89 autumns later, Gulzar retains the spring in his step and method in his writing. He devotes six hours every day to his literary pursuits.
None can match the poet’s choice of metaphors to convey the peculiarity of love, loss and longing. Effortlessly plucking at the heartstrings, Sampooran Singh Kalra has, over the years, transformed into the emotion called Gulzar. He was recently selected to be conferred with the Jnanpith, the country’s highest literary honour, for 2023.
Be it the celebration of a progressive thought not bound by ideology or conventional idiom, a reflection on changing social mores, a chit-chat with children or a deep dive into romance, Gulzar has given us a potli brimming with elegant verse.
Gulzar at the 2024 Jaipur Literature Festival | Photo Credit: PTI
Even recently, he was motivated to select and translate 365 poems from different languages in his latest work, A Poem A Day. During a conversation, students complained to him that they could not relate to the poetry in their syllabus. “Poetry is a living medium, as alive as the headlines of a newspaper. The problem is that in schools and colleges, we teach only classical poetry when the focus should be on contemporary writing. I promised to give them a poem a day that is relevant to the times we live in.”
A decade after the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke Award for his contribution to cinema, when Gulzar was named for the Jnanpith, it signalled recognition of his genteel yet resilient struggle for acceptance. “Sometimes, I felt that if I had not found success in cinema, nobody would have picked up my literary writing. But I kept at it and the prestigious award proves that I was wrong. Lagta hai meri kitabein suhagan ho gayin,” he says.
Purists might have taken time to give Gulzar his due, but his cinematic expression always possessed literary merit. “My work always had individuality. I don’t think anybody before me teased the moon with a phrase like ‘tohe rahu lage bairi’,” he says, referring to his first creation, ‘Mera gora ang laile’ for Bimal Roy’s Bandini (1963), where the protagonist, who is willingly getting sucked into darkness, strikes a conversation with the moon playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. She playfully curses it with a conjunction of Rahu — the shadow planet is supposed to bring ill-luck and cause eclipses.
Gulzar during the Jashn-e-Rakhta festival in New Delhi in 2016 | Photo Credit: CHANDAN KHANNA
“I had to feel like the character, but without the riyaaz of literature, this thought could not be expressed. Literature was my ground, literature was my soil where I ploughed my imagination and experiences. And the award feels like a farmer has found his kosha-e-gandum, the sheaf of wheat, or bajre da sitta, the pod of the pearl millet,” says the wordsmith.
The lyricist who famously didn’t go to receive the Oscar statuette for Jai Ho because “I didn’t have a black coat,” is keen to hold the Jnanpith’s bronze Saraswati. “I feel contented. Tasalli ho gayi.”
Reflecting on his long journey, Gulzar says: “Like my moustache and beard, at a certain age, shayari also grows on everybody. People learn to swim, I drowned myself in literature.” He insists there was no catalyst as such. “I studied in a school where the medium of instruction was Urdu. Our teacher Mahmood ur Rahman used to organise bait baazi competitions, where students had to recite the couplets of noted poets. At times, I would cheat by changing the first letter to meet the challenge given by the opposite team, but the master would intervene. It was his way to make us go beyond the prescribed text. The chura (flakes) of that poetry stayed somewhere inside me,” he elaborates.
Gradually, Gulzar learnt to separate the good couplets from the ordinary ones, and then started introducing his own. “When the teacher asked whose creation it was, I would feign ignorance.” That passion for literature soon turned Gulzar into a bookworm. It meant he would read not just Tagore and Shakespeare but also Jibanananda Das, Nazim Hikmet and W.H Auden.
“The fact that I studied poetry in different languages and from varied cultures helped me come up with words to express myself with confidence. For instance, a line of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock — the streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent — stayed with me and when I was writing a nazm to introduce Mirza Ghalib’s abode in Old Delhi, it came out as, ‘Ballimaran ke mohalle ki pechida dalilon si woh galiyan’.
When he starts writing, hundreds of idioms that Gulzar has read on the subject pass through the mind, he says. “The challenge is to keep them aside and say what you exactly feel. For instance, every poet sees the sunset differently. Fascinated by the colour of twilight, I would imagine if I could take that colour and rub it on the cheeks of my beloved.”
Gulzar also possesses a deep, soulful voice. He is aware of it and says he could have been a classical musician, but did not venture in that direction, because his family took time to understand his aesthetic makeup.
Gulzar at NCPA’s Bandish Festival | Photo Credit: NARENDRA DANGIYA
In Bombay, he came in touch with progressive authors such as Krishan Chander, Ali Sardar Jafri and Rajinder Singh Bedi, whose writing he admired as a student. However, he stayed away from any political umbrella. A humanist does not need one, he would say.
Gulzar feels everyday Indians do not stop with practising religious secularism, but harmony among languages is also a part of their collective consciousness.
In Bombay, he says: “I could hear five to seven different languages on the road, and did not resist any one of them.” It meant he could express the pangs of Partition and bureaucratic hurdles thus: ‘Aankhon ko visa nahin lagta...band aankhon se chala jaata hoon sarhad paar Mehdi Hasan se milne..’
Gulzar also believes in speaking his mind. He urges decision-makers to not be afraid of Firaq, Faiz and Dushyant. “Why are we not talking about Partition even 75 years after Independence? If we don’t, its ghost will continue to haunt us. Padhaiye! So that they live through it, understand better and let prejudices go out of the window.”
The poet says that even when people were fighting over linguistic identity in different parts of the country, the issues that were being tackled in the poetry of different regions were similar. “That way, we are culturally united. When the farmer suffers, his plight finds an echo in our poetry, when ‘Garibi Hatao’ was the slogan, we all reflected on it and when escapism was in trend, we all indulged in it unabashedly.”
Government awards and recognitions are often seen as a barter to buy the silence of the poet, but Gulzar says even if the entire world turns silent, poets will continue to speak their heart. “Yes, they might temper their choice of expression in the face of physical threat. That’s why I once said about the seemingly double-faced aspect of the poet: Bada bogla hai shakhs ye, koi aitbaar bhi kare to kya, naa to jhooth bole kavi khabi, na kabhi kahe wo khara khara. (How could one trust this man? Neither does the poet lie, not does he talk straight. When he cannot speak the bitter truth, he indulges in similes and metaphors).”
On the relevance of poetry in this post-truth age, Gulzar says civilisation is replete with this constant tension between the right and wrong, between the truth and falsehood. “So don’t give up hope. Like the blade of grass that needs just a crevice in the rock to sprout, poetry will find its way.”
