Shamshad Begum: Obit

There was a time in the history of Hindi cinema when the singer was the song, when the persona of the singer did not exist;the listener heard and was entranced by the song and its words. We have moved a long way from that age of self-effacing artistes. Reality TV and live shows have brought the singer centre stage and made the singer a 'performer' in a manner that playback singers of yore could never have dreamt of.

 

Nothing illustrates this better than the recent death of Shamshad Begum at the age of 94 on 23 April at a suburban hospital in Mumbai. Shamshad Begum who made her debut as a radio artiste and went on to steal millions of hearts with a voice that was as remarkable as it was powerful, died unsung and largely unknown.

 

Perhaps it is one of the ironies of fate that at a time when Hindi cinema is celebrating its centenary with a series of high-octane, eyeball-grabbing extravaganzas many of its stalwarts continue to live on the fringes of popular consciousness and die - when not in abject poverty and hardship - certainly without any of the benefits that today's stars take very much for granted. Coming from a conservative family, Shamshad chose to shy away from the camera yet could not hide her light under a bushel when it came to her stunningly formidable voice. Over the decades, while her numerous songs continue to be aired, she herself remained unrecognised.

 

In her heyday, as a playback singer, such was the range and depth of her voice that every note she sang was distinct from that of her near-contemporaries such as the Mangeshkar sisters and Geeta Dutt. Perhaps that is why she has sung songs for the heroine as well as the vamp, the village belle as well as the courtesan. The duet she sang with Mohammad Rafi for the film CID (1956) - Leke pehla pehla pyar - is redolent with the fervour of young love. Then there is the qawwali from Mughal-e-Azam : Teri mehfil mein qismat aazma kar hum bhi dekhenge (sung with Lata Mangeshkar) that is remembered even today for its archness and coquetry. Another of her songs still enjoyed in its remixed version is Kajra mohabbatwala akhiyon mein aisa dala sung with Asha Bhonsle for Kismat (1968); like several of Shamshad Begum's songs this too was composed by O P Nayyar, who possibly knew better than most how to use this powerful voice in the matrix of popular Hindi cinema.

Some of her other songs that were a rage in their time and are still remembered include: Milte hi aankhen dil hua deewana kisi ka with Talat Mahmood for Babul; Chali chali kaisi yeh hawa chali with Usha Mangeshkar for Bluff Master; Kabhi aar kabhi paar laga teer-e-nazar for Aar Paar; O gadiwale gadi dhirey haank re and Holi aaye re Kanhai for Mother India. As anyone who remembers this 'golden era' of Hindi film songs will vouch, if there was the alhadpana (playfulness) of a gurgling brook in Boojh mera kya naam re there was also the sombreness of Naina bhar aye neer, the entreaty of Nazar phero na humse and the poignancy of Chod babul ka ghar in Shamshad Begum's oeuvre. Then there were also the romantic duets such as the one with Kishore Kumar, Meri neendon main tum, mere khwabon mein tum, that effortlessly conjured a far-off world

 

Years later, it is hard to imagine Saiyan dil mein aana re from the film Bahar or the evergreen hit Mere piya gaye Rangoon, wahan se kiya hai telephoon from Patanga sung by anyone else but Shamshad Begum. Or, Reshmi salwar kurta jaali ka...

 

The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam: A Review

Every now and then you read a book that surprises you by its combination of contraries. No matter how rich a lode of raw material a writer may have struck, nor how vast or variegated a canvas he may have appropriated, regardless even of how talented or dedicated he might be, he evokes exasperation rather absorption in his reader. Not consistently, not always but every now and then, sometimes every few pages but enough to make you put down the book, and pick it up again through sheer dint of will power. For, I must confess, were it not for the purpose of writing this review I would have abandoned Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden after the first 50-odd pages. I must also confess that the loss would have been mine. For all its ponderousness and portentousness, The Blind Man’s Garden, hides within it a story that was waiting to be told.

Shortly after the American bombing of Afghanistan, we had heard of the countless Pakistanis who volunteered to help the victims of the west’s ‘war on terror’; some crossed the porous border into Afghanistan, others flocked to shelters and refugee camps to help the waves of Afghan refugees who sought safe haven on Pakistan soil. But save for stray newspaper reports, largely one-sided depending on where or by whom they were being published,  no substantial account emerged of the compulsions of those who offered help, of what they saw and experienced, let alone the reception they met at the hands of the ‘victims’. In this, his fourth novel, Nadeem Aslam takes off from his previous book, The Wasted Vigil, which had dealt with the depravity and horrors of Taliban territory. In fact, all of Aslam’s literary offering have been marked by the confrontation of the East and the West, the Islamophobia that has gripped the West and the murder and mayhem unleashed by the events of 9/11.

‘History’ is the third parent,’ so begins The Blind Man’s Garden as it sets off to explore the flawed marriage between politics and religion. It is October, a month after the attacks on the Twin Towers. American forces have launched a military offensive; the buildings, orchards and hills of Afghanistan are being bombed, for an aggrieved America has decided that there can be ‘no innocent people in a guilty nation’. Rohan and his son, Jeo, travel from Heer, an imaginary town somewhere in Pakistan, to Peshawar where the wounded and injured are being brought in. Mikal, Rohan’s foster son and the son of Communist arrested and never seen again, is also planning to offer help; while Jeo is a third-year medical student, Mikal works at a gun repair shop where a day after the West invaded Afghanistan a ‘piety discount’ is being offered to those who wish to buy an AK 47 to go to jihad. Jeo and Mikal cross the border and are promptly sold to the Taliban; they find themselves amidst a ragtag army of jihadis from the wider Muslim world: Egyptians, Algerians, Saudis, Yemenis, Uzbeks and Chechens. Jeo is killed shortly thereafter in an American attack on a Taliban fortification and a grievously wounded Mikal taken prisoner by a warlord ‘who cut off the trigger finger on each of his hands and nailed the two pieces to a doorframe along with those taken from dozens of other captives.’

What follows is an unimaginable litany of horrors: A game called ‘Nail’ where a captive is asked his age; if the boy says twelve, he is raped by twelve men, if he says fourteen, then fourteen men are sent to him all of whom keep shouting ‘Nail! Nail! Nail” as they go about brutalising him. Desperate parents of captive boys who sell off a kidney to pay the ransom seekers who may be defeated or banished Taliban, al-Qaeda gangs or rogue warlords.  A room filled with the rubble of the broken Buddha and his companions. A graveyard of vandalised Russian helicopters, MiGs and Hinds covered with lichens. Blood-thirsty bandits bartering their prisoners for ransom, or failing that putting them to hard labour like galley slaves from an ancient age. With all the solemn ponderousness of a church bell, Aslam’s voice pierces through the veils of dispassionate reporting as, for instance, when he observes:

‘The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence, and cold-blooded murder. With war. The man [a warlord] must earn millions of dollars for guarding the NATO supply convoys as they pass through his area, and for the militia he must have raised to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers alongside American Special Forces.’

Interspersed with the brutalities of a war-ravaged land and horrifying vignettes of a people desensitised by a relentless, never-ending chaos and carnage, is a tender love-story – between Mikal and Naheed, Jeo’s widow. Mikal, who reminded me constantly of Ayn Rand’s iconic protagonist, Howard Roark, because of his self-destructive idealism, who has come to Afghanistan to fight a holy war, instead finds himself wounded and enslaved, brutalised and humiliated, trapped and sold for $5000 to the Americans. Through a series of incongruous twists and turns – no less incongruous than the war that has devastated countless lives – Mikal rescues an American stranger. In the end, while the American is rescued and spirited away in a Chinook helicopter Mikal’s own fate is left ambiguous. ‘Damaged and scarred, he is still perfect’; he appears as a ghost to convince Naheed, the love of his life, to continue with her life without him. Aslam’s last words are moving and prophetic: ‘The insects weave a gauze of sound in the air. She moves towards him and her eyes are full of a still intensity – as though aware of the unnamed, unseen forces in the world, and attempting in her mind to name and see them.’ Perhaps, it is these unnamed unseen forces that govern history and the complex weave of time and circumstance.

Notice about Next Hindustani Awaaz Event -- Talk by S M Ashraf on Mera Safar

I am pleased to invite all the next talk in the monthly series: 'Why It Speaks to Me'.

Syed Muhammad Ashraf, Commissioner Income Tax and an award-wining short story writer, will speak on Mera Safar by Ali Sardar Jafri. He will tell us why, from all that he has read, this particular poem 'speaks' to him.

Mera Safar opens with these lines:

Phir ek din aisaa aaega

aankhon ke diye bujh jaaenge

haathon ke kanval kumhalayenge

aur barg-e-zabaan se nataq-va-sadaa kii

har titlii uD jaaegii

ik kaale samandar kii tah mein

kaliyon kii tarah se khilatii huii

phuulon kii tarah se hanstii huii

saarii shaklein kho jaayengii

Khuun kii gardish dil kii dhaDkan

sab rangiiniyaaN so jaayengii

Khud-garifta -- a review of Ijlal Majeed's stunning new book

Zehra Nigah, the pre-eminent poet today, once made a very interesting observation in the course of a conversation during one of her frequent Delhi visits. She pointed out for me how, the majmua-e-kalam of even some of  the greatest poets have a lot of padding or fluff; she used the delightfully colloquial but apt description: bharti ke sher, alluding to the unevenness that is inevitable and therefore taken as a matter of course while reading a diwan or majmua from cover to cover. It is a rare poet, indeed, she said who exercises enormous self-restraint and is capable of a rigorous self-edit to publish a collection of his or her poetry. I was reminded of Zehra Apa’s words when I first glimpsed through Ijlal Majeed’s debut collection of poetry, entitled Khud-garifta. A slender volume, no more than 140-odd pages, there is nothing here that can remotely be described as fluff. Certainly no bharti ke sher whatsoever mar the evenness of tone and the immaculate, even stringent selection of what goes, and what stays back.

A writer of both the ghazal and nazm since the 1970s, Ijlal sahib has chosen only ghazals for this selection. Such nafasat, too, is rare for the modern poet seldom makes so stern a distinction between the two; Ijlal sahib does so on grounds of lehja and mizaj. He says the two are completely different in the ghazal and the nazm. In fact, his own lehja, his own idiom is far removed from the conventions of the Urdu ghazal. His choice of words and images is starkly modern. As he himself says:

            Badsaleeqa, lu-ubali, baavla, phakkad mizaj

            Ab use jo chahe kah lein who magar achcha laga

And elsewhere:

            Kiss-kiss jatan se jisko kiya tha kabhi shikaar

            Khwabon mein ab bhi chawkrhi bharta hai woh hiran

A retired Professor of History at the Saifia College, Bhopal, Ijlal sahib has been known and well regarded as a poet as his poetry and essays on poetry have been published in both Urdu and Hindi. In Bhopal -- the city of enlightened Begums who nurtured literature, among a circle of connoisseurs and rasiks who can be best described as a latter-day ‘Halqa-e-arbab-zauq’ – Ijlal sahib has enjoyed a reputation as a ba-zauq person and a poet for over five decades. When I meet him for the launch of his book in Bhopal (launched, incidentally, by another ‘son of Bhopal’, Javed Akhtar), I ask Ijlal sahib the reason for this kam-goi. For a person known as a poet to publish his first collection at the age of 74 is unusual in ange when every nausikhiya poet is in a hurry to publish. Ijlal sahib tells me that while he has always read and reflected and ruminated on poetry, literature and the arts, for long periods of time he ceased to think of himself as a poet: ‘Sirf tab likha jab kuch kehne ko hua.’ Giving a glimpse into the oceon of loneliness that lies within every creative person, he writes:

            Ek ek kar ke uddh gaye panchchi

            Khud-garift chattan tanha hai

Literature is understood to mirror social realities. To what extent is Urdu poetry, especially the ghazal, capable of reflecting this reality, with all its violence, contrariness and extremes, I ask him? While, no doubt, the Urdu poet has wrenched himself free from the limitations of the time-honoured ghazal format and freed himself of the classical repertoire of shama-bulbul-parawana, can the ghazal reflect contemporary reality? Can it say as much or as freely as the nazm can, I ask Ijlal sahib. While he agrees that the nazm enjoys far greater freedom, the ghazal can nevertheless allude to many things; it can, for instance, give ample express to the angst, alienation and exclusion that is such an integral part of the modern-day reality:

            Dariya chadha to paani nashebon mein bhar gaya

            Abke bhi barishon meon apna hii ghar gaya

Another remarkable quality about some of the ghazals included in Khud-garifta, is the compactness of the metre; while no poet myself, I believe the chhoti behr ki ghazalein demand that much more brevity and compression from a poet than one with a more languid metre. As for instance:

Udti chiriya ka saya hai

            Main samjha patthar aaya hai

            Ik girti deewar girakar

            Apne bheetar kuchch dhaya hai

 

            Khod ke hamne in teelon ko

Kya khoya kya paya hai

Published by Yatra Books in both Devnagri and Urdu, Khud-garifta brings to the fore a fresh, ‘new’ voice; the fact that it is not new at all, and that the poet has been active and well-known in the Hindi-Urdu circles of Bhopal tells us how provincialism has become the bane of good literature in modern times. One particular ghazal, written in 1979, has been known and loved by a select few for decades; yet it had to wait for a mainstream publisher to be placed before a larger audience:

            Shiryanon mein phire darinda

            Qaid mushaqqat sahe darinda

            Fursat mein kya kare darinda

            Ghaaron mein but gadhe darinda

            Patta-patta lahu bahaye

            Jhaadi-jhaadi chhupe darinda

            Purab-paschim wahi shikari

            Yaan nikle waan chhupe darinda

My Interview with Javed Akhtar, for Doordarshan

Here's a link to my interview with Javed Akhtar for Doordarshan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ3IGnK28Pk

This is an abridged version of an hour-long interview. Hope to post the longer version soon.

First Talk in the Hindustani Awaaz Series: Why Ghalib Speaks to Me by Prof Gopichand Narang

Friends,

Those of you who missed the first talk in the monthly series : Monthly Monologues: Why It Speaks To Me, here is a recording of the talk by Prof Gopichand Narang. He delivered the first talk in the series, called Why Ghalib Speaks to Me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y37fSNMZWVo&feature=share&list=UUITTtTqW0LGq51v1ywZQXhw

'I Don't believe in Destiny...' Shahnaz Husain

Flame: The Inspiring Life of My Mother Shahnaz Husain by Nelofar Currimbhoy, Hachette, 2012, Rs 295, pp. 236.

 

Engaged at 14, married at 16, mother to a little girl at 17, Shahnaz Husain’s life is an inspiration to those who passionately want to turn adversity into success. Losing has never been a choice for her nor has being anything less than successful; hitting upon the winning formula of age-old home-grown beauty cures has been a consuming passion for over four decades. The story of her life, told by her daughter Nelofar Currimbhoy, is as riveting as it is remarkable. Despite highs and lows, losses and gains, personal tragedies and professional triumphs, Husain’s life and career reveal her boundless courage and conviction and her relentless determination to face any challenge that comes her way. Her persona – always larger-than-life, as is amply reflected in her huge kohl-rimmed eyes, chunky jewellery, outsize sunglasses and crimson mane – is as compelling as the story of her life, making her products ‘Shahnaz Herbals’ indelibly associated in the mind of every user with their creator.

 

Currimbhoy, showing great promise in her first outing as a writer, reveals the innate qualities of a born story-teller. Having had a ringside view to her mother’s life and career, she studs her narrative with not only the enthusiasm of one who has watched this incredible story unfold but also the warmth of one who has loved unconditionally. The Shahnaz Husain that emerges from these pages is intelligent, driven, astute yet child-like, dreamy, glamorous, and yes, larger than life. Currimbhoy paints an intimate portrait of a woman who launched her multi-million dollar empire in a glazed verandah in a rented house in the summer of 1970. With little more than a frugal budget and endless reserves of energy and enthusiasm (not to mention a hugely supportive husband) Husain built, literally brick by brick (or more appropriately jar by jar and potion by potion) a range of treatment-based products that would soon take the world by storm. Keenly aware of the responsibility that comes with unquestioning love, she tells her mother’s story with panache and perception. Likening her mother (‘Mum’ as Currimbhoy calls her) to a flame, a flame that could not be doused by all of life’s storms, she refers to her mother as an ‘intensely free spirit’: ‘Every time a wave splashed on her, she rose again with an irrepressible – the energy of life and passion. How else would you explain the path she steered her life through?’

 

In a series of Chapters entitled ‘How the West was Won’, ‘When east Met west’, and ‘When the Future Came, She was Already There’, Currimbhoy gives a sampling of Husain’s astute business sense. Asked how her company would face up to the innumerable foreign brands flooding market, she narrates how her mother answered with complete nonchalance: ‘I don’t have to face them. They are coming to my country; they will have to face me.’ Speaking at Harvard, after attending President Obama’s summit of world entrepreneurs and taking in a short course on business management, Husain rued her lack of formal education (she dropped out of School at 16) but also asserted:

‘Would I have done it any better if I had come to Harvard at 16? I am not sure if I would have but I am sure of one thing – I would not have wished my career to be any different. Strangely, I have found that almost everything that was taught to me in my course, I have already applied over the years.’

 

A quintessential and intuitive entrepreneur, Husain and the Shahnaz Herbals model has been studied by marketing gurus the world over. What made a flourishing franchise of salons dispensing the signature Shahnaz Herbal products turn to building a distribution network from scratch? Primarily, the thriving grey market of fake Shahnaz products coupled with an overwhelming demand that the franchises could not meet. Commenting on this fortuitous serendipity Currimbhoy writes: ‘Shahnaz Herbals was an interesting example of a company that first created a market quite incidentally by remaining exclusive and then supplied an already existing demand.’