Driven From Home - I

My Mirror column (24 May 2020):

It’s time to revisit Bimal Roy’s 1953 neorealist melodrama, Do Bigha Zamin, which remains one of the earliest and most moving depictions of the urban migrant in Indian cinema

Another poster for Do Bigha Zamin (1953), designed by the artist Chittaprosad

A poster advertising Do Bigha Zamin in the 15 May, 1953 issue of Filmfare contains eight moments from the film etched into memorable black-and-white linocuts by the artist Chittaprosad. Linocut 5, at the centre of the page, foregrounds a young boy, barefoot, a palm held up to his face, as if he's just been slapped. The blank wall to the right is occupied by “Vote For” graffiti, above which is a strategically-placed poster of a gun-toting gangster, captioned “Criminals”. Behind the boy, the Indian city is pared down to its essentials: a mailbox, a lamppost, tall buildings -- and two other children: one polishing shoes under a streetlight, and the other being marched away by a uniformed policeman.

If you have never seen Bimal Roy's era-defining film -- or even if you have -- now is the time to revisit it. Perhaps in this cruel summer of 2020 you will see, as I did, that it is not some timeless tale of a single hard-working farmer stripped of his land by feudal exploitation, but a very particular postcolonial Indian story, in which Shambhu's dispossession is caused much by pre-modern landholding structures as by modern-day legal injustice (perhaps you'll hear the mocking laughter of the lawyers in the courtroom scene, as the non-literate Shambhu's oral calculation of his dues is superseded by the zamindar's duplicitous figures, for which Shambhu's own fingerprints become legal 'evidence'). Perhaps you'll see that this is a film as much about the city as the village, and that while it pinpoints the shortages and shortcuts that already marked the lives of India's urban poor, it is also, like the early cinema of Raj Kapoor, KA Abbas and others, filled with the warmth of nascent urban communities. Perhaps you'll see, like the great Chittaprosad did, that as crucial as the film's adult tragedies are the moral dilemmas of Shambhu's little boy Bachhua (played by Ratan Kumar, a much-favoured child actor of the time, who was soon to be seen polishing shoes again in Prakash Arora's 1954 film Boot Polish, produced by Raj Kapoor). Perhaps you will notice the film's depiction of 1950s Calcutta, with its white colonial buildings gleaming in the sunlight and its neon signs for Kodak and Polar and Castrol and KC Das glittering through the nights, and the poor homeless people who sleep under them – and think about whether the city currently suffering the debilitating effects of Cyclone Amphan is any different.

Bimal Roy, who had begun his career as a camera assistant at Calcutta's New Theatres, moved to Bombay in the early 1950s with a team of talented crew members that included such future stalwarts as Salil Choudhury and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. He had already made his directorial debut in Bengali with Udayer Pathe, which Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen describe in their Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema as “introducing a new era of post-WW2 romantic-realist melodrama that was to pioneer the integration of the Bengal school with that of De Sica”.

Do Bigha Zamin, Roy's Hindi debut, was crucial to continuing that trajectory, and it is unsurprising that it took him back to Calcutta. The film reveals a very particular constellation of influences, reflective of the time and the people who came together in it. The core idea, of a peasant robbed of his small plot by an avaricious zamindar, came from a Rabindranath Tagore poem in Bengali, called 'Dui Bigha Jomi'. The poem was turned into a short story by Salil Choudhury, which also formed the basis of Satyen Bose's Bangla film called Rickshawala. Choudhury's story was reworked into a 24-page screenplay by Hrishikesh Mukherjee (also credited as Editor and Assistant Director), which became a Hindi film with the assistance of Paul Mahendra's Hindi dialogues.

The IPTA connections were also important here. Launched in 1943, the Indian People's Theatre Association was informally affiliated to the Communist Party of India, and had links with the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). It was a nationwide network composed of travelling musical and theatre groups focused on reclaiming and working with vernacular folk traditions in various parts of the country, particularly Bengal, Telengana, Kerala, and later also Assam, Punjab, Orissa and urban centres like Mumbai. “For a brief period following WW2 and in the early years of independence,” write Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, “virtually the entire cultural intelligentsia was associated with or influenced by IPTA/PWA activities...”. Salil Choudhury was a self-taught composer who had been a peasant activist in Bengal, and began his musical journey scoring for IPTA plays. Bimal Roy's own Udayer Pathe also drew heavily on IPTA style. Sahni, too, was a regular IPTA actor, and had previously played a peasant in the IPTA-backed film Dharti Ke Lal (1947).

The Tagore poem does not contain the spectre of the factory as the zamindar's reason for land-acquisition. In it, the dispossessed farmer becomes a mendicant's assistant. But the film -- informed as much by Vittorio De Sica's visuals of a father-son duo grappling with the city in Bicycle Thieves as by the Indian left's understanding of the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation -- turned its protagonist into a rickshaw-puller on the streets of Calcutta. 

The first part of a two-part column. The second part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 May 2020. 

Faces in the crowd

My Mirror column (17 May 2020):

As we are schooled ever more to view India's labouring poor as an undifferentiated mass, Kamal K.M.'s I.D. and Geethu Mohandas's Liar's Dice help us see our co-citizens in their individual humanity.

A still from Kamal K.M.'s film I.D., in which an upper middle class migrant is forced to think about the life of a poorer one

“A painter came to this house. I did not even ask his name. I mean, who does, right?”

The young female protagonist who says these words in the thought-provoking 2012 film I.D. is speaking to a male friend, who has to strain to understand what she’s on about – and not just because they’re in the midst of a raucous party. “I don't get you,” he responds at one point. Even to Charu (Geetanjali Thapa), her own words feel like the verbal equivalent of a shrug. There is a niggling sense that she could have done better – but following close behind is an attempt to reassure herself, that her lack of interest in the working class man who came to her upper middle class apartment wasn’t out of the ordinary.

The opening scenes of Kamal KM’s astutely crafted film have already established Charu as an ordinary member of her class and gender. She is a migrant, too, but that status does not mark her. Having moved to Mumbai recently from her home state of Sikkim, she shares a rather nice three bedroom apartment in Andheri with two other women her age. We hear her telling a friend on the phone that she has already booked a new car, though we know she’s still at the interview stage for a telecom marketing job. Meanwhile, through the glass walls of her bedroom, we see a city brimming with construction and labour. One man leads a buffalo through the streets, another kneels on the road to repair his auto, yet another carts eggs on a bicycle. Two urchins make a possibly obscene gesture as a young woman in a form-fitting dress climbs into her car.

When a man arrives to repaint a wall in the house, Charu lets him in, a little grudgingly, asking only one question: how much time will the work take? She is not exactly rude, but she displays the wariness that the upper middle class, likely upper caste Indian woman has internalised about the poor or lower middle class man. When the painter squats beside her to help her pick up some broken glass, she is standoffish. She does not offer him water until he asks. When she hears a thud, her first instinct is to tiptoe out of her bedroom looking for signs of violence, as if she fears a dacoity or worse. So distant does she feel from this stranger's humanity that she can't bring herself to touch him to revive him. She doesn't even think to sprinkle water on his face. Instead her only instinct is to call for help – the aunty downstairs that she has never before spoken to, the old security guard whom she has never before accompanied to the roof where he has to go each time the building lift misbehaves.

Gitanjali Thapa sets out to trace an unknown man's identity in I.D.

But the painter has fallen unconscious in her presence, and Charu is now the only person who can take him to a hospital, pay the bill, file a police report. She begins to feel compelled to find out who the man is, so she can inform someone who knew him. From inquiring after this nameless man at the labourers’ naka near her home, to following the contractor home when he stops taking her calls, to following a possible lead to the desperately filthy lanes of the Mankhurd slum he might possibly have lived in, Charu becomes our route into the beeping, blinking city whose SOS signals she – like all of us reading this paper – have learnt to keep switched off.

A still from Liar's Dice, India's official entry to the Oscars in 2013.

I.D. is about how extraordinary circumstances force one woman out of her ordinary privileged cocoon, from suspicion to empathy. Another woman is forced out of a different cocoon in Liar’s Dice (2013), India’s official entry to the Oscars that year. Also starring Geetanjali Thapa and produced by JAR Pictures (in association with whom the Kochi-based Collective Phase One produced I.D.), Geethu Mohandas’s pensively framed road movie views the migrant labourer in the city from the other end of the telescope. Thapa won a National Award for her role as Kamala, a barely-literate woman who leaves her Himachali village to search for her construction worker husband who hasn’t answered his phone for five months. Mohandas makes us painfully aware of the dangers the outside world poses to a woman like Kamala, forcing her to rely on a stranger. The limping, unkempt Nawazuddin (played with relish by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) has a taciturn, unreliable presence: himself a possible threat that Kamala must bet on. The film could have been better written, and banks too much on a cherubic child actor (Manya Gupta) and a baby goat for charm and watchability. It also turns a predictable cinematic gaze on Old Delhi, all rickshaws and dingy hotel rooms bookended by picturesque shots of street performers and the Jama Masjid.

But it works as a companion piece to I.D., both films bringing into focus the India we consider normal – in which a man can simply disappear, with no-one held responsible for what happened to him. As even our existing labour laws are suspended in state after state, with governments using the pandemic as a cover for less regulation and oversight of working conditions, the lives of our nameless, faceless co-citizens are being pushed ever more out of sight. I.D. and Liar’s Dice give us a rare chance to start seeing.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 May 2020

Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone

My Mirror column (10 May 2020):

As India's labouring poor are locked into cities and die tragically in their unaided attempts to get home, Muzaffar Ali's 1978 migrant classic Gaman acquires new layers of meaning.

In an early scene in Gaman, a hesitant Ghulam Hasan (Farooque Shaikh) gets off a train at VT Station and manages to find his way to the jhopadpatti that appears to be his childhood friend Lallulal's (Jalal Agha) Mumbai address. He pauses beside a group of young men chatting by the roadside. “Sunoh bhaiyya,” says Ghulam softly, his tongue still travelling along the slow perlocutionary path of his native UP village. “Woh kya hai ki kya Lallulal Tiwari yahan rehta hai?” 

The retort is quick and stinging, and the word now jumps out at us, an untranslated social footnote that will not be suppressed: “Apun tumko bhaiyya dikhta hai?”

One of the others deigns to direct the lost newcomer to the tin-roofed shanty (“third gali after the municipal toilet”) that the affable Lallu shares with several other men, and Ghulam quickly becomes one of its occupants. But Muzaffar Ali's 1978 directorial debut, a film made three years before his much more famous Umrao Jaan, never lets his viewers forget that this rickety roof over their heads is both temporary and tenuous. Shelter in the big city is so precious a thing that Lallu's labelling of it as his “Taj Mahal” is both a bad joke and thoroughly heartfelt. And the emotion only heightens through the film, as Lallu and his sweetheart Yashodhara (Gita Siddharth, of Garm Hava fame) yearn ever more for a place of their own so they can marry, while even the rented kholi is threatened with demolition.

For Ghulam though, it is the village home he has left behind that calls out to him, in the shape of letters bringing news of his ailing mother and his lonely wife Khairun (Smita Patil), whose face drifts up from his memories and looms large over the cityscape that he learns gradually to traverse. Aided by older men from his native region, so-called bhaiyyas, Ghulam becomes, like Lallu, a taxi driver in Mumbai. The film is full of shots of Shaikh in a taxi, his sad eyes seeing but not quite seeing the urban crowd he is now part of. “Hiyan bheed ka kauno hisaab naahi,” as he tells Lallu wonderingly.

Muzaffar Ali's use of songs is perhaps his most affective talent, and it is powerfully evident here. In the picturisation of the film's magisterial anthem of urban desolation “Seene mein jalan, aankhon mein toofan sa kyun hai/ Is sheher mein har shakhs pareshaan-sa kyun hai? (Why does the heart burn, why is there a storm in my eyes/ Why is everyone troubled in this city?)”, our gaze travels past blocks and blocks of urban housing, and cars seen from above, like unending queues of ants, and we hear Shahryar's line: “Ta-had-e nazar ek bayabaan sa kyun hai?” “Why is there a wilderness as far as the eye can see?”

One of Gaman's achievements as a film about the migrant experience is that the distance between the village and the city feels insurmountable, despite the technologies that bridge the two. That feeling is gestured to in the film's very first shot, when a letter is being laboriously typed with one finger (on a typewriter that, in one of those surreal moments that populate the watching of so much in 2020, bears the brand-name Corona), and the camera moves up from there to the telegraph lines that stretch across a bucolic rural landscape. A great deal of screen time is spent on trains and buses – and at moments of particular emotion, Ali inserts a distant shot of a plane in the sky, like some imagined modern-day pigeon-post of the heart.

Conditions of labour and lack of money make it nearly impossible for the poor migrant to go back home, even when nothing is ostensibly stopping him. In the third month of a shockingly unplanned and heartlessly implemented lockdown, when lakhs of India's working poor are being forcibly kept from going back home, Gaman's final sequence bears a terrible new weight. Farooque Shaikh bundles up his few belongings in his lovely old-style trunk (the objects of the feudal Awadh village were still beautiful) and arrives at VT, hoping to depart as spontaneously as he had arrived. But more than half the money he has saved in a year will go on just the journey home, he thinks, and his feet stop where they are. We leave him standing behind the collapsible gate that enters the platform, locked down in the city while his mind climbs onto the train, over and over.

I'd like to end this column with another moment from Gaman, when Ghulam is actually on a train. He and Lallu are going to meet Yashodhara. They are already late when the train suddenly stops. What happened, asks Ghulam the newbie. Must be an accident, says Lallu. It turns out a man has been killed under the train’s wheels. “The bus would have been faster,” says Lallu. “Yahi gaadi mili thhi marne ke liye! (Did he have to choose this train to die under?)” rues another man. “Patri se hataane ka aur gaadi start karne ka. Passenger log ka kaahe ko time barbaad karne ka (Get him off the tracks and start the train. Why waste the time of passengers?)” says a third voice.

Ghulam looks distraught. “Wait and watch,” says Lalloo. “You’ll get used to it like all of us.”

Watching Gaman in mid-2020, it feels sickeningly clear that all of us are now passengers, whose time can’t be wasted on mourning those the train rolls over. The numbers rise every day.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 May 2020.

Isolated incidents

My Mirror column (3rd May 2020):

Placebo takes a personal deep dive into one of India's premier medical colleges and comes up with a disturbing, affecting vision of where we’re headed.

In 2011, a young filmmaker made a visit to his younger brother Sahil, who was studying to be a doctor at India’s premier medical college, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. It was the time of the annual college festival, Pulse, and as happens during ‘fest’ season, enthusiasms and emotions were running high. Before the night was over, Sahil had been admitted to hospital, with his right arm so badly damaged that he would not be able to return to the hostel for three months. The twist, though, is what made the tale possible: Abhay, the filmmaker brother, didn’t go home with Sahil. He decided to stay on his brother’s hostel instead, gradually inserting himself in – and his handycam is – into life on the AIIMS campus. And so began the dark, dark cinematic ride that is Placebo.

Free to stream on YouTube, Placebo is a strange and vivid film, combining special effects, hand-drawn black and white animation, found footage and still photographs with Abhay Kumar's footage. The 96 minutes that we finally see on screen apparently draws on 800 hours of footage, and the filmmaker edited 80 different versions before finalising this one. That process sounds terrifying. The film is a little less so – but not by much.

Placebo is a film about many aspects of the Indian present seen through a sharply angled lens: education, privilege, individualism, community, institutional failure and our failures as a society. Kumar starts by pointing to the competition that these students have dealt with to reach these peeling hostel buildings. According to a statistic cited in the film, MIT has an admittance rate of 9 per cent, and Harvard (the university, I'm assuming, not the medical school) has one of 7 per cent. The rate for AIIMS’s is 0.1 per cent.

Kumar’s voiceover repeatedly emphasises the 'brightness' of these students, and they mirror his framing, telling stories that reveal their sense of achievement in having, as we say in North Indian slang, “cracked” the medical entrance. But watching these nerdy young men talk about girls or play music or collapse in laughter after a doobie or a round of bhang pakoras consumed appropriately on Mahashivratri, what one is struck by is precisely how ordinary their desires are. They seem like any other 23-year-olds, with the same fears and desires and anxieties as young men everywhere – just bearing a heavier weight of academic/professional expectation, without the emotional or therapeutic support structure needed to deal with the pressure. Those who break, the film shows, are not helped to mend themselves. The cracks are papered over, and the fragments swept under a carpet.

All that the Indian educational system seems to have given these young men is the heady sensation of entering an elite. The path from AIIMS could take them on to a well-paying career as a doctor, or a powerful position in the Indian civil services, or to more specialised medical research in India, but more desirably in the USA. There is ambition aplenty – but even among the four or five students that Placebo keeps in fairly tight focus, there is no sense of a vocation.

There's Sethi, a fair North Indian chikna hero type who says his greatest desire is to “look good naked” – “like the guy in American Beauty”. He categorises the species called girls into different colours: “There are orange girls, there are green girls”, and the one who got away, “she was so white”. Sethi wants to be confident enough to ask out girls in America. Getting to America is his second ambition after getting to AIIMS.

There's the tall, bespectacled, pudgy-faced Saumya Chopra, who begins his AIIMS life terrified of ragging but becomes the senior who's suspended for two months in 2008 after a Supreme Court judgement makes the authorities crack down on ragging incidents. There's a tangent here that the film doesn't follow, about how our educational culture is so toxic and so isolating that ragging was the only way to forge intergenerational connections.

There's K, the most meditative of the lot, whose self-reflection does not in fact help him deal with his inner demons. “The respect I have for the word doctor is far more than the respect I have for me as a doctor,” K tells Abhay.

Ostensibly at the other end of that spectrum is someone like Saumya, who's only answer to why he wants to be a doctor is “My parents want me to be a doctor.” “What do you want?” asks the filmmaker. “Whatever my parents want,” comes Saumya's reply. “Our life is a debt to our parents... You can't pay it back ever but one must try at least.”

Saumya's words reminded me of another young Indian captured on camera in a documentary: a Durga Vahini leader-in-the-making called Prachi Trivedi, in Nisha Pahuja's superb 2014 film The World Before Her, who says she would do whatever her father wanted, because she was eternally grateful to him for not having aborted her as a female foetus.

This idea that our earthly existence is essentially beholden to our parents feels chilling to me, and will do to many who see human beings as free-standing individuals. Yet the flip side of that individuation is also a chilling aspect of Placebo, and particularly resonant in these solitary, socially distanced times. As K says to the filmmaker: “Even though we have been talking for so many months, you and me, we're isolated, that is a fact.”

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but perhaps also a self-fulfilling one.

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 May 2020. You can watch the film for free, here.

Art stops at nothing

A short feature for India Today magazine.

Displaying work created during the lockdown, a virtual initiative proves the pandemic won’t stymie art.

As the weeks of India’s coronavirus lockdown dragged into months, many of those privileged enough to isolate started to chafe at the bit. But not artists. Almost all those involved in Art Alive Gallery’s #ArtForHope initiative confess that their working lives are less disrupted than most people’s. Virus or no virus, visual artists are so used to days spent in splendid isolation that they exhibit few signs of cabin fever.

Many of the senior names, Krishen Khanna (b. 1925), Maite Delteil (b. 1933), Sakti Burman (b. 1935), Gopi Gajwani (b. 1938) and Jogen Chowdhury (b.1939), had already retreated from the hubbub of gallery openings and art fairs. They are devoting themselves to work with enviable focus and often childlike enthusiasm. Gajwani, for instance, has been drawing after many years, describing these solitary times with impish humour. In one of his drawings, a man at his window ignores a curious crow and an expectant dog. In another, a man has tied himself into a knot: a large ball of thread that rolls on even as he tries to unravel it. In a third, a painter baulks at the sight of his own easel, like it is a mirror.

Others, too, speak of the lockdown as a time of greater reflection. “As artists, we like our solitude,” painter Jayasri Burman says on the phone. “Yes, first I was confused, I was crying. What is this coronavirus? What will happen? Artistically, I responded as I had during the tsunami and 9/11. I started making abstract drawings. They’re like my private diary. I might show that work some day, but not now.” Burman, who draws on the Indian epics and myths for her jewel-like canvases filled with dreamy women, says she settled down when the Navaratras began. “I painted Durga, who is important to me. Then I came back to my Dharitri, the universe,” she says. Like her goddesses who often shelter other creatures even as they are themselves sheltered, by the multi-headed Shesh Nag, trees filled with birds, or cornucopias of lotuses, her current work is a world map on a sea of blue, protected by mandala-like rings of ducks and fish. “Nature is now protesting. And she decides how she will clean up,” Burman says. “All we can do is maintain harmony and try to improve. Humans need to learn that you cannot take any panga with nature.”

Several artists have responded to the unseeable threat by envisioning the virus. Kolkata-based Chandra Bhattacharya, who speaks of a constant “uneasy feeling” during these months, offers up the image of a man emerging from a tunnel, a flaming blue torch in his hand, the virus blooming, or being conquered?

Debasish Mukherjee’s series of inky blobs with ragged edges seem to suggest the virus is embodied in other human beings: now faceless, now utterly real.

Jogen Chowdhury extends his distinctive visual vocabulary of men and beasts to create drawings in which the human figure cowers in the face of a demonic presence that is all claws and tongues.

But in ‘Corona Vs Man-Man Vs Corona I’, the creature who holds up the virus for examination has turned into a beast himself, ridges running down his back.

US-based Tara Sabharwal, who is recovering from (untested) pneumonia, has been doing ink drawings of “menacingly beautiful cellular creatures in armour, with jelly-like frightened interiors”.

“The way to keep hope alive is to actually feel this moment... It is so heavy, it gets one down. But to run away from it would be to not be able to go to the next step,” says Sabharwal.

SIDEBAR: "THIS IS NOT A WAR"
 

Krishen Khanna is 95 and still paints daily. “It’s like a demon inside me that wants it,” he says on the phone. “I have been through more than one migration, seen how people are forced to live in new situations. And this is not new, pushing people around: think Tughlaq. But this is probably the worst.”

Born in Faisalabad in what is now Pakistani Punjab, Khanna was a schoolboy in England during World War II and his vivid memories of war and Partition offer sobering comparison and perspective.

“The people in charge are still talking of winning the “battle” against coronavirus. As if it is a war. But it is not. This is our overreach. We are the sole generators of this. There is a need for re-examination of the human spirit.”

Published in India Today magazine, 6 June 2020.

The Krishen Khanna sidebar appeared in the same spread, in print. 

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.