit with her when my brother said to me, "It’s all over. She has gone."
 

The next few hours were traumatic. There was no ambulance available. The few people around in the hospital and fellow patients were very good to us, very sympathetic. But the skeletal staff at the hospital was worried; the army had taken over. And we were told that we just could not take our mother home. I only remember this outburst of feeling, "Arre hamare shahar mein gaadi kaise nikalne nahin denge?!" (How can we not be allowed to take out a vehicle in our own city?)
 

That night was desperate. It was Friday, January 25, 1990. The army had taken over. All roads had been sealed. Shoot-at-sight orders were issued the next day. Then the Peerbhoys got some cars and helped us; we could never repay that debt. We didn’t even know which route the driver took, but he managed to get us home. We had to sit in the pitch-dark in our house that night with our mother’s body.
 

Come morning, we had to deal with the last rites. I do not know what had gripped me that day but I was determined to get a dignified cremation for my mother. This meant walking down deserted streets, lined with CRPF forces, eerie in their silence. I simply had to approach the authorities to request a cremation for my mother. As I walked down alone, scraps of memories from my activist past struck me, helped me. A friend and comrade, Bobby had once described how she’d survived in Poland… one of her graphic descriptions which probably saved my life that day. She told me that often when she’d needed to go out during curfew she always held her hands up above her head as she walked. I remembered what she had said and did just that. Just kept on walking with my hands up to appeal to someone to let us take my mother’s body for cremation.
 

My father was worried, he said, "It doesn’t matter. Let’s wait. We can have the funeral rites the day after…" But I was determined and very emotional about the cremation. The second person from the security forces I encountered hurled filthy abuse at me. I just kept on moving, with my hands up. All I felt was, "My mother needs and deserves a funeral and I will do anything to get that for her."
 

I remember one Jat, a Haryanvi officer who demanded to know whether I had any orders to move, to come out. I appealed to him, "Ma ki nidhi ke liye nikla hoon, agni lagaani hai Ma ko…" (We have to complete the last rites of our mother)… It made no difference. By this time I had reached a police station and a BSF commandant came out and asked me what the matter was.
 

I made the same appeal to him. As I was speaking to him I realised that we did not even know where to get the kafan (shroud) from. The commandant and another BSF officer helped us with the arrangements and got us to the Ganesh temple between the first and second bridge in Srinagar city. The temple doors were open, so we could go in and bathe my mother. My brother and I, along with two cousins and one Muslim friend who had insisted on coming with us. It was after this ritual was over that I actually looked around and saw the city. It was a chilling sight. Srinagar had been completely sealed off. It was a city I had never seen. "Yeh mera shahar nahin tha, jis galiyon mein hamne masti bawal kiya tha" (It was not the city of my birth where we had frolicked and made mischief).
 

It was through this eerie Srinagar that our procession wound its way after leaving the temple, trying to reach the cremation ground. In a city sealed off there are no ordinary people about, only uniformed army men at every step and around every corner. Every 40 feet or so, we had to lift the shroud and show our mother’s face to those who patrolled the streets. As we passed, there were loud sounds, a bomb was thrown and we heard an explosion at a spot somewhere behind us. What was happening to Kashmir?
 

Finally we made our way to the ground where my mother was then cremated. It was a Muslim who cremated her, that is the beauty of Kashmir… By the time we had arrived there I had no emotions left, I was numb.
 

Then, we did not know how to get back home. Normally, one never takes the arthi (ashes) home but that day we had to. The earthen pot containing our mother’s ashes was our passport to return home safely. I spotted the police headquarters at Batmalu. I stopped the truck we were driving and said, "Help us get home." After that it was one wireless message after another, stopping at checkpoint after checkpoint before we got home. There, my 70 odd-year-old father, my sister and two nephews were waiting anxiously. We were stuck at home for days after that. Even my mama and mausi (maternal uncle, aunt) learnt of my mother’s death only seven-eight days later.

I could never accept the fact that there was nothing for me in Kashmir. Even today I don’t have a home there. So what? Srinagar city was home! I was a Srinagar city bum, why couldn’t I go back to my city?
 

After this tragedy, we were faced with another dilemma. My father did not want to leave in such tragic circumstances, but he could not stay alone either. He talked to his neighbours at length, persons from the mohalla (neighbourhood), because we had been living there from my great grandfather’s time. There was a lot of pain in those conversations. Our dearest friends, our closest ones were helpless in the face of what was happening. Safety or comfort could not be assured. That is when my father left for Jammu. He never could go back.
 

From Jammu he came to our home in Noida. He was a fiercely independent man, as fit as a fiddle, he walked six kilometres every day. He used to be a National Conference party worker. He had his home, his dentist’s practice, his friends around the neighbourhood. My parents were very self-sufficient.
 

But once my father left Kashmir, he started suffering from hypertension. One day he told me, "I am too old." When he passed away some years later, my son Anto (Anant) remarked, "Baba did not go now. Baba had already gone." That is when I realised my son had grown up. He knew my father had never been the same after he left the Valley. Ever since 1990 our clan has been scattered. Some are in Jammu, some in East UP, others in Rajasthan, some in Pune. Our property is all gone. We had to sell it for a pittance a couple of years ago. Our children our grown now.
 

For me this period in 1990 worked as a catalyst. I could never accept the fact that there was nothing for me in Kashmir. Even today I don’t have a home there. So what? Srinagar city was home! I was a Srinagar city bum, why couldn’t I go back to my city? Soon I had the opportunity. In 1992, when I was working with Siddharth Kak on the North India section of the cultural television serial, Surabhi, we needed to shoot in Kashmir. I was the obvious choice for the unit since I knew every street in Srinagar. When our unit landed at the airport we were received by state security forces, there for our protection. The minute we arrived and security personnel joined us, I realised that we had made a mistake. I knew then that this was not the way I should have returned to my city. I went back to Delhi the very next day.
 

Then, about six years ago, I began the real journey back. Chances opened up through a PTI television series on Kashmir planned from a cultural perspective and without any propaganda. We depicted Kashmiris any and everywhere, inside and out of Kashmir.
 

When I first went back, I didn’t know where I would stay. There was Arshad (whose play is just being staged at NSD) whom I had met earlier. I had asked him to pick me up at the airport, not knowing whether he would come. He did. I still remember his smile when he greeted me! For 15 minutes, I couldn’t move… For 15 minutes my bag went round and round the conveyor belt. In those 15 minutes I made up my mind. I told myself, no security this time. I also remembered a little hotel with a kebab joint, Ruby Hotel on Lambert Lane. As I came out and Arshad greeted me I said we would stay at Ruby Hotel. "That’s it!" he said.
 

I also went to the Dastagir Sab shrine near downtown Srinagar. In days past, my mother used to give me Rs. 11 whenever I passed that shrine and she would say, "Ya Peer Dastagir, Allah theek karenge" (All will be well by the grace of Saint Dastagir and the Almighty Allah). I went there, offered Rs. 11, received sheere, you know, the round hard bits of sugar? I got five-six of those and then told Arshad that now we should start meeting people. We met writers, poets, hoteliers, businessmen and many others. I was lucky we were moving around fearlessly.
 

Then some years later I began a project filming heritage sights in Kashmir. The day my father died I had a nightmare that frightened me… All the beautiful shrines of the Valley, all my childhood images would one day just disappear. I didn’t want the Shah Hanadan shrine, its beautiful architecture, to just disappear. My mausi lived opposite Shah Hanadan. Whenever we visited her we would bow our heads low in respect to the shrine. As children we were told a story. That Shah Hanadan and our other beautiful structures were all made from one forest of wood each. Imagine if they all disappeared! I had this fear that they might go. Charar-e-Sharief had been gutted in 1995. In 1996, on one visit, I remember calling my wife Anju and telling her that I wanted to record these heritage sites so at least our children, the younger ones who had never seen Kashmir, could soak in this heritage. She was very supportive. As I began shooting, temples, mosques, dargahs, my own fear dissolved. The only condition my family insisted on was that I should phone them every evening.
 

While I was shooting, the evenings would depress me because then the shroud fell on Srinagar. Everything stopped moving. Curfew was on. The Residency on Lambert Lane used to be the hub of activity. There was a coffee-house there. It served a lousy cup of coffee but it was the cultural hub of Srinagar, the spot where all the great intellectuals of Kashmir, from the world of literature, song, theatre and poetry, met. Now not a soul could be seen as evening fell. One evening, some time in 1997-1998, I found myself in tears for there were no faces at the coffee-house to remember.
 

In Delhi, NSD and theatre was my life. Around this time, someone suggested that I do a play on Chhattisgarh. Why Chhattisgarh, I remember demanding. I said I wanted to do a play on Kashmir. This began another journey back to the Valley.
 

During my earlier stays in the Valley, shooting for films and documentaries, I had re-established contact with many old colleagues. One of them, Shafi saab had through INTACH already conceived of CHECK (Centre for Kashmiri heritage and environment). We decided on an official collaboration through an NSD workshop in Srinagar. We, Shafi Pandit and I met senior bureaucrats to solicit space for 30 people to live and have a residential theatre workshop. Finally, we were given space at the agricultural university, Sher-e-Kashmir. The registrar was wonderful; he had seen me on television and showed me a beautiful bungalow, with a forest as backdrop. An empty hostel would provide the rooms. It was just the place I wanted.
 

I advertised for participants in the local papers. I received no responses on the first day. One evening, two days later, a student from Baramullah came. Within seven days, I had students from Sopore, and Gandarbal as well. This was what they needed. Young people needed this space for expression. A residential workshop of this kind gave them a welcome release from the lives they led, or had been forced to lead.
 

The workshop was completely self-sufficient and Gandhian in principle. It was cook, clean and work. It was a very tiny place but set in lovely surroundings. A garden in an apple orchard scattered with chinar trees. The workshop lasted four full weeks. We performed theatre, saw several films on video and invited Kashmiri intellectuals for discussions at specific workshops.
 

That experience remains the foundation of what I am still trying to do in Kashmir. It was a small beginning. You know, to climb on to a horse and ride you first need the four-legged structure to get onto the horse in the first place? For that you have to build that structure. We are trying to do that so that we can begin climbing on to the horse.
 

I was 18 when I left Kashmir. When I returned in 1990 when my mother died, I was married with two children. There was much to learn about the years in between. I can only say that now, with this first workshop, the bottle has been uncorked.
 

I am not a hero. We do not need heroes. We need ordinary people who act as catalysts to re-start the normal everyday processes of living, healing and forgiving. My deepest regret about Kashmir and the state of affairs there is the utter failure of Indian civil society when there was a crisis at hand. I am active in the anti-communal movement and often felt frustrated and alienated when there was little or no attempt by radical activists to relate to the ongoing crisis in Kashmir.
 

A cultural awakening is a must for a genuine resurgence of health and vigour in Kashmir. You know the education of the Kashmiris has been ruined? They have forgone their rich heritage by dumping the Kashmiri language and have adopted a very inferior kind of Urdu. It was and is my endeavour to bring the Kashmiri component of culture to these children of the Valley. Along with the cream of Kashmiri intellectuals, we spoke of the richness of Kashmiri culture to the young. Rehman Rahi, the renowned Kashmiri poet, spoke to them on what Kashmir was before Islam; he spoke of the Buddhist influence on Kashmir, the influence of Shaivite Hinduism on the Valley. The Kashmiri Pandit scholar, Ganjoo saab, who knows the old Kashmiri script, spoke of the evolution of the language. We had Abhinav Gupta, a scholar of Sanskrit, giving his commentary on Natya Shastra. The whole impetus was to communicate to the young what you are, what have Kashmiris made of this land? They were told Kashmiri short stories, wonderful stories. If I can ever raise the resources I will make a film on one of these stories… they beat even Kafka in their craft and depth.

I am not a hero. We do not need heroes. We need ordinary people who act as catalysts to re-start the normal everyday processes of living, healing and forgiving
 

We developed performances and also put up an exhibition of our paperwork. At the end, we performed to an audience. Five years ago, after God alone knows how many years, there was a public performance at the Tagore Theatre. This whole cultural experiment with residential theatre workshops set the pace and with every workshop we found more people. Soon we were running short of space at the first location.
 

In the second year, we performed a play with new people. By the third workshop the university had run out of space, so we moved our workshop to an indoor stadium near the Passport Office (which incidentally was attacked in early 2005) and held our rehearsals there. This time, instead of directing the plays myself, I told Arshad and Hakim Javed to do so. We had a two-day festival at the end of the workshop. Today they are making their directorial debut at the NSD in Delhi!
 

There is much insularity within Jammu and Kashmir, be it in Ladakh, Jammu or the Valley. I believe this insularity needs to be addressed. One way to do this is through cultural resurgence. The work is like aachar lagaana (making pickles). You have to work at it for a long time before the end product results. Slowly you can earn trust. I know they are my own people. I have to win them back.
 

My daughter Aditi accompanied me on one of my trips back. She was studying the impact of violence on children. She insisted on moving around on her own, visiting schools, orphanages and interacting with local activists. On a visit to the Chashmeshahi Lake she witnessed the humiliation that Arshad and Javed had to suffer when they were stopped and searched by security forces. I used to insist that things were normal in my Kashmir. She turned and said to me, "How can you say things are normal? There is fear and terror." My own child opened my eyes to another dimension of the tragedy. Children.
 

The Rajiv Gandhi Foundation gave me a small grant to work with children whose lives had become a living hell. There was no education worth the name, either. As a result, we had a residential camp in Jammu in February last year. Srinagar kids were brought to Jammu camps. There were 40 kids from Srinagar and 15 from Jammu. Both groups had seen violence. They were like tense little birds; these were children who had seen trauma. They wanted to avoid contact. Many mothers volunteered at the residential camp. We spent 12 days at the camp together.
 

I had each child’s case history with me. There was anxiety and concern about the experiment. What would 12 days out of their homes mean? There would be Hindus and Muslims staying together? Would this cause more pain than healing?
 

We proved the sceptics wrong. Nothing untoward happened. If any child was upset, he or she went to one of the ‘aunties’ who were organisers as well. These aunties were also mothers. The children stayed awake late into the night, sharing experiences, whispering fears. Kids moved into one another’s rooms. They held hands, slowly. The division crumbled… As the camp came to an end they all howled for an hour because they had to leave.
 

Suddenly they had all become part of a larger family. Last year the same children attended the camp again and some new children also joined. These included migrant children. Camp mothers of migrant Pandit children came to Srinagar. We had to keep a daroga, a watchman, since we were near the lake, but it was a tremendous experience.
 

There are just so many stories. One woman, Usha took us to her home or what had once been her home. Initially, she didn’t want to go to her home near Pahalgam, she couldn’t handle it. When we visited the temple complex at Pahalgam, however, she began to get restless. As we approached her home, "Mera ghar peeche rah jayega," that’s my home, she said. Then, when she finally did go, she found her home intact, her mohalla intact. She met persons from the neighbourhood. Though she was torn when we left, I saw a different face now. Usha’s face held less fear. More confidence.
 

The year before last, I took Sanjay, a Pandit from a village, back with me. He works in film and television as a freelancer in Delhi. When we reached Srinagar, he was frightened, paranoid. Red in the face, he sensed a policewoman staring at him. She turned out to be an old classmate who came up to him, "Tu Sanjay hai na?" (You are Sanjay, right?) They were meeting after 12 or 14 years. She insisted that Sanjay go to her house and meet her husband and children.
 

He was very tense on the streets of Srinagar. Arshad and I, and the others took Sanjay to Lal Chowk and other familiar haunts. We felt that we all had something precious that we needed to fight to reclaim and preserve. As we took him around Srinagar, we reached the Cheel Bhawani temple, 20 km away, which we were also filming. As we neared the temple, he became more and more tense. The symbol of his faith in his homeland was bringing back all kinds of memories. I told Arshad to take special care of him. Inside the temple premises it was as if a chain inside him had snapped. He started sobbing like a baby. Arshad hugged him and took him to the bench. They sat there talking and talking and talking… I just thought, "Yeh Bharat milan ho raha hai" (This is meeting, Indian-style).
 

And then do you know what we did? We asked him if he wanted to do a puja and he said yes. We then went outside to the man selling earthen lamps. In Kashmir, he too is a Muslim. Despite years of violence, this Muslim was there and he had kept the tradition alive. His name was Ghulam Mohammed, a poor peasant. We asked him how many diyas he had; he had 80 or 81. We bought every single one of them, lit them all. Then we performed the aarti for Sanjay as bhajans were sung in the Cheel Bhawani temple, Sanjay, Arshad, Javed and I. Then we ate the prashad (offering), tears flowing down our cheeks. This was Sanjay’s therapy. Sanjay continues to go back to Kashmir today. He is now going back to shoot a story of an ex terrorist who used to be his classmate…
 

Who can understand this reality? Ek Kashmiri Pandit ki puja hi nahin ho sakti jab tak mitti ke bartan – joh Mussalman banata hai —woh na ho. (A Kashmiri Pandit’s prayer ceremony is impossible if the earthen vessels – made by a Muslim – aren’t there.) My father used to say Janm se marne tak Mussalman ka saath hai, from birth to death, Muslims are with us. We have to re-build a future on this rich tradition of multi-culturalism.
 

I now have 150 friends in Kashmir from the world of theatre. Twenty are in Delhi performing right now. For me, I know that my Kashmir is there.
 

Initially, when I started going back I was, for them, a strange nut. But after my experience in 1990, I was sure of two things. Fear feeds more fear and anger fuels more anger. But if you hold out your hand then the fear and anger dissolve and the healing begins. By God’s grace that has happened with me.
 

(As narrated to Teesta Setalvad).

Archived from Communalism Combat, January  2005 Year 11    No.104, Cover Story 2

The post My hometown appeared first on SabrangIndia.

My plane landed at Ahmedabad airport in the wee hours of the morning. As I emerged from this splendid airport I was surrounded by a herd of taxi-drivers all asking me to get into their taxis. One of them picked up my bags as another literally pushed me into his cab, each compelling me to travel with him. It was a surreal feeling.

I had planned to visit several places in Gujarat on this tour and according to my schedule I was to leave for Anand the same day. I could go either by local train or taxi and I had been advised to use a taxi. The problem was however that while I sat in one taxi my luggage had been loaded into another. This hijack only confirmed that although I was travelling into Narendra Modi’s progressive Gujarat, in fact I stood helplessly in no man’s land.

Last year, under Narendra Modi’s leadership, the BJP won the Gujarat assembly elections with a thumping majority. The BJP’s mega success and absolute majority in the state assembly has already made Modi mightier than his party. As a leader, he ‘helped himself’ and the BJP to retain success. He now rules the state for yet another term, making it four consecutive terms for the BJP.

Following his victory at the polls, Narendra Modi declared that his win was a triumph of the sentiments and prestige of five crore Gujaratis (sic) "including its 50 lakh Muslims". It is however a shameful truth that the Muslims of Gujarat are still outcastes in their own land.

Why did Modi win with a complete majority? Political pundits and analysts in the media have their own explanations for this; the media always seems able to justify ‘worshipping the rising sun’. According to popular opinion in the fourth estate, it was Gujarat’s social, political and economic development under Modi’s "able leadership" through the preceding decade that rewarded him with yet another term in power.

Five years down the line, many media hypotheses and views, voices that the media once espoused, seem to have subsided as many lie forgotten. The one fact that everyone seems to agree on today is that Modi won thanks to the social, political and economic prosperity of his state. Yet his win owes much to his religious chauvinism, his bigotry being a major factor in scripting his "success story". A state that had long been experimenting with religious dogmatism, Gujarat soon turned into a boiling hotbed of Hindu fanaticism. The carnage and riots of 2002 was the chosen battleground where thousands of Muslims were slaughtered, their women brutally raped and murdered, in a genocide that was condemned worldwide.

Ironically, this time around, Narendra Modi was praised for his "statesmanship". Hindutva’s new poster boy for victory made history for the win-win mechanism of Hindu fanaticism. Interestingly, the media seemed to forget his many misdeeds.

As a devout Gujarati, Narendra Modi has developed infrastructure in his state. He appealed to non-resident Gujaratis to maintain ties with their state as true sons of the soil. He has improved the distribution and supply of electricity in Gujarat and supported industrialisation for sustainable growth. But as chief minister he can pick and choose which areas to look after and which ones to avoid. Upon closer analysis it appears that Modi deliberately overlooked Muslim dominated areas of the state, which are instead being looked after by NGOs. Functioning within their own limitations, these NGOs are unable to formulate feasible plans for development; especially without the governmental support they are denied. The very idea that they work for a particular religious group is reason enough to arouse bias against them. Where then do Gujarat’s Muslims and their supporting NGOs fit in such a scenario?

My musings come to a halt as I zero in on a taxi that could drive me to Anand. Appearances speak louder than words, they say. I applied this wisdom to the dilemma at hand, looked deeply into the faces of both taxi-drivers and concluded that one of them was a Muslim. He sported a beard and his typical attire, a salwar khameez, confirmed his identity. I chose to take his taxi because I thought it would be safer travelling in a Muslim’s taxi – my misgivings had transformed me into a communal peer.

Guessing my intentions, the other taxi-driver played his final card. Hoping to change my mind, he used sound fiscal logic to lure me into his taxi instead. Sir! How much are you going to pay that mian (Muslim) chap? It isn’t safe to travel with a Muslim in Gujarat nowadays.

My appearance disguises my religion and I wasn’t easily distinguishable as a Muslim, rather I have often been mistaken for a Hindu.

You ride with me and pay me 100 rupees less than what you would have paid that mian, he said.

Perhaps it would be an adventure to travel in disguise. I chose the taxi driven by Hirabhai Patel, the Hindu taxi-driver, and instructed him to take me on a tour of Ahmedabad before I left for Anand. The architectural beauty of this historical city evoked its golden past, highlighting a bygone era. Its splendid buildings and monuments surpassed my musings. This was no idle reverie.

I had to be careful when I answered incoming calls on my mobile phone, choosing to say “hi” instead of “salaam” to my Muslim friends when they called. I did this not out of fear but because I wanted to hear more of these outbursts from an ordinary if communalised Hindu who had been poisoned by hatemongering

As we traversed a busy city street, Hirabhai Patel asked me my name. Asif Anwar, I replied. He repeated it aloud, with some modifications: Ashish Anup. Yeah, I said, and began to talk of something else. But I was not afraid. So you are a North Indian Brahmin. Would you please shut up and take me to some monuments, I rebuked him. Sure, sir! A little later, Hirabhai’s words, uttered as we drove through another crowded street, grabbed my attention. Sir, look at that place. This is where the biggest ever dhamal had happened. Dhamal! What do you mean? I don’t understand. You wouldn’t since you are a "non-Gujarati Hindu". Dhamal is a riot where devout Gujarati Hindus killed Muslims and showed them their rightful place – the graveyard.

I couldn’t weep. I should not. Apart from anything else, I could have been taken for a Muslim.

A few hours’ journey had suddenly become an exhausting experience.

From my seat in the taxi, I looked out anew at the city’s monuments. To my eyes, most of them seemed to be stained with fresh blood. I looked at Hirabhai who was now driving along in silence. People like him had turned into Hindu chauvinists. But who can blame him for the mischief he gave voice to? He had his arguments. Thousands like him had been instigated to choose the path of hatred.

I toured all of Ahmedabad city in the space of two hours. I was shown each and every temple in the city. I visited a grand temple at the army base camp. Each devotee, including ‘me’, was checked through security. I ate prasad. If they could have, the security guards would have checked my ‘religion and my intentions’ and found that I was not a worshipper but, unfortunately for them, they could not. I didn’t visit a single mosque in Ahmedabad. And I admired the towering architecture of its temples.

By evening I had arrived in Anand. Hirabhai was happy that I was a "devoted Hindu" from North India. Still, he contended, Gujarati Hindus were unsurpassable in their devotion. North Indian Hindus cannot even begin to conceive of what Gujarati Hindus had done. This was all thanks to the "able leadership" of a man of Narendra Modi’s stature, he said.

I kept nodding in mute agreement, yeah, yeah. I was in no mood for a discussion on such weighty issues with a taxi-driver. I had to be careful when I answered incoming calls on my mobile phone, choosing to say "hi" instead of "salaam" to my Muslim friends when they called. I did this not out of fear but because I wanted to hear more of these outbursts from an ordinary if communalised Hindu who had been poisoned by hatemongering.

History flashed back through the centuries, years and years through which Gujarat has encountered the Hindu hatemonger. Viewed against this backdrop, Narendra Modi was no more than an ‘active’ puppet of Hindu fanaticism who deliberately advocated the ‘cause of Hinduism’. One cannot but recall the Gujarat riots of 1714, 1715, 1716, 1741, 1750, 1941, 1946, 1965, 1969, 1982, 1984, 1986, and the more recent ones of 1992, 1993 and 2002. The seeds of hatred have spread unbridled among leaders here.

On entering the precincts of the Institute of Rural Management in Anand, which I was visiting on an official assignment, I paid the taxi-driver’s fare. As he was leaving, he invited me to come back to Ahmedabad and hire his taxi again, saying that it was really nice to have toured his Gujarat with a "North Indian Hindu". By this time I had decided to clarify Hirabhai’s misconceptions. I told the poor chap, enough is enough. Do you know my identity? I am a Muslim, and a devout Muslim. Now, please leave me alone. I had grown increasingly short-tempered.

Hirabhai Patel was plainly stunned. He sped off the campus, probably convinced that he had been deceived by a Muslim – an experience he wouldn’t forget in this lifetime. One that could turn him into either a true Hindu or a full-fledged hatemonger.

I don’t know what happened with him. But a minute or two later when I received a call on my mobile phone I answered the call and, as usual, said salaam.

Hirabhai had reconfirmed my identity. He had disconnected the call.

I had toured Modi’s vibrant Gujarat.

Archived from Communalism Combat,  February 2008 Year 14    No.128-Cover Story 3

The post Losing my identity appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Courtesy: mumbaiqueerfest.com
 

Notes from a personal diary

Experience is a double-edged knife. Neither can you have too much of it, nor can you have too little of it.

Experience has different connotations for every individual. For me it is a sum total of knowledge, the accumulation of facts and an ongoing process of storing moments of pleasure and pain, consciously but most of the time subconsciously, in the memory.

Inevitably there are limitless aspects to one’s experience. Most of these aspects are personal. Some of these are selectively applied to one’s profession. Whether you’re an artisan, a manual worker, a writer, painter, performing artist or filmmaker, your views, values and innate abilities are dictated considerably by what you have gone through, felt, related to, disconnected from, endured and assimilated.

Fortuitously, almost like water finding its own level, after several attempts, I found myself the job of a journalist. At first reluctant to specialise in the area of film journalism – still considered a mug’s game or an inferior offshoot of mainstream newspapers – I aspired to apply my formal education in political science and philosophy to my daily beat. This proved to be futile. I may have had a theoretical grasp of realpolitik but scant exposure or comprehension of state governance and its machinations.

Feverish attempts to bury the experience of watching cinema regularly and evading its myriad grids, signs and meanings amounted to denying one’s instinctive and perhaps only legitimate calling.

The informal education in cinema viewing – at the alarming rate of a junkie throughout one’s growing years and more – hurtled me towards the ghetto slot of a film reviewer, reporter and commentator. If those tags sound grandiose, do excuse me, because the work and appreciation of film writing was anything but during the 1970s and ’80s when mainline newspapers gave cinema and the arts a grudging amount of space, on page 30 instead of the current page 3, or even the front page.

Willy-nilly, one’s experience, partaking of or the exposure to cinema intensified, simultaneously on personal and professional planes. It became vital to incorporate the element of objective distancing to subjective likes and dislikes. It became vital to discard the in-built residue of bias. Bias had to be replaced with an acceptance and estimation of the multiple dimensions of creativity, ranging from the good and the excellent to the bad and the ugly.

It became abundantly clear that every film for better or worse is in a way an articulation of the director, writer or even the producer’s ethos and principles, be they hyper-commercial or alternative or a blend of both. Every film had to be seen within its context, and above all, in terms of how far it came to honesty or truth telling, never mind the outer trappings. The inner core, or let’s say the emotional heart, was paramount, as it is in any work of literature, painting, poetry, dance and theatre.

One grappled initially, not to be ruled by the age-old divisive lines, that commercial was reprehensible and the artistic was supportable. Every film has its own life and its own reason and has to be considered accordingly; the purest form of reaction being the objectively emotional, a tough task, but it has to be performed if one aims to be responsible, professional, analytical and informative.

That task is tougher since reviews have to be formatted within a prescribed word limit, averaging at 500-600 words a piece generally in the set column of a newspaper, surrounded by a plethora of advertisements.

The task was facilitated, I would like to think, because of experience, of having seen, heard and absorbed cinema of every hue and stripe, at the local cinema halls and at film festivals, most significantly, the festivals of short films and of French and Czech cinema organised by the once flourishing film society movement in Mumbai during the 1970s. There was much to see and much to reflect upon. Which brings me to the central point of the discussion.

The representation of the minority community, which has largely been cartoonish, patronising and often fantasticated. Christians and Parsis are the butt of ridicule and jokes while the Muslims are either benign Rahim Chachas and Rahima Chachis, or alarmingly in recent years, terrorists from across the border.

If there was caricaturing once, it was at least devoid of malice and politics. Indeed, during the 1950s there were sub-genres of Hindi-Urdu cinema like the Muslim mythological, the prime example of this being Hatim Tai, and the Muslim social, which found patronage specially with Muslim audiences of the urban mohallas. Not surprisingly, with changing fads, time, taste, and commercial compulsions, the Hatim Tai genre died and so did the Muslim social, the last successful one being Mere Garib Nawaaz and on a bigger-budget scale, Mere Mehboob, Mere Huzoor and Nikaah.

The male miyan protagonists were either indolent nawabs, often revealing a less-than-seven-year itch for another shariq-e-hayaat. Or they were college campus romantics a la Rajendra Kumar in Mere Mehboob and Rajesh Khanna in Mehboob Ki Mehndi. The supporting characters were more often than not equipped with quivering goatees, piety and tears, as they played good samaritans like the poor man played by the ever suffering Manmohan Krishna who raised an abandoned illegitimately born child in Dhool Ka Phool, on secular tenets. (‘Tu Hindu banega na Musalman banega’, the refrain still rings in the ears.)

Muslim women also represented patented types, which is perhaps inescapable because custom and movie tastes want them that way. For instance, the ammi jaan was expected to be snow-haired, unbending and a model of tolerance, a kind of a Mohammedali Road Ammi India. In effect, she was like every other mother in the movies, only her costumes and hair tints were different. She did namaaz the way the Hindu woman went to the temple, there was a certain grace and commonality in the representation of the mother figure.

The sister, the aapa was like the normal screen didi, peppy, innocent and frequently seduced and ravished by the villainous elements. Also, the biwi or the beloved was slotted into a groove from which there seemed to be no escape. The Muslim heroine found ancestral roots in Anarkali, the classic cinema courtesan. She was the dancing girl, the nautch girl, the tawaif, the raqassa… in countless films… till this reached some kind of apotheosis in Pakeezah. Enough?

Meena Kumari, the contradictory chaste and sullied woman, had portrayed it all. Or that’s what you thought till the shimmering, singing Umrao Jaan, aka Rekha, mesmerised viewers. Interestingly, a movie corporate baron recently asked me to write a courtesan script. The reason? His logic was, Aishwarya Rai would look very well as an updated Umrao Jaan of Lucknow. It is another story altogether that the mujra mahals of Lucknow have all but disappeared today.

Reality, a contextual base or credibility are not the issues here. Flexibly, cinema lends itself to fantasies, concoction and fictionalisation. Yet even while spinning a yarn about say extra-terrestrials or imaginary courtesans, there has to be a relation to our real anxieties, fears, wishes and dreams. Take Mughal-e-Azam, the black-and-white version that is, it is an apocryphal love story of a Mughal prince and a courtesan who did not exist according to the history records. Nevertheless, the film was made with such immense power and conviction that we tend to suspect that maybe, just maybe, Anarkali was real.

On the flip side, the maa, bahen, biwi of popular Hindi cinema were believable only intermittently. Otherwise they were theatrical, relentlessly melodramatic ammi jaans, aapas and bahu begums given to abject suffering without raising a whimper against the feudal order created by males. Whenever the women protested against subjugation, they either died or failed miserably at the cash counters, an example being the Bimal Roy produced Benazir.

Of course, melodrama, gross exaggeration and distortion are not exclusive to the representation of Muslim characters. To strike a connection with viewers from different strata, the tradition has been to avoid subtlety and restraint in order to underline matters to the nth degree.

The representation of the minority community, which has largely been cartoonish, patronising and often fantasticated. Christians and Parsis are the butt of ridicule and jokes while the Muslims are either benign Rahim Chachas and Rahima Chachis, or alarmingly in recent years, terrorists from across the border

Hindu characters have also been stereotyped without any let-up, a trait that has found further expression on TV soaps and serials. Only, they aren’t made marginal characters hanging around on the fringes of the script.

This much was obvious to me during the early years of film watching; in other words a child could tell that there was a facetious shorthand in the portrayal of Muslims. That many of the stalwart writers, lyricists, producers, artistes and directors belonged to the Muslim faith was strange, to say the least. Stranger still, I have not been able to quite understand why Yusuf Khan chose to give himself the screen name of Dilip Kumar. Was it to strike a chord with the larger segment of the audience?

Be that as it may, as one started reviewing films circa the late 1970s, one made it a religion not to lose one’s innocence and emotional bearings while watching films, even while synopsising, analysing or reconstructing them in the journalistic mode. In the ’70s there was a trend to glorify parallel or off-mainstream cinema while disparaging the commercial or the mainstream. In principle, one had to be supported and the other attacked. This I found to be an Achilles heel in some of my senior colleagues. In effect, they were setting up borders in cinema that were unnecessary and unfair. So if one raved about Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony or Naseeb or the films of Raj Kapoor, one was considered a bit addle-headed. Eclectic tastes in cinema were suspect. Today, mercifully, eclecticism has become the norm.

Desai’s ironical entertainer about three lost and found brothers weaned on different religions was a joyous laugh riot. Manmohan Desai continued to push the secular envelope further, not with the same impact though. Coolie, with its incredibly absurd finale – in which the hero survived about a thousand bullets – at the Haji Ali shrine is unforgettable for sure, but finally far too fantasticated and over-the-top. The same goes for Allarakha, which he produced and piloted. Manmohan Desai was a child-like adventurist and there’s little doubt that his unashamedly absurd adventures were the best of their kind.

While looking for valuable signs and meanings in the big-budget movies, it was also rewarding to discover sensitive and lastingly significant portrayals of the Muslims in alternative cinema, the most important one being MS Sathyu’s Garm Hawa. It dealt with a Muslim family faced with the prospect of losing their moorings in India because of the Partition. Several attempts have been made to tell Partition stories, but Garm Hawa remains the most emotionally moving since it touches on the central truth of a political tragedy.

An underrated film, Bazaar, was Sagar Sarhadi’s expose of the selling of young brides. For some of its truth-telling moments, the earlier black-and-white Dharamputra is important too, more as a socially conscious streak in Yash Chopra’s oeuvre before he flew off to discover the scenic vistas of Switzerland.

Of the other films that have been valuable for their treatment of minority issues, Aparna Sen’s Mr and Mrs Iyer comes instantly to mind. It took a stand, and indeed was a corrective on Mani Ratnam’s Bombay, which strove to perform such a balancing act that it was neither here nor there. Govind Nihalani’s Tamas and Dev have their hard-edged moments, while Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, and Naseem point to a filmmaker whose humanism was more palpable than the films’ political content, which tended to get dogmatic.

In recent times, the Muslim woman has come out of purdah but is still hidden behind a mask of tinsel and glamour, as in Veer-Zaara, which was so politically correct that it was sterile. In Gadar, too, the Muslim woman was in dire distress and served as a Barbie doll being saved by a superman. By contrast, the helpless mother of Khamosh Pani, in recent times, stood out as an authentic portrait of a woman who has no choice but to convert to another faith during Partition. Also more convincing, by the strength of her portrayal, was the character of Tabu in Maqbool, caught in the crossfire of the underworld and savage ambition.

Over the decades, critiquing the pitfall of popular cinema has been common. The question is: is this critiquing to any point? On asking this despairing question some years ago, it was filmmaker Kumar Shahani who answered, "The accumulation of criticism is the point," encouraging me to continue with my, dare I say it, love. I say love because I see it as a faith in itself rather than an occupational preoccupation or hazard.

Of this accumulation, of criticism and concurrent life experiences, came my effort, first at film script writing, an opportunity given to me by Shyam Benegal, and then film direction, a purely accidental visa to another realm altogether stamped for me by the selfless support of cinematographer Santosh Sivan, and actors Jaya Bachchan and Karisma Kapoor. They were of the opinion that if I had a story to tell, in a cinematic framework, I should go ahead and do it.

The scripts for the Shyam Benegal-directed triptych Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa were extremely personal, drawn from the lives of my maternal family. Mammo was a grand aunt who was living in Pakistan but longed to return to India as she considered it her home. Sardari Begum was her younger sister, who rebelled against family orthodoxy to become a flamboyant thumri singer of the 1930s ultimately to end up lonely and meet with a tragic end. Zubeidaa was the story of my mother whose second marriage to a Rajasthani Maharaja precipitated scandal and her death, at the age of 19, in an air crash.

The scripts drew on anecdotes, investigation and real-life events. Without having the base of close-to-the-bone reality none of these three stories would have been possible. Ornamentation of the real stories is what I tried to avoid. In fact, downplaying the inherent melodrama in the stories is what I aimed for, whether successfully or unsuccessfully is not for me to say or even remotely guess at. All I can say is that the task of re-telling the real stories of three Muslim women, of some substance and nostalgia, was a therapy, a means of coming to terms with the women I’d known to a degree, always searching for the missing pieces in the puzzle of their stories.

To come to Fiza. I directed Fiza simply because filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma, for whom the script was researched and written, suggested far too many alterations. The catalyst for Fiza were the restless and eternally watchful lives of several families in Mohammedali Road. Sons, brothers and husbands had vanished after the ’93 communal riots in Mumbai. Were they dead, or alive or… ? The immediate reaction of the film industry and a section of journalists was: how can he dare to make a film when he’s been critiquing them?

The reaction didn’t affect me to the extent of giving up what I’d ventured out to do, because I saw filmmaking as an extension of journalism. If I was straying into another medium of reportage, comment and storytelling, there were no written codes or laws to prevent me from taking the step. Perhaps the sudden popularity of Hrithik Roshan, who has been cast as the missing brother, before he became hugely popular with the release of his debut film Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, evoked inordinate curiosity. But it did help me considerably in getting the sub-text of the film across to a large audience. The sub-text was simply this – the ruination of human lives caused by political self-servers.

A sequence showing the Muslim girl, Fiza, dancing up a storm to the lyric ‘Main nachoo bin paayal’ elicited a horde of negative reactions. This was a compromise, an item number, how could a Muslim girl do this? That was exactly why the sequence had been in the original script, it wasn’t an afterthought tagged on because of commercial compulsions. A sequence in Sarhadi’s Bazaar had shown Muslim men and women dancing and drinking at a party. I wanted to echo that – a Muslim girl need not be a closeted, shrivelling lily. She could enter a disco and dance up a storm. In real life they do, but on cinema this was believed to be taboo.

Next, I directed Tehzeeb, a look at a troubled mother-daughter relationship, inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, a work of tremendous literary quality in the writing. The sub-text here was to depict a Muslim family like any other, unencumbered by shararas, burkhas or serving sheer-korma at Id festivities. The point was missed; the film was marketed haphazardly and received lukewarmly, to put it mildly. Too heavy some felt, too slow others said. The only silver lining is that women audiences seemed to relate to it.

If there are two questions that I feel wary about, they are, "Why do you always make films about women?", "And why are they all about Muslims?"

What can one say but to emphasise that one narrates stories one feels strongly about and concerned with? I have just completed filming a third film titled Silsilay which is about women again, and one of the three women portrayed is the character of a Muslim housewife.

I may be absolutely wrong, I may be partially right. But cinema, like other art forms, has firmer roots when it draws from the real and the experiential.

While searching for the identity of the Muslim woman, I hope to find my own identity, if not today, then some day soon.
 

MUGHAL-E-AZAM
Saajan se jo naina milein
Naina milein, naina milein, naina milein,
Saajan soh jo naina milein
Toh man ki pyaas bhuje…

(So I gaze into my love’s eyes,
So I gaze into my love’s eyes,
And quench the thirst in my soul…)

The sultry sounds of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan echo through the black and white landscape. By a fountain in the moonlit gardens of the palace, Prince Salim, resplendent in brocade and jewels, uses a large white feather to gently caress the beautiful face of the woman sitting before him. Hers is a face of incredible beauty framed by the chiffon and zari of her dupatta. Their gazes are locked. Anarkali’s smiles are bashful, yet laden with passion. His look conveys a myriad messages as her eyelashes flutter, her lips part. He strokes her gently, carrying the feather from her lips to his. Their eyes speak volumes, clouded by desire. As he leans forward to kiss her, the feather shields the embracing couple.

In the distance, Sultana watches.

MR & MRS IYER
A motley collection of passengers sit dead still in the interior of a bus as fires are seen raging outside. It is late evening; the scene is tinged in deep earth colours lit by flame. To the eerie tom-tom of drumbeats, two mobsters enter the bus menacingly, asking each passenger their name. The gang-leader is dressed in a loud printed shirt, a saffron tilak on his forehead, while his colleague sports a saffron headscarf. A traditionally dressed South-Indian Hindu woman clutches her baby to her breast as she and her neighbour exchange looks. Two Sikhs sit frozen in their seats.

The gang-leader grabs a young man by the collar and pulls him out of his seat.

Rioter 1: Tell me your name!… Didn’t you hear what I said? Tell me your name!

Youth: Sohail.

Rioter 1: Sohail what? Sohail what?! …What is your father’s name?…Tell me your father’s name, Sister-f****r!

Youth: Sohail Rai… son of Samir Rai.

Rioter: Drop your pants! Drop your pants!

Rioter 2: Abbe, drop your pants you a******e!

The passengers wait in trepidation. The young man takes down his trousers; the mobster gives him a cursory look and throws him back into his seat. The rioters move on. Neighbours clutch at neighbours. Every passenger is paralysed by fear.

A man says: "We are all Hindus here. All Hindus." Another adds: "All Hindus. All Hindus." From the rear of the bus a bespectacled man rises to interject (in English): "No, not all. Not them (pointing at an elderly couple). They are Muslims – the old man and his wife – Muslims." The rioters stop in front of the old man and his wife.

Rioter 1: Your good name?
Old man: Iqbal.
The gang-leader restrains the other rioter as he lunges forward. è
Rioter 1: This could also be a Hindu name… Iqbal What?
Old man: Iqbal Ahmed Khan.
Rioter 2: See! Trying to pass himself off as a Hindu, the a*******e! B*****d! We’ll finish off your whole family! Get up!
Rioter 1 (to his colleague): Enough! Don’t talk rubbish! Get back! Get back! (Turning to the old gentleman) Come Iqbal saab, please come outside with us. We have something we’d like to discuss with you.

Old man: But we have to go to Calcutta…
Rioter 1 (baring his teeth): Why are you so afraid? Not in front of everyone, we need to make some inquiries in private. Come on.

The old man and his wife exchange looks and he gets up to follow the men, turning to ask her: Najma, my teeth?

His wife nods and gives him his dentures from the bag on her lap: Here… You’ll need your spectacles too (Handing him his spectacle case). As the three men move off, she stops them, holding out a packet of pills: He hasn’t been keeping well lately, it is cold, these tablets…

The gang-leader sniggers: Don’t worry; he won’t need them where he’s going.

They make their way out of the bus. As they are about to leave, a young woman in the front row starts wailing, pleading with them in English. Realising that her husband is in dire trouble, Najma calls out to stop them and starts to follow them. They drag her out of the bus as well. The young woman in front screams out to stop them. The gang-leader hits her and flings her on to the floor of the bus. As a co-passenger tries to intervene he is warned off.

At the rear, the young man, bristling with anger, jumps up in protest. Thrusting her baby roughly into his arms, his neighbour admonishes, "Just hold him!" Dumbstruck, swept up in the fear and the emotion of the moment, he is left holding a howling infant in his arms.

GADAR
In a ceremonial ground by a flag post bearing the Pakistani flag, a young couple – an Indian Sikh, Tara Singh, his wife Sakina, a Pakistani Muslim, and their little son – are being grilled by sundry Pakistanis as a large crowd looks on.

Qazi (priest): You are fortunate, Tara Singh, as Allah has beckoned you to his fold, that he has given you the opportunity to become a Muslim. What do you think? Do you accept Islam?

Tara Singh: A man’s biggest duty is to protect his wife and child.

Qazi: Do you accept Islam?

Tara Singh: Kashi and Kaaba are one and the same.

Qazi (shouting angrily): Do you accept Islam or not?! (His voice reverberates menacingly in the surroundings, as the crowd waits with bated breath for Tara Singh to reply.)

Tara Singh: I accept.

Qazi: Maashallah, Subhanallah, then come to the mosque and proclaim this honestly and in all good faith… (He is interrupted by Sakina’s father, Ashraf Ali.)

Ashraf Ali: One minute, Qazi saab! Before he takes a single step into the mosque let us find out whether he is worthy of being a Muslim! (To Tara Singh) Fine, if you accept Islam, say Islam Zindabad! (The crowd shouts Islam Zindabad! Sakina looks at her husband and her father anxiously.)

Tara Singh: Islam Zindabad.

Ashraf Ali: Hmmm. Say Pakistan Zindabad! (The crowd shouts Pakistan Zindabad!) è

Tara Singh (glaring): Pakistan Zindabad. (The crowd cheers.)

Ashraf Ali: Now say Hindustan Murdabad! (Sakina looks at her husband and her father anxiously.)

Tara Singh (shouting angrily, his voice ringing through the ground): Ashraf Ali! We have no objection to your Pakistan living long but Hindustan has lived long, is living, and will always live long! (He advances, waving his fist in the air) Hindustan Zindabad! Hindustan Zindabad! (His young son echoes the words.) Hindustan Zindabad!

Ashraf Ali: Don’t talk rubbish! As long as you don’t say Hindustan Murdabad how will the people of this country believe that you are a true Muslim?!

Tara Singh: There are more Muslims in Hindustan than in this country. Their lips, their hearts all cry Hindustan Zindabad. Does that mean they are not true Muslims?!

Ashraf Ali: Stop your speechifying! If you don’t say Hindustan Murdabad you can’t take Sakina with you!

Tara Singh: Stop! That’s enough! If I can bow my head for my wife and child I can cut off everyone’s heads too!

There is an outcry as the Pakistanis surge angrily towards him. He then pulls a hand pump out of the ground and swings it around wildly, felling attackers with his blows.

MAMMO
A young boy in shorts and T-shirt and a burkha clad woman, Mammo, are walking along a city road.

Boy: What sort of things?
Mammo: Like seeing hell on earth.
Boy: You’ve seen Hell?
They stop in their tracks.

Mammo: Yes, beta. May God never show us those times again. Your Nana, God rest his soul, and I left everything we had in the dead of night, stuffing whatever we could in our hands, our pockets; we were leaving for Pakistan. We were taken to the border along with other refugees. From there, by foot … What a time it was! Doomsday, it was doomsday! Fire, bloodshed, plunder and pillage, bodies, screams. Our hair stood on end. (Scenes of fire and strife in the dark of night play on the screen. Gut-wrenching cries are heard.) We were about 400-500 of us going from this side to that side. There were an equal number coming from there. The people leaving here were Muslims and those coming from there were Hindus and Sikhs. But we were all in the same boat. Our country, our land, had turned into Karbala (the site of a great war in Islam), God! There was a young woman walking along with me. She had two little children clutched to her breast, the unfortunate. One boy died in her arms. Who had time for a shroud or burial? We came to a river and people said that the dead child should be thrown into the water. That poor hapless woman was not in her senses. She threw the live child into the water and clutched the dead child to her bosom. I can still remember her glazed eyes staring wildly. And that scream of hers…Ya Allah!

Stunned, the young boy asks: You saw all this with your own eyes?
Mammo: I saw this and much more…
Boy: Mammo Nani, I am going to write about all this one day.
Mammo: But who will read it? It isn’t good to cry about one’s sorrows…

Archived from Communalism Combat, February  2005, Year 11    No.105, Cover Story 2.

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