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April 7, 2002
REVIEW: Bard of shattered dreams
NIDA Fazli is an esoteric poet and writer. His fame as one of the most successful song writers of the contemporary filmdom is beholden, almost entirely, to his marathon presence in Bollywood’s show-world. Unlike most other poets who were famous in their own right before succumbing to the glitz and glitter of Mumbai’s celluloid world, Nida cut his teeth in it. Bollywood is, therefore, his sole reference and touchstone.
Nida is a born rebel — with a cause, he believed. He rebelled against his middle-class upbringing of a traditional Muslim family of Gwalior, because the lure of the then Bombay was too much for him to resist. And that magical city of a million shattered dreams has been his sole refrain since he landed there as a starry-eyed youth in search of fame and success in the fifties.
Nida made it good on his quest for recognition and fame after a long, hard, struggle. He was lucky for thousands get sucked into the vortex of Mumbai’s magical entertainment world and simply perish. In recalling his own struggle for stardom as a notable lyricist and script writer in Bollywood, in a remarkably candid autobiography written with his usual flourish, lyrical finesse and panache, Nida has not ignored many of those who were his fellow travellers in the arduous journey in search of the Holy Grail. He recalls these characters, some quaintly charming, others hauntingly moronic, with the fondness of one who savoured their company and looks back on it with melancholic nostalgia, now that they are not there.
Nida’s picture gallery of his comrades is a collage of artistes, poets, writers, dramatists, singers, dancers — all those ‘talented’ characters that one would associate with Bollywood — and some quite ordinary, plain folks, too. Indeed, it is the latter who come out in Nida’s portrayal of them as refreshing, colourful, delightfully vibrant or plainly pathetic characters. But Nida never shuns them as belonging to another stratum of society. In fact, he bonds with them more closely than he does with his fellow artistes, writers or poets. These ordinary people shared his grief and suffering with empathy and compassion and succoured him as if he was one of them.
A sensitive man, and a down-to-earth poet, Nida writes poetry mostly in an idiom of a man-on-the-street, returns their compliment in full. He never looks down on them as wretched of the earth undeserving of an artiste’s sophisticated imagery. His bonding with these ‘left-overs’ of a cruel and cut-throat culture epitomized in Mumbai’s glitzy world is so organic that he writes about himself too in third person, as if he was viewing and evaluating his own life journey as a stranger from a distance.
But Nida is not so charitable to those competing with him for the Bollywood turf. He is quite unsparing in caricaturing their petty foibles and peccadilloes. Poets like Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri and Akhtar ul-Iman, for instance, have been subjected, at times, to scathing barbs for their ‘arrogance’. Nida faults all of them for megalomania.
Likewise, the great storyteller, Krishan Chandar, also does not escape Nida’s ire for making a great virtue out of mediocrity. But he accords a much sympathetic treatment to Ismat Chughtai and Rajinder Singh Bedi, two of the greatest short story writers of their era. Sadly, except for the ailing Kaifi Azmi, none of the others is alive to take him up at his own game.
Why does Nida paint many of these celebrated giants of the latter half of the twentieth-century Urdu literature in most uncomplimentary colours is not hard to understand. Professional jealousy is universally contagious amongst the literati all over the world. See, for instance, how boorishly the literary world’s latest Nobel Laureate, V.S. Naipaul, the self-obsessed West Indian of South Asian origin, has been taking swipes at his contemporaries, as if he were in a game of blind man’s buff.
Basically, and ultimately, Nida’s two-part autobiography is about himself, and in that about his life of an itinerant who is still grappling with the core question of who he is and what is the purpose of his life. It is, in that sense, a poignant story of his own foibles, failures, adventures and, most prominent of all, struggles to carve out a niche for himself in Mumbai’s cold-blooded world of glamour and gamesmanship.
And yet, despite success Nida feels unfulfilled. His own elegy of life is overwhelming and omniscient. Here is the story of a man who went against the grain of his traditional family values, fashioned a life against their norms but was always haunted by his own betrayal of the core essence of his traditional cultural milieu. The rebel has an abiding sense of loss, which he cannot paper over.
Nida’s account of himself and his world is incisive and captivating. He does full justice to a difficult task. Urdu literature needs more of such candid expose of both the writer and his subjects.
Deewaron ke bahar (Outside the walls)
By Nida Fazli
City Press, 316 Madina City Mall, Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi-74400 Tel: 021-5650623, 5213916
Email: cp@citypress.cc Website:
www.citypress.cc
ISBN 969-8379-35-5 192pp. Rs100
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