Mention Gulzar and what comes to mind even before his baritone, poems and the melodious songs, is the image of his signature crisp white shirt and trousers and his traditional mojris . Settling down to talk about his latest works — ‘Nindiya Chor’ and ‘Baaghbaan’ , translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems to Hindi — Gulzar glances at the city skyline from the seventh floor of Taj Krishna. “I come to Hyderabad every now and then. Bacchon ka tyohar (Children’s film fest on Children’s day) brings me here,” he says.
The story teller begins the conversation by narrating about his brush with Bengali, how it grew over the years to writing love letters in Bengali, meeting Satyajit Ray only to earn a compliment from him and how ‘The Mali’ from Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Gardener’ stayed with him from the time he first read it as a child. “Bengali is a very infectious language and my fascination for it kept growing. Our neighbour’s daughters used to tease my younger brother Lochan. They would say, ‘ Loche dal-bhaat khacche .’ Try spending two weeks at a stretch in Kolkata and your Hindi will become gol-gol ,” he guffaws.
He says his aim in translating Tagore’s works to Hindustani (he prefers to call Hindi as Hindustani) is to make them available to a wider section of readers, especially children. “Tagore wasn’t new for me as a child. We grew up with him because our school books included chapters on Tagore. As I grew, I began learning and speaking a word or two in Bengali and that increased my friends circle,” recollects Gulzar.
This fascination for the language grew further when he moved to Bombay and met people like “Shailen da, Debu da, Ruma (Kishore da’s first wife)...the language also took me to different Bengali poets at that time. At that young age I translated Subhash Mukhopadhyay for Urdu and Bengali magazines. I wanted to introduce the poems in my language because the form is totally different from that of traditional Urdu poems. However, the free verse resembles work of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The fascination with Tagore’s works remained, especially his early works. I read them all and still have them with me. Then, something else happened; when you fall in love with a Bengali girl and start writing prem-potro in Bengali. There can’t a better way of polishing and sharpening your Bengali,” he laughs.
Gulzar has also translated works of Basu Bhattacharya, Jibon Ananda Das and Shakti da (Chatterji). “Dabbling with Tagore was always scary. It happens with masters, with contemporary poets you know their vibes and their meaning. Tagore was different; his aura and the feel of his language was different,” he says. He owes the courage to getting down to translate to the encouragement of filmmakers like Asit Sen, Hemant Kumar. “Hemant da would give me a Bengali tune and ask me to write Bengali lyrics for it ‘ Maine kaha, isse toh translate nahi karni na. Unho ne bola nahi is tune pe likho .’
At that time Satyajit Ray was in Mumbai and Rishi da (Hrishikesh Mukherjee) said he wanted to see me. That is when Manikda (Satyajit Ray) told me about doing Gopi Gayan in Hindi. I was honoured. He wrote the songs by hand himself and gave it to me. I had to pass a test here. Manik da asked me what would be the Hindi translation for a song — ami sheedha shaadha Bangali , I translated it to hum to thehre seedha seadha dehati and Satyajit da was thrilled ; because for the Hindi remake of Gopi Gayan the song couldn’t have been seedha saadha Bangali . However, the project didn’t take off. What a master artist he was,” says Gulzar touching his ears in respect.
Gulzar feels school texts should have a lesson on Tagore because when he read his works to Shantanu Moitra and singers Shaan and Shreya Ghoshal, he realised Bengalis who moved away from Bengal have missed the connect with Tagore. “Shaan knew some poems because his father was a well know Bengali composer. I told Shantanu (Moitra) that he isn’t a pure Bengali because he doesn’t know Tagore. Tagore mercilessly edited his original poems into English. I appreciate the publisher Harper Collins’ attempts to bring out books with poems in Bangla, English and Hindustani. Translating one region’s works for another region has a beauty with an inborn connect. We might speak different languages but our culture and history is one. It’s high time books in Hindustani are brought out for children. I am not here forever, so I wanted to do the best for the coming generation,” he smiles.
