Book Review: Lost in translation

This review of a new book on Sahir Ludhianvi and his poetry was commissioned much before the lockdown. It finally appeared in print this week, in India Today magazine's now-restored Leisure Section.

Sahir Ludhianvi was among India’s most talented Urdu poets. After joining the film industry in 1950, he also became one of the most popular. If you’ve grown up with Hindi film music, you’re likely to know many of Sahir’s poems, even if you don’t know they’re his. You might know the multi-religious “Allah tero naam, ishwar tero naam, Sabko sanmati de bhagwaan” from Hum Dono or the critical-nostalgic “Yeh mahalon yeh takhton yeh taajon ki duniya” from Pyaasa. You might have sung one of his immortal love songs, from the irresistible “Yeh raat yeh chaandni phir kahan” (Jaal, 1952) or the wistful “Chalo ik baar phir se ajnabi ban jaaye hum dono” (Gumraah, 1963), all the way to “Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayaal aata hai”, an early Sahir poem around which Yash Chopra crafted his 1976 romantic classic Kabhie Kabhie. Nearly 40 years after his death, it is high time that Sahir was attentively translated, analysed, studied.

But Surinder Deol’s Sahir: A Literary Portrait does not deserve to bask in the late lyricist’s reflected glory. Deol, who left India in 1983 to work at the World Bank in Washington, DC, now lives in Maryland. Other than his most recent book, The Urdu Ghazal: A Gift of India’s Composite Culture, he has previously published a novel, a collection of poems and a book-length rendering of Ghalib’s poetry into what he calls “American free verse” (The Treasure, 2014). I have not read these other books. But Deol’s translations of Sahir are lacklustre at best and often distressingly unpoetic. He is painfully literal, and even then, not always accurate. “Sard jhonkon se bhadakte hain badan mein shole,/ Jaan legi yeh barsaat kareeb aa jao” becomes, in Deol’s inexplicable rendition, “Cold flames, hot flames engulf my body,/ This downpour will end my life./ Come up to me!” Meanwhile the crisp simplicity of “Chalo phir aaj usi bewafaa ki baat karein” gets stretched into a torturous “Today, let us talk once again/ about the graceful one/ who lacked constancy”.

In his preface, Prof. Gopi Chand Narang, former president of the Sahitya Akademi, whose book on Ghalib Deol translated in 2017, proclaims Deol’s translations to be “effortless”. But translating Ludhianvi is no easy ride. Deol at least seems to recognise that when he mentions reading Pablo Neruda in English and Coleman Barks’ renditions of Rumi. But these inspirations notwithstanding, Deol remains preoccupied with the dictionary meanings of Sahir’s Urdu usage, with little sense of what sounds poetic in English. So we get a book strewn with such lines as “It is just a demand of my wreckings” or “I want an answer/ from the foggy spoilers/ of my wishes and dreams”.

Deol is no literary scholar: his comments on individual poems are banal and unsatisfying. He is no biographer either, merely compiling a few snippets into an introduction. If you’re looking for a Sahir Ludhianvi biography to read, Akshay Manwani’s The People’s Poet (2014) is still your best bet.

Published in India Today, 6 June 2020.

A Wizard of Song - II

The second part of my Mirror column on Sahir:

Did the great lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, who would have turned 99 on 8 March, lead a life filled with inconsistencies? 

Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 99^th birth anniversary this column commemorated last week, appears at first glance to have been a bundle of contradictions. He was a great romantic, a man whose depth of feeling cannot be doubted if you listen to his poetry – and yet he remained a confirmed bachelor who did not seem able to sustain a long-term relationship. His love life was a series of brief encounters, a candle that (to adapt the words of poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox) may have burnt at both ends, but did not last the night. He was a Progressive Urdu poet with socialist leanings, but aspired to write lyrics for the highly commercial Hindi film industry. A great friend of Sahir's, Hameed Akhtar, remembered in later life that the young Sahir's repeatedly stated ambition was "Bada songwriter banoonga". He was notorious for disagreements with friends and collaborators that he then refused to climb down from – but he was also renowned for going all out for his friends, and his loyalty to particular people could last forever. 

But if one looks carefully at each of these aspects of Sahir’s life, one might evaluate them differently: not as contradictions inherent to Sahir, but as bearing true witness to the irreparably fractured world in which we live. It is true, for instance, that the young Sahir seems to have fallen in love quite a few times, and perhaps had a little more courage than other young men of his age, declaring his attachments to the objects of his affection – sometimes using the support of the poetic medium he had just begun to master, but sometimes actually managing real meetings with them. Real meetings between young lovers were, in the middle class milieu of late 1930s-early 1940s India, a necessarily clandestine affair, and the social stakes were high.

After one such secret assignation at his college in Ludhiana during the summer vacation, the girl in question was apparently expelled from the college, and Sahir seems to have left as well, though it seems that the college has no written record of expelling him. A poem he wrote in this period of his life encapsulates the frustration and real-world angst of trying to follow through on romance in the stultifying India of arranged marriage: “Jab tumhein mujh se zyada hai zamaane ka khayaal, Phir meri yaad mein yun ashk bahaati kyun ho, Tum mein himmat hai toh duniya se baghaavat kar do, Varna maa-baap jahan kehte hain shaadi kar lo.” Later in life, among other briefer affairs, Sahir conducted a long (and mostly long-distance) romance with Punjabi poetess Amrita Pritam. Amrita was already married when she met him, and stayed so – and unfulfilled longing, as all lovers know, is often the best way to keep romance alive.

On the question of his ego, it is clear from reading Akshay Manwani’s very useful account of his life that Sahir found it difficult to collaborate with people who had egos as big as his. So he worked with the industry’s most feted music directors, but not for long. As early as 1957, for instance, he ended a highly fruitful partnership with SD Burman, that had produced such astounding work as ‘Baazi’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘House No. 44, ‘Funtoosh’, ‘Devdas’ and ‘Pyaasa’. That same year, with both of them having produced the brilliant lilting soundtrack of ‘Naya Daur’, another fine music director, OP Nayyar, told BR Chopra that he did not want to work with Sahir any longer.

Sahir went on to work with competent and even good music directors, like N Datta and Ravi, but he continued to have clear ideas about who he could collaborate with. His partnership with the Chopras was lifelong, first with the socially conscious films of BR Chopra, and then the changing oeuvre of Yash Chopra, from such films as ‘Dhool Ka Phool’ and ‘Dharmaputra’ to the romances for which he is better known. Sahir needed to know he came first. When Yash Chopra made ‘Kabhi Kabhie’, for instance, Sahir and his poem came on board first, and Chopra was persuaded by him to drop the commercially more successful Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo in favour of Khaiyyam, whose literary sensibilities Sahir decided were needed for a film about a poet. Sahir’s behaviour throughout his lifetime was perhaps read as mere arrogance, but today it is hard not to see it, at least partially, as a response to an industry that did not value writers. A call made by Sahir to BV Keskar, it seems, may have been responsible for All India Radio’s announcers beginning to mention the lyricist’s name alongside the film and the singer.

The gravest charge of contradictoriness, of course, is that a poet should not want to write for films, and that the idealistic socialism of Sahir’s verse was muddied by being picturised on screen by stars and filmmakers who made a great deal of money. The purists can never be satisfied on this. But Sahir seems to have had no doubt that film songs were the best way to make Indians think as well as feel. The poet who wrote “Hum amn chahte hain, magar zulm ke khilaaf/ Garr jung laazmi hain toh, phir jung hee sahi” was not compromising when he subverted Iqbal’s grandiosity into the vividly sarcastic “Cheen o Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara/ Rehne ko ghar nahi hain, saara jahan hamara”, or crafted the undying call to humanism of “Tu Hindu banega na Musalmaan banega,/ Insaan ki aulaad hai, insaan banega.” He was communicating with his compatriots – in all their glorious and inglorious variety.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Mar 2020. (First part published on 8 Mar 2020)

A Wizard of Song

My Mirror column:

Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 99th birthday it is today, brought remarkable sophistication to the Hindi film lyric, yet never lost the simplicity of the popular. The first of a two-part column.

A collage of Sahir Ludhianvi's letters, poetry and photographs recovered from a scrap shop in Juhu by archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur in 2019.

Sometime in 1937, a young man who had just taken his matriculation examination in Ludhiana read the words of the poet Mohammad Iqbal bemoaning the loss of the 19^th century poet Daagh Dehlvi, and found in them the pen-name by which he would be known forever. The words were these: “Is chaman mein honge paida bulbul-e-shiraz bhi,/ Sainkdon sahir bhi honge, sahib-e-ijaaz bhi... /Hubahu kheenchega lekin ishq ki tasveer kaun?/ Uth gaya nawak fagan, maarega dil pe teer kaun?” [“There will be many nightingales born in this garden/ Countless magicians, men who work miracles as well... But who will sketch such a vivid portrait of love, Who will enchant the heart, now that the marksman is gone?”]

Young Abdul Hayee decided that he would henceforth be ‘Sahir’, and in the well-worn tradition of Urdu poets, he took the town of his birth as the second part of his name.

Akshay Manwani’s book on Sahir Ludhianvi, from which the above anecdote is taken, cites the poet’s reasons for this decision from Naresh Kumar Shaad’s ‘Sahir Ke Saath Ek Shaam’ – “Since I never had much of an opinion about my poetry and always considered myself one amongst several poets, the word “sahir” and its use in the poem immediately caught my attention and I chose it as my takhallus”.

The story seems to me to reveal a great deal about Sahir, his personality and his politics. In drawing his pen-name from the words of one great Urdu poet about another, Sahir placed himself squarely within a grand literary tradition. And calling himself a magician was a lofty claim to make. Yet he simultaneously undercut the claim to uniqueness, because Iqbal had spoken of “sainkdon sahir”. That self-deprecation suggests a political position: a man who holds that poets, too, are a class: a class of those who do magic with words. It is also an early glimpse of a man who could make himself immortal with a song about being a poet of the moment. “Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon, pal do pal meri kahaani hai”, picturised on Amitabh Bachchan’s poet hero in Yash Chopra’s ‘Kabhie Kabhie’, became one of Sahir’s most popularly sung lyrics: “Kal aur aayenge naghmon ki khilti kaliyan chunnewale,/ Mujhse behtar kehnewale, tumse behtar sunnewale,/ Kal koi mujhko yaad kare, kyun koi mujhko yaad kare?/Masroof zamana mere liye, kyon vaqt apna barbaad kare? [Tomorrow there will be more who can pick buds that bloom into songs/ Speakers better than me, Listeners better than you,/ Tomorrow if someone remembers me, why would someone remember me,/ The future will be too busy to waste its time on me.”

There was something of the romantic hero about Sahir, and very occasionally, that quality seeped through into the films that used his verse. That this happened even in an industry that rarely gives writers their due speaks to the power of Sahir’s words as much as his persona, his close – if often fraught – relationships with colleagues. Much before Kabhi Kabhie – a film whose very title comes from a poem from Sahir’s hugely successful book ‘Talkhiyan’ that director Yash Chopra had read as a young man in Jalandhar – there was ‘Pyaasa’, in which Guru Dutt’s hero Vijay is a young poet who goes from youthful romantic idealism to bitter disillusionment with the world around him. Sahir’s own trajectory as a Progressive poet – his critique of feudalism and capitalism, his attacks on social hypocrisy, especially around prostitution – gave Vijay his poetic voice.

Sahir’s songs for ‘Pyaasa’ also displayed his unrivalled range. “Jaane woh kaise log thhe jinke pyaar ko pyaar mila” is an anthem to unrequited love that could make anyone feel sorry for themselves. “Jinhe naaz hai Hind pe woh kahan hain” and “Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai” are two of the most trenchantly critical songs ever written for the Indian screen. But ‘Pyaasa’ also contains the immortal “Sar jo tera chakraye”, a tel maalish song which manages to be socially sharp, and “Aaj sajan mohe ang laga le”, a love song in the form of a Vaishnava lyric, allowing us to see the sex worker Gulab’s (Waheeda Rehman) longing for Vijay as Radha’s for Krishna.

There were many things that made Sahir Ludhianvi unusual, and certainly this was true of the songs he sometimes put into the mouths of female characters. Poetry everywhere, and Urdu poetry especially, is filled to the brim with paeans to the physical beauty of women, and Sahir wrote many such love lyrics, often sung by Mohammad Rafi.

But only Sahir could make the heroine sing in praise of the hero’s beauty. So Vyjayanthimala could sing with perfectly believable abandon about Dilip Kumar’s hair “Ude jab jab zulfein teri,/ Kunwaariyon ka dil machle, jind meriye”. Or Reena Roy could describe herself as lost in Rakesh Roshan’s eyes in ‘Dhanwan’ (1981): “Yeh aankhein dekh kar hum/ Saari duniya bhool jaate hain,/ Inhein paane ki dhun mein/ Har tamanna bhool jaate hain”. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Mar 2020. (Second part follows.)

Tricks and Treats

My Mirror column:

Carrying on our examination of 1957’s biggest Hindi hits, a look at a film which gave us a new kind of exuberant, prankster hero.

1957 was a remarkable year for Hindi cinema. Last week, I wrote about one of the top ten hits of that year, Paying Guest, directed by Subodh Mukherjee. 1957 was also the year in which Paying Guest’s talented screenplay and dialogue writer, then employed by Filmistan Studio, managed to branch out into film direction.

The writer-turned-director was Nasir Husain, and the film was Tumsa Nahin Dekha, which also found its way into the top ten hits of the year. Husain never looked back, going on to a gloriously successful innings in the film industry, as the maker of hugely successful entertainers like Dil Deke Dekho (1959),Caravan( 1971), Yaadon ki Baaraat (1973) and Zamane Ko Dikhana Hai (1981), as well as the founder of a film family that includes Mansoor Khan (who directed the epoch-marking Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar) and the actor Aamir Khan.

The story of how Tumsa Nahin Dekha(TND) got made is enjoyably filmi. Tolaram Jalan, primary financier of Filmistan, agreed to fund Husain’s directorial venture, but gave the novice director a shoestring budget — and insisted on him hiring a young heroine called Ameeta, who was Jalan’s protege. Husain, having crafted such a fun new persona for Dev Anand with his scripts for Paying Guest andMunimji, had assumed that the star would be part of his directorial debut. But Anand decided that a starlet like Ameeta didn’t match his stature, and bowed out of the film. That left Husain scrambling for a male hero.

But when his mentor at Filmistan, the legendary S Mukherjee, recommended Raj Kapoor’s younger brother Shammi, Husain wasn’t at all convinced. Shammi had already acted in some nineteen films without finding his feet as a hero. Already suffering the consequences of comparison to his hugely popular elder brother and even more legendary father Prithviraj, Shammi had also made that cardinal error in a patriarchal society: he had married a woman more successful than himself. Even Husain, when persuaded to approach Shammi, decided that if he was going to meet the actor couple, he’d try for the star first. It was only when Geeta Bali turned him down, saying that the heroine’s role wasn’t strong, that Shammi Kapoor got the part. And Hindi film fans got Shammi Kapoor.

Watching Shammi in his ‘introduction song’ in TND, one would be forgiven for imagining that he had always been this way — the ridiculous excess of gesture, the arch glance thrown over his shoulder, the floppy hair, the floppy gait, and the floppy wave of the hand with which he waves away a potential sea of admiring women. But one would be wrong. That Shammi Kapoor persona we know so well came into being with this film. Shammi acquired a new clean-shaven look and a shorter haircut, and an air of exaggerated exuberance that then became his signature style. Nasir Husain wrote two more films which gave Shammi’s new persona full play — Dil Deke Dekho (1959) and Teesri Manzil (1966), the latter directed by Vijay Anand. And Shammi Kapoor became the hero who seemed always drunk on life.

Once you pay attention to Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics for the film’s title song — “Raaste khamosh hain, dhadkanein madhosh hain; Piye bin aaj humein chadha hai nasha” — it becomes slowly clear that that idea — of being ‘mast’ without needing to have consumed intoxicants of any sort — lay at the core of this new heroic persona. This was a masculinity that didn’t take the world —or itself — too seriously. The usual terrible things could and often did befall the Nasir Husain hero — a sad childhood, separation from a parent, poverty or unemployment, being unfairly suspected of a crime, or simply being treated badly because his true worth (often implying parentage) had not yet been recognised — but he kept the weight of the world at bay with a combination of silliness and wit. And of course, music. Many Husain protagonists were musicians, and even when they weren’t, as in Paying Guest or TND, he made a point of having them be highly competent amateurs, often setting up scenes in which the hero and the heroine matched their wits — and musical skills — in a performative display of virtuosity.

While this competitive nonk-jhonk was constitutive of the highly enjoyable Nasir Husain model of romance, it is undeniable that his heroes belong to a long tradition of falling ‘in love’ at first glance and then flirting incessantly with the heroine, who rejected his overtures. Such a line as “Nafrat mohabbat ki pehli seedhi hai” (which Husain managed to insert into both Paying Guest and TND), or worse, having a side character like the comical thief in TND say to Shankar “Woh mard hi kya jo biwi ko neecha na dikhaye” are part of an unfortunate cinematic legacy in which the woman cannot be the initiator of romance. She is assumed to be a reluctant participant, all the way until a (usually staged, sometimes real) turn of events proves to her that the maskhara hero is actually 1) ethical, 2) brave and 3) truly invested in her honour.

This persona of the light-hearted prankster was perhaps also meant to upend our expectations of who a hero is. In TND, for instance, Pran — the villainous imposter — sits around looking serious and reading books, while Shammi — the real heir — constantly plays the fool. Nasir Husain had given us the hero as joker. Wholly serious men, henceforth, were going to be a little suspect.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Aug 2017.

Will it dawn on us?

My Mirror column:

Watching a 1950s film with Sahir Ludhianvi’s utopian lyrics involves mapping the grave distance we have travelled away from that utopia.

Last week, feeling utterly saddened by the state of the nation – recurring incidents of mob violence against Dalits and Muslims in the name of defending the cow, and a jingoistic nationalism that treats any criticism of the government or of India as an unpalatable betrayal – I found myself humming the words of a Sahir Ludhianvi song: “Woh subah kabhi toh aayegi, woh subah kabhi toh aayegi; In kaali sadiyon ke sar se, jab raat ka aanchal dhalkega; Jab dukh ke baadal pighlenge, jab sukh ka saagar chhalkega...” [In my tragically inadequate translation: ‘That dawn will come someday, that dawn will come someday; When these dark ages will shrug off the veil of night; When these clouds of sorrow will melt, and the ocean of joy brim over...’].

I remembered the song being from a Raj Kapoor film called Phir Subah Hogi, but I hadn’t watched it since my childhood. So I found myself on YouTube, discovering that it was a film directed in 1958 by Ramesh Saigal, with a plot based very loosely on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Kapoor plays Ram Mehra, a penniless law student in love with a poor girl called Sohni (Mala Sinha) who, in a bid to redeem a watch he has pawned, ends up unintentionally murdering the villainous pawnbroker.

Kapoor’s Ram is a dreamy-eyed do-gooder who wanders the streets of Bombay dressed in the classic blazer-and-trousers uniform of the 1950s Hindi film hero, coming to the aid of exhausted cart-pullers and injured children alike. The film contains many of the tropes of the 1950s film: the poor but khuddaar hero, his mother (here an unseen figure in the village) who does all she can to support his education, a city full of cold, calculating rich men without a conscience in sight.

Another familiar 1950s trope is that of the hero’s best friend, provider of companionship and comic relief. That figure here is the impeccable Rehman, who in one of those effortless nods to Hindu-Muslim friendship that characterised so many films of that era, plays a Muslim by the name of Rehman.

The film is full of soulful socialist angst, and nothing embodies it more than Ludhianvi’s lyrics. Among the finest Progressive poets to have ever composed for Hindi cinema, Ludhianvi outdoes himself here. Apart from the melancholic-utopian title song, the film offers two stellar examples of his style of critique – pointed, but with an undercurrent of humour.

In the first, Ram, ejected from his tenement for non-payment of rent, tries to find a place for the night. His journey from park bench to pavement is accompanied by a sardonic take on a nation that boasts of inroads into China and the Arab world while its educated youth – and its labourers – are homeless: “Chino-Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara/Rehne ko ghar nahi hai, saara jahan hamara.”

The song’s gentle delivery belies its sarcasm: “Patla hai haal apna, lekin lahu hai gaadha; Faulaad se bana hai, har naujawan hamara; Miljul ke is vatan ko, aisa sajayenge hum, Hairat se munh takega, Sara jahan hamara [Our state is pretty thin, but our blood is thick; Each of our young people is made of iron; Together we will decorate the country, so much that the whole world will look on in amazement.’]”

Later, as Ram’s romantic and other desires are crushed by a cruel world, he half-stumbles into a posh party – another classic Hindi film trope – and begins to sing “Aasmaan pe hai khuda, aur zameen pe hum; Aajkal woh is taraf dekhta hai kam. Aajkal kisi ko woh tokta nahi, chahe kucch bhi keejiye, rokta nahin; Ho rahi hai lootmaar, phat rahein hain bam... Zindagi hai apne apne bazuon ke dum. [God is up in the sky, we’re on the ground; These days, he doesn’t look this way much. He doesn’t interfere with anyone these days, you can do anything, he won’t stop you; There’s looting and bombs exploding... Life is a matter of might is right.]”

Call me a sad-eyed left-liberal, but I was comforted by the film’s secular-socialist vision – and struck by how much Ludhianvi’s words resonated with my present-day political desires. He bursts the balloon of an inflated nationalism, and offers a language in which to mourn an India in which packs of Hindutvavadi goons roam free, picking on defenceless Dalits and Muslims.

Imagine my surprise, then, on discovering that LK Advani and AB Vajpayee went to watch this film at Imperial Cinema after the Jan Sangh had received a particularly bad drubbing in the 1958 Delhi municipal elections – and that Advani often reminisces about how they returned certain that their political fortunes would also see a new dawn.

It is possible that good fiction and poetry is simply so capacious that we can all find our desires echoed in them. But given the BJP’s talent for appropriating, misreading and parodying our finest nationalist symbols – from Gandhi to Ambedkar to Nehru’s tryst with destiny speech – it feels like the truth lies elsewhere.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 July 2017.