GULZAR RESPONDS TO COVID IN VERSE
Responding to the pandemic with poetry, Gulzar writes of melancholy while finding hope in humanism
PPoets and writers, according to Gulzar, perform an essential function—they give the period we live in, our era, a register. “And even if they write a small editorial, they record the times we live in. That is what is happening now,” he says. As the pandemic has worsened, Gulzar has been using a friend’s Facebook wall to publish his recent poems. “I’ve written several poems that illustrate today’s news.”
In May this year, for instance, Gulzar published a poem on the plight of migrant workers. It had an affecting refrain: “They will go to die there—where there is life.” Explaining the dichotomy, he says, “The problem is that they had come to cities to stay alive, but they had left life behind.” The 85-year-old poet and lyricist uses everyday examples to describe a pastoral abundance—squabbles, sugarcane, harvest, cousins. While he isn’t unaware of problems that beset rural populations—“the land you own becomes smaller and smaller”—he feels our cities have no life to offer. “You come here to work, and then one day, you buy a saree for your mother or a dhoti for your father. That can’t be contentment.”
Objects have always resonated in Gulzar’s verse. As he starts reading lines from a new poem, you are struck by how deftly he stresses the importance of a municipality tap and a local train in a daily wager’s life. “They had just plugged their bodies in here,” says Gulzar. “Now they have removed that plug and gone away.” The poet’s view of the pandemic, though, isn’t all melancholic. He manages optimism, too. “This is the first time that we are suffering locally, but thinking globally.” Gulzar points to the problem of pollution in Delhi: “Nobody in the rest of the country was bothered, but today, when cases go up in the capital, Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu, we all feel worried.” This new empathy, he hopes, will engineer a fresh humanism. “I hope this makes a difference and I wish we stop thinking solitarily.”
Having worked in the Hindi film industry for over 60 years, Gulzar hasn’t just seen talent take life, he has also been forced to witness the passing of many friends and colleagues. That said, however, the deaths his industry has witnessed during the pandemic seem to have impacted him more. He and Basu Chatterjee were both prolific filmmakers during the 1970s and ’80s.
Gulzar had directed Irrfan Khan in a TV series called Kirdaar
in 1993. He and Yogesh, the lyricist, had struggled together. “After burying or cremating a friend,” says Gulzar, “you do feel hungry. Sadness cannot kill hunger. Life has to move on, but what pained me the most is that I couldn’t go and say
‘khuda hafiz’.”
Gulzar also has another, admittedly smaller, gripe with the pandemic. In February, he was meant to travel to Delhi and finalise the proof of A Poem A Day, an anthology of verse that compiles the work of 279 poets from all across the subcontinent. In order to put together this 1,000-page bilingual volume, Gulzar first found English translations of the 365 poems he had selected, while simultaneously translating each into his trademark Hindustani, a seamless mix of Hindi and Urdu. Having given nine years of his life to this project, he now says,
“Inshallah, HarperCollins will finally release it in August.”
When compiling the poems that make up the book, Gulzar started with a few parameters in mind: “I wanted to compile poetry through which I
Gulzar witnessed the passing of two friends during the lockdown. Life moves on, he says, but wishes he could have bid them ‘khuda hafiz’
had passed in a sense, poetry that helped me grow up. So, I started looking at the poems that were written after 1947, but I also wanted the poems to feel relevant to a newer generation. I wanted them to see that poetry is alive, that it breathes.” Gulzar decided early on that he would avoid the works of masters such as Rabindranath Tagore and Mirza Ghalib. “Their poems would have made this read like a textbook. I wanted it to capture everyday life.”
Speaking of the 35 languages that A Poem A Day either includes or translates, Gulzar is critical of our tendency to think of certain languages as “regional”. He says, “The languages we call ‘regional’ are all national languages. Languages like Tamil and Marathi, for instance, are too big to be referred to as ‘regional’.” As an anthologist, his aim was not to go searching for highbrow poetry. He wanted to find poems that could move every Indian. “With this book, you’ll see the many moods of India, and how they are processed in every language. We might bicker, yes, but our cultures are all bound together.”
Gulzar’s film repertoire, his many fans often attest, has a song for every mood. For every ‘Mera kuchh samaan’ (Ijaazat, 1986), there is also a ‘Beedi jalai le’(Omkara, 2006). Rather than seem detached from sentiment, he seems attached to all emotion. “You are never one individual,” he explains. “You are a father, husband, son and neighbour. You are then a citizen, but importantly, you are human. The matter then boils down to your quantum of feeling. The question I ask is this: how do I expand myself?”