{ 2006 08 01 }

Flower and Fire: a tribute to Kaifi Azmi

azmi.jpg

On Saturday, Ashwin and I went to watch ‘Kaifi Aur Main’ (Kaifi and I), Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar’s tribute to Kaifi Azmi and Shaukat Kaifi, Shabana’s parents. Based on Shaukat’s book ‘Yaad Ki Raah Guzzar’ (Down Memory Lane) and Kaifi’s own poetry and interviews, it was a wonderful evening in memory of a strange and wonderful man.

Ashwin, unfortunately, found the Urdu too difficult, so all he could do was to watch my delight (hardly entertainment, I fear)… It did help that the performance was at the St John’s auditorium, round the corner from home - everything one does/not do in Bangalore these days is a locational hazard.

The evening had been billed as a theatrical presentation by IPTA Mumbai, but as Deepa Punjwani points out in her review of the performance in Mumbai, it was not quite theatre. It was quite a mehfil (particularly with Jaswinder Singh’s music), and certainly a tribute. Both to Kaifi and to Shaukat, interestingly. For instance, Shaukat remembers how she thought the feminist in Kaifi was speaking directly to her, when she first heard his poem ‘Aurat’ (Woman):

Rut badal daal agar falna foolana hai tujhe
Uth meri jaan mere saath hi chalna hai tujhe
(Change the season to grow, to flourish
Wake up, my love, my soul; walk with me).

Then in another moment, she talks about fighting to save her child (Shabana) from being aborted, because the comrades in the commune she and Kaifi lived in were worried they would not have the means to support the family. As Javed said in an interview to Swati Anand (Times of India, Bangalore, July 30, p. 15), “So we don’t know if Shabana was born because of communism or in spite of it!”

At this performance anyhow, I felt the greater drama came from Javed’s rendition of a passionate, progressive human being who strode, rather than straddled, the worlds of revolution and poetry, with insight, irony and craftsmanship. Shabana was, well, Shabana (as she is apt to be in most performances; mesmerisingly herself) and her (in?)voluntary ‘wah wah-s’ and ‘kya baat hai-s’ tended to break any possible suspension of disbelief.

Javed was particularly deft in the humourous moments, including those which quirkily reflected on himself: Kaifi reportedly said that lyrics being written after the tune is composed - a Bollywood practice - is like digging a pit in a cemetry and then looking for the body that will fit it! Another (more moving) metaphor was when Kaifi reflected bitterly on the stroke that paralysed him: he felt ‘imprisoned’ like Sita, and wished a Rama, or even a Ravana, would rid him of the pain. I may have transliterated that badly, but the thought transcended all those convenient - and generally inaccurate - categorisations that we tend to make in this country around ‘community’, ‘language’ and ‘mythology’.

Ultimately, the protagonist that really sparkled and shone in the performance was the language itself. While my Urdu is nothing to blog about, the music of the words themselves was enough to give meaning where a dictionary might have been found wanting. It may not have been theatre, but it was poetry, it was a song.

In Javed Akhtar’s own words for Kaifi that ended the evening, ‘Ajeeb Admi Tha Woh’ (He Was A Strange Man):

Mohabbaton ka geet tha, baghawaton ka raag tha
Kabhi woh sirf phool tha, kabhi woh sirf aag tha
(He was a song of love, a rhythm of rebellion
Sometimes he was a flower, and sometimes he was fire).

Posted by anasuya on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006, at 12:09 pm, and filed under Bangalore/Karnataka, Poetry/Music, Politics, Theatre.

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