EVEN HE COMES UNTITLED
Much like his sculptures, 86-year-old Himmat Shah stands alone
—Chinki Sinha
Don’t ask me why I never got married,” says Himmat Shah, before he enters the lounge area of the Bihar Museum, which is hosting his retrospective, Under the Vastness of the Sky, till August 1. At least 200 of his works are on display. In the exhibition hall, you are confronted with too many images and forms at once. In a role reversal of sorts, the heads, for which he is famous, seem to be gazing at you from their vantage point. You’re struck by how these sculptures stand alone.
Shah tells you a story about loneliness. One lonely night in Paris in 1966,
he saw two middle-aged women enter his underground train compartment with a little girl. The women were speaking French, but he could make out they too were sad and lonely. And then the little girl got up and started dancing. “Watching her, I felt a strange joy. That night, I travelled from loneliness to aloneness. I’ve never felt lonely after that,” he says. “The girl gave me courage to create.”
To make art, one has to dedicate oneself to the pursuit. He calls it abhivyakti. “Expression is our strongest power,” Shah says. “An artist abandons all but his craft. There is no good or bad in art. Art is a vast sky.” He never found a woman who would have understood his art. Had there been, he would’ve surely held her hand, he says. “Creativity is orgasm.”
Produced in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, this is the third iteration of Shah’s retrospective. Strangely, all his works are untitled. “If I name my works, people will assign meaning,” he says. The 86-year-old, who has created relentlessly over the years, also says there are no answers to questions because one leads to another. And when one is surrounded by the infinite, there comes a stage when there are no questions left. “I am mystery, and I want to break mountains,” Shah says.
At some point, he stands before his black-and-white portrait on the wall. “I was handsome,” he says. His voice drops. There is a hint of nostalgia. A slight indulgence of sadness. A little ego. But, then, in the same breath, he says that clay is a humble material. “It will be returned to earth.”
All of Shah’s works are Untitled. “If I name them, people will assign meaning,” he says
The red flower in The Jungle Book becomes rakt phool. Infinity stones from the Avengers films are anant mani. And Wanda in Captain America: Civil War tells Vision, “Ek chutki mirch ki keemat tum kya jaano, Vision Babu.” Since 2016, writer and lyricist Mayur Puri has been the man responsible for giving some of Disney and Marvel’s biggest films a wholly specific Indian context. The creative force behind their Hindi dubbed versions, Puri has seen their appeal slowly rise. In the just released Lion King, for instance, Shah Rukh Khan and his son Aryan have given their
voice to his dialogue.
Disney’s word for Puri’s job profile is ‘transcreation’. Puri, whose credits include writing dialogues for Om Shanti Om and ABCD, says, “My guiding philosophy is that I am not translating words but emotions. I’m a big believer in Natya Shastra. I must create the same rasa a filmmaker is trying to.”
It’s not an easy job. Puri has, at times, only had a month to deliver his Hindi script. He often has to work with films that don’t have visual effects. Sometimes only the lips are in focus. The most important thing, he says, is to crack the bilabials to ensure lip synchronisation. “Mann ki udaan se nahin likh sakte (You can’t write as you please),” says Puri about the process. “There are restrictions, but there’s some liberty too. You have to be bold in your choices, responsible with risks and honest to your work.”
More than the script, Puri finds translating songs a tougher task. “Apart from the sync, it has to sound nice, and the notes shouldn’t be wrong,” says Puri, who has written songs for Moana and The Lion King. What works in his favour is the experience of writing around 110 Hindi film songs. While Puri and his wife Ulka have produced four plays under their banner Story Circus in the past two and a half years, two finished film scripts gather dust on his shelves. Puri says the itch to return to mainstream Hindi films is growing. “As I was telling Shah Sir [Shah Rukh Khan], I’m currently seeking employment.”