Seene Mein Jalan Aankhon Mein Toofan Sa Kyu Hai Is Sheher Mein Har Shaqs Pareshan Sa Kyu Hai...

THESE LINES KEEP reverberating in my mind and I can barely hear anything, even the cacophony of the autorickshaw I am in. “It’s all good,” I tell myself. “The noise will keep me distracted.” My autowalah talks of the heat; I nod in agreement. It is a hot day indeed. But at this moment, nothing matters. I am supposed to be at the Kotwara Studios by 11am; it is almost time. And I am nowhere close. I tell the autowalah that I have an interview. He wants to know if I am meeting a bada adami. I tell him, yes! I am meeting Muzaffar Ali. His blank look says it all. I ask him if he has seen Umrao Jaan. His face lights up—he has seen the movie and wanted to marry Rekha after it. We both laugh; I tell him I am meeting the man who made the film. My auto halts and we are here. I have managed to reach a little before time. As I enter the studio, pictures of Abida Parveen, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and a painting—Ali’s own creation—greet me. I am informed that “Sir is a little late.” I will have to wait for some time. I sit staring at the brown walls of the studio, thinking about the questions I want to ask, points I may have missed. Suddenly, there is a commotion. “Sir aa gaye hain,” says the man. Muzaffar Ali walks in. He is wearing a loose black shirt and grey cotton pants, his spectacles have been strategically placed on his forehead, his grey shoulder-length hair looks messy. He looks at me and smiles. At 67, he is a very attractive man. He has forgotten about the interview completely. I remind him about it and we move to the second floor, which is his film studio. Posters from Gaman, Umrao Jaan, Anjuman and Aagaman adorn its walls. From a wooden frame, Rekha stares at us; any time now we will hear her sing ‘In aankhon ki masti ke, afsaane hazaaron hain’. Moving away from the talking images, we sit in the second room, which looks like an old library. All his film scripts, storyboards and poetry books of his favourite poets Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Rumi, Shahryar and others are kept here. I have a clear list of questions in front of me yet I remain conflicted. Where do I start? His royal parentage or his films? His love for Sufi music or his paintings? Perhaps we could talk about fashion design? A similar feeling haunts me while writing the story. How do I start? I am not sure yet. I finally decide to tell his story the way a movie maker’s story should be told.

Opening Sequence...Lights...Camera... Action

SOME FORTY YEARS ago, in the green hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh, a young man of 20 sat discussing Faiz and Rumi with his friend on a high cliff—perhaps discussing these very lines. The man, a geology student who took up the subject because he thought, “No matter what, people will always use petrol,” was Muzaffar Ali. Ali is in splits while narrating tales of his naiveté. From that UP cliff to Mumbai studios, the journey has been serendipitous. After graduation, Ali went job hunting and landed up in a Kolkata advertising firm. “Early on, I realised that I was not cut out for advertising; I couldn’t work under anyone forever.” Yet he is grateful that he took up the offer. Because it gave him the chance to meet filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. “I used to have long discussions with Ray. We often talked about movie-making for hours,” he tells me. And there are other points of connection; Ali, like Ray, also prefers to do his own sketches while storyboarding. “Ray used to sketch frames because it gave him clarity of thought,” he informs. An artist himself, Ali has drawn every frame of his movies. While talking about how he came to sketch sequences of Gaman (his first film) he tells me that his storyboards (well, most of them) are lying around that very room. As he talks about long-shots and mid-shots, I am lost in an image of Ali sitting on a comfortable rocking chair with his sketch book and pencil. When I am back, I find myself staring at an empty chair. I turn around to see Ali wiping the dust off some old books. Those are the storyboards of Umrao Jaan and Gaman. He hands them to me; the weight of modern cinematic history rests on my lap. But I can not flip through its pages right now. A lot needs to be asked before that, and I am running out of time.

Bombay Talkies - The Continuity Sketches

IT IS A BUSY Bombay morning. A car halts near the traffic signal, its glasses roll down; two men sitting inside the car are deep in conversation. The street beggar knocks at the window, recognises the face and shouts his name. “Amitabh Bachchan!” he says. The signal turns green and the car speeds ahead, leaving an overwhelmed spectator behind. Aeons back, a job with Air India brought Ali to the city of dreams. He was allegedly living a “life of poverty”, where his “house rent was almost as much as the salary” and where he had to sell his father’s “vintage car in order to make a living”. In those days of struggle Amitabh Bachchan used to give Ali a lift to his workplace. It was also the time when Ali was contemplating the idea of making Gaman. He told Bachchan about his plan and asked him if he would be interested in hearing out the script. And he expressed a desire to work with him. “He kept on giving me vague answers and after some good three months, he came up to me and said,’ I can’t work in your film. My image of an action hero (read Angry Young Man) might get ruined if I do this character’,” says Ali. Bachchan perhaps missed an opportunity to work with one of the finest directors of our time, but as they say, one man’s loss is another man’s gain. When Bachchan refused, Ali approached Farooq Sheikh, who later became the protagonist of every film that he made. If Bachchan was the quintessential hero who could sing songs, woo the girl, beat the villains and save the lives of hundreds in one go, Sheikh was the charming guy-next-door; his dilemmas were often existential, he looked real and believable on screen. Perhaps this was the reason why Ali chose to cast Sheikh in Gaman. “He had the vulnerability which was much needed in my films. He didn’t just look the character in front of the camera, he became the character,” says Ali. After the critical success of Gaman, he started working on his masterpiece Umrao Jaan which was based on Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s novel Umrao Jaan Ada. The film had a poetic value to it, and a lyrical flow which appealed to the audio-visual senses. That is why it is considered to be the most aesthetically pleasing film ever made. It is an Indian classic to say the least, and a piece of cinematic genius. Rekha, who played a Lucknow courtesan in the Mughal Era, was grace and elegance personified. And the music was enchanting, layered and haunting. This film won Rekha, and music director Khayyam, their first and only National Awards. It is needless to say that the film is still universally lauded. I am itching to know what he feels about the recent attempt at remaking the classic. In answer, he laughs. Naturally, he has been asked this question before “but it never gets old,” he says. I wait patiently, while he seeks the right words. “Why remake a classic anyway?” is his first response. “They couldn’t recreate the magic of Umrao Jaan. They couldn’t understand the essence of the film, its poetry was lost in the new version; Aishwarya couldn’t carry the film on her shoulders the way Rekha did,” he adds. His disappointment doesn’t end there; it is not just the fact that someone made a “version” of his film. He talks candidly about the current spate of films and expresses his disdain for most of them. “In the 80s, cinema had a social connect with its immediate surroundings. That connect is missing today”. Films like Peepli Live, which he considers to be a bold attempt, do not appeal to him as a viewer. “I can’t see myself in any of the characters. I just can’t relate to them”. Though he is all praise for some of the younger directors like Anurag Kashyap, he doesn’t necessarily like the themes of his films, but he does “enjoy the way they are made.” But he is all praises for one peculiar man called ‘Tiggu’. “Tiggu is doing some great work,” he says. At my puzzled look, he informs me: “I was talking about Tigmanshu Dhulia. He is a friend of Shaad (his son Shaad Ali) and keeps visiting us often; I think he is doing a tremendous job.” Shaad is Muzaffar Ali’s son from his previous marriage with Subhashini Ali. Having made commercially successful films like Saathiya and Bunty aur Bubbly, the junior Ali has earned quite a name for himself. But Ali is very modest while doling out praise for his son and the films he has made. “I think he has a great understanding of commercial cinema, and I would never burden him with my ideology. He is a person with different sensibilities and is doing well for himself” says the father. He adds later, “But his best is yet to come.” Ali has been working on a film called Zooni since the late 80s. Based on the life of the 16th century Kashmiri poetess Habba Khatun, Zooni was supposed to be released in the early 90s, yet is still stuck in the pre-production stage. “I started shooting for Zooni on January 5, 1989; I can remember the exact date.” His face looks poignant and grim while he talks about this film. He wanted to make the film divided into four seasons of the poetess’ life. “It was something that producers couldn’t understand and so the movie kept getting stuck,” he sighs. I ask him if he still plans on making this film and he says he does. But he doesn’t know when.

Flashback-Life in Technicolour

ON A HARSH winter morning, a group of women have assembled in the sangeet ghar (music room). Singing paeans in the lord’s praise, the women are too immersed to notice a lad of eight who has sneaked in, and is listening to them with rapt attention. Ali’s first brush with Sufi music was through zanana sangeet. His mother and her friends would gather at one place and sing to their hearts’ content. And there, little Ali would hear them sing and be moved. It was this early exposure to music that helped him develop an astounding audiovisual sense. There is music and poetry in every corner of that chaotic and comfortable room where he is sitting. A lot of Ali’s artwork—paintings and photographs—grace the walls of this room. Beyond the ornamental value, these paintings don’t just embellish; they bear witness to an artist’s love for his craft. These are paintings made by Ali which were not up for sale. There is a picture of a Rolls Royce in monochrome, the very same one he sold to survive in expensive Mumbai. As is with any artist, his affair with his brush and pencil is ethereal. One can also spot a heavy influence of Sufism in his life—whether we look at his movies, music or paintings. Ali talks about Sufism with an infective zeal. It is Sufism’s closeness to human predicament that attracts him to it. He informs me that through his films he has tried to understand the dilemmas of the human mind, especially women. Perhaps that is why his films have always had strong female protagonists. “Such is the nature of Sufi music that the pangs and conflicting emotions of a woman are sung and expressed by a man,” he says hinting at a wonderful union of the two genders in a single strain. It is this love that compels him to talk about Faiz Ahmad Faiz—who was also an inspiration behind his first movie—again and again. While talking about the layers of poetry that Gaman had, he starts fiddling with his phone. He is looking for something; he finds it, he passes the phone. It is a message from Faiz himself; a message he sent Ali after seeing Gaman. Though he waits patiently for me to finish reading the note, his eyes give him away; they have the glint of a child who has just met his hero. But if his life could be written in couplets, it would be written by Shahryar. The great poet wrote all the lyrics of Ali’s films. Shahryar and Ali shared a deep bond; the duo were friends since their Aligharh Muslim University days. “Shahryar often complained that before meeting me he used to be a man (think like one), but since he has met me he has turned into a woman,” he breaks into a smile that reaches his eyes.

Behind the Scenes

TODAY, MUZAFFAR ALI spends his time flitting between Lucknow and Delhi. He is yet to cut the umbilical cord that ties him to his hometown. The mention of Lucknow brings back memories of a childhood spent gallivanting in the dusty lanes of the ancestral village. Ali was born into the Royal Muslim Rajput Family of Kotwara. His father, the Raja of Kotwara was also a member of the Communist Party of Scotland and for him “being a raja meant working for the benefit of people and not ruling them.” When Ali admits of harbouring Leftist sympathies, you realise it is a legacy that he has inherited from his father, who returned to his country right when it was days away from Independence. It was a time when the ‘royals of India’ were living in the shadow of a glorious past. “What I saw was a skeleton of something spectacular” says Ali. But his father remained unfazed by the days long past. Instead, he marched right ahead and started a party for the local farmers, Haljutta Party that fought for their rights. The birth of the party couldn’t have been better timed. It was almost as if Ali’s father had foreseen the eventual exploitation of farmers that became a reality in freshly Independent India. Like father, Ali too believes in working for the welfare of the people. Today, he is trying to generate employment for the people in his hometown and reviving the ‘local culture and tradition of the City of Nawabs’. He talks about his current project Jhadi se Saree with great fervour. It is a project involving nine yards of silk where his and his teams’ involvement starts right at the beginning; from the time a tree is planted, to the breeding of the silk worms. It is a peculiar project, but Ali is nothing if not unconventional. “My motive was to provide as much scope for employment as possible. It was imperative that we had all the stages of production happening right here so as to include as many people as possible in the project and maintain a strict eye on the quality,” he says. His studio in Delhi—named after his ancestral village, Kotwara—doubles up as his film, music and design studio. He takes care of it along with his wife Meera Ali. Here he teaches his craft to aspiring young designers. His customers are well-known faces such as the talented Irrfan Khan and fashionista Sonam Kapoor. In a bid to keep the traditional weaves and textiles alive, he focuses his attention on creating high-end Indian attires. Ali appears to be displeased about the increasing ‘western’ influence on society. And this displeasure isn’t limited to clothes. “The fact that you and I are having a conversation in English rather than Hindi is proof of how much we like everything foreign,” he says. By now the clock hands tell me that I have gone beyond the designated hour that I had for the interview. It is time to leave. As I gather my things, Ali gets up and takes out a thick notebook and hands it over. It is a yellowed, much thumbed booklet. I realise it is the script for Zooni. “This is the 23rd one,” he admits with a rueful smile. He puts it back gently and neatly. On my way back, I ruminate over the day but am interrupted by a song. “Ye kya jageh hai doston, ye kaunsa dayar hai Had-e-nigah tak jaha gubar hi gubar hai” I smile to myself. We steer forward leaving a cloud of dust behind.