Saeed Akhtar Mirza hopes to furbish his Bandra writing room. For now, though, it is spartan. Only a desk and two chairs are conspicuous. The director of films such as Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai (1980) and Naseem (1995), Mirza says he doesn’t want to make films any more: “It’s a whole lot of hot air.” Having just released his third book, Memory in the Age of Amnesia , it does seem clear the 75-year-old has found a more suitable medium to convey his sometimes radical and disruptive thoughts.
Part-memoir, part-polemic, part-story, Memory... never pulls a punch. There’s much that’s wrong with the world, and Mirza refuses to respond to inequity with apathy. In his writing, and in person, he never resorts to fire or brimstone. His anger is palpable, yes, but his tone almost always stays even. He laughs when asked, “ Saeed Akhtar Mirza ko gussa kyoon aata hai ? (Why does Saeed Akhtar Mirza get angry?)” Gussa (anger), he says, is too strong a word. “The book is a cold-blooded reflection of our times. What angers me, though, is a diktat we follow — Thou shalt not think.”
Mirza’s book makes clear that collective amnesia is not just regrettable, it is also dangerous. In his second chapter, ‘The Gujarat Legacy’, he quotes Czech writer Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” For Mirza, the scar of the 2002 Godhra riots is permanent, and unlike the rest of India, it is one that he, a “liberal Sufi”, cannot ignore. “Memory brings a sense of morality in a fundamentally amoral world,” he says. “I don’t believe in a self-important morality, but I have faith in its critical element. It’s important to us and to the nation.”
In all that Mirza says, there is more candour, less abstraction. He says Narendra Modi had left the country with an unprecedented moral dilemma in 2014: “It’s like he was saying, ‘I’m a great administrator, but I’m also a mass murderer. What will you do now?’ Because of the 31% who voted for him, we’re now carrying the baggage of that mandate as a nation.” Only a few Indians think Godhra is important enough to risk bringing up publicly. Mirza is aware he is in a minority, but that does not deter him. “Those who voted for the BJP strongly believe Godhra should be forgiven and forgotten. They argue we must move on. But move on to what, I ask. We all live in the nation of a lie.”
The last nail
Mirza’s socio-political commentary isn’t belatedly principled. In Albert Pinto... , for instance, Albert finally acknowledges the discrepancies of capitalism after having suffered the grind of the class system. Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! (1984) took on India’s judiciary, and for Mirza, Joshi is still his ‘Samson’. He says, “That old man brought the whole bloody house down.”
According to him, though, the most relevant of his films is Naseem , his last released offering. Set in the months before the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, Mirza believes it was the last nail he had left to drill in the state’s coffin.
“I had written the epitaph of a nation,” says Mirza. “I wanted to say that poetry was dead. All we had was the reality of ‘ Mussalman ka ek hi sthan, Pakistan ya kabristan ’ (For Muslims, there is just one place, Pakistan or the graveyard.). Today, people claim to be shocked when they hear of Dadri and Mohammad Akhlaq. I had seen it coming. There are just so many clues scattered all across our history.”
The past, for all its folly, does seem like a place Mirza is sometimes happy to return to. He smiles when he speaks about Kaifi Azmi, for instance. The poet was so fond of Mirza, he agreed to play Naseem ’s protagonist even while he was ailing. “I first met him in 1978,” reminisces Mirza. “It was such a joy discussing poetry and literature with him. He was a rum drinker. “ Yeh khoon ke liye achha hai (It’s good for the blood),” he would say, and when I’d ask about my whisky, he’d say, “Not so much.”.”
Sadly, a number of those Mirza reminisces about are today no more. “I want to write a book on my friend Kundan Shah, but I don’t know where to begin.” Mirza laughs and adds, “He was an anarchist to the core, but he looked like a clerk. His aim was to take film to its most absurd level. As a result, you have Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983).”
Father and son
Shah and Mirza were classmates at Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). That’s where Ritwik Ghatak gave Mirza the idea that he should use ‘Akhtar’ as his middle name. “Dada was a great man, but a third-rate teacher. He once told us that if we’d become directors, our names should carry a lot of weight. So, Saeed Akhtar Mirza sounded right.”
In Ammi , Mirza’s first book, he writes letters to his mother. His third book, Memory... , he has dedicated to his screenwriter father Farhat Akhtar Mirza. He remembers him as “exceptionally well-read, incredibly sophisticated”. Mirza adds, “He introduced me to the work of Latin American and European writers. He taught me Urdu and Farsi. He was a renaissance man.” On his 12th birthday, Mirza remembers coming home to see a projector and other film equipment being unloaded off a van. All the neighbourhood’s children were in his living room. “My father told me I should watch all kinds of films if I enjoyed cinema, so, for a year, I got to see one classic every month.”
Though Farhat was a liberal, his son Saeed feels he could have stuck his neck out a little more. “He never liked my politics. He thought I was too much of a radical. He said, ‘Beware, because the world will thrash your faith out of you. They have done it before.’” In his fight against the world, however, Mirza has not yet buckled. Decades later, when his family would sing songs in turn, Mirza would always pick ‘Sixteen Tons’, a Merle Travis song about a coal miner’s struggles. “My two sons would always be embarrassed. They’d think I was old-fashioned. But then, around the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement, one of them heard it being sung in New York. He called me instantly.”
Getting away
In Memory... , Mirza picks his subjects from all across the world. Godhra worries him as much as Vietnam once did. He says, “I have not localised myself. I am an Indian, but I am also an internationalist.” The director-writer’s detachment from place is apparent even in his choice of home.
Angered by how the Shiv Sena has damaged Mumbai over the years, he spends a lot of time in Goa now. “I wanted to get away from all of this. If I didn’t, I’d keep gnashing my teeth and getting more frustrated,” he says.
When he is in the city, though, he often gets called on by groups of young filmmakers. “They come to me with their scripts and I help them out. But I always insist they don’t include my name in the credits. I might not be interested in making a film, but I’m still in touch with cinema,” he says, sipping coffee. The street makes his writing room noisy, but that won’t distract Mirza. Practically nothing does.
The author of How to Travel Light relies on books and pop culture for nourishment.
