Muzaffar Ali is a man who wears several hats. The filmmaker, designer, author, artist, and a cultural and social activist, Ali made his debut with the feature film Gaman (1978), about a migrant from Uttar Pradesh working as a taxi driver in Mumbai. He followed it up in 1981 with the classic Umrao Jaan, based on Mirza Hadi Ruswa's 1899 novel, Umrao Jaan Ada, about the famous Lucknow courtesan and poet. Even subsequently, be it Aagaman (1982), Anjuman (1986) or Jaanisaar (2015), through his films, Ali has kept going back to his roots in Awadh.
Umrao Jaan won Rekha her first national award for playing the lead role of Amiran/Umrao Jaan, despite a tough challenge from Jennifer Kendal in Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane. The film also won the national awards for music for Khayyam, female playback singer for Asha Bhonsle for the song Dil Cheez Kya Hai and art direction for Manzur.
Ruswa’s novel was adapted for screen yet again years later in 2006 by J.P. Dutta with Aishwarya Rai in the lead.
Ali’s Umrao Jaan has now been restored by the National Film Development Corporation and National Film Archive of India under the aegis of National Film Heritage Mission. It will be re-released this Friday, June 27.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Ali spoke to The New Indian Express about adapting Ruswa's novel, recreating culturally rich Awadh on screen, casting Rekha in the lead role, her alchemy with the co-stars and the restoration of the film.
Excerpts:
We have known you to be a man who wears several hats, someone multidimensional, with many interests. The world of Umrao Jaan is also many splendored, rich in culture, literature, music, and dance. Is it why you connected with it? Or is it because it takes you back home to Awadh?
Muzaffar Ali: I'm an artist. An artist can’t be one-dimensional. He has to think, he has to see, he has to touch, he has to feel, he has to smell. An artist is anyway a kind of a holistic creature. He or she journeys into life and various worlds, and out of that derives inspiration to do what he/she is doing. Some people find an easy connection with their world, their past or with their present. Some people start getting confused and lost.
The first step that I took, both in painting and in film, was very relevant. If I hadn't made Gaman I would have lost my way. It made me look at people of my kind, region and ilk and type, and take them into an alien, hybrid milieu like Bombay. I started feeling the dichotomy in their lives and their disconnect with their roots. That became a very important issue for me as a thinker, creator, as a person who uses all art forms to tell the story.
You can't tell the story without poetry. You can't tell the story without music because all the pain and the pathos lies in these elements of storytelling. They become a very important driving force. I'm inspired by many things. It's multifaceted thought processing. If I didn't have the ability to paint and sketch, I would not be able to make creative moving frames in the film. All these things came together, and also the people I met, and the kind of inspirations I derived from them.
And then came Umrao Jaan. I think it was a very seminal film for me. It was talking about a lot of very delicate and sensitive things that Lucknow is all about, that people of Lucknow are all about, the pain of Lucknow is all about and the story of this girl is all about.
In terms of the Awadh we see in Umrao Jaan, including the grandeur and the decadence, the language, art, culture, people, what does it signify to you?
I think Awadh is the angst of my childhood, the kind of ethos of growing up there and awakening through a lot of very fine expressions of pain, through poetry and music, and a lot of characters who've walked the earth there. How they looked at poetry, how they looked at music, how they looked at dance. All these elements were Awadh for me.
Each person has a different Awadh. A rickshaw-wala sleeping on his rickshaw in the burning heat is also Awadh. Somebody sleeping in the Taj Mahal Hotel is also Awadh. Awadh is really anything, and it's nothing. So these are all very nebulous, intangible feelings but when it enters the realm of classicism and art, then it finds very deep positioning. If this book [Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jaan Ada] wasn't there, maybe there would be no Awadh for me. A lot of people have led me in and out of Awadh. Aagaman and Anjuman are the epitome of the crumbling Awadh today. It's got a vulnerability. It's got beauty. At the same time it's got helplessness to changes which are inevitably going to create ugliness.
When I was working in Calcutta with Mr Satyajit Ray in advertising, I used to admire how somebody like him can get so absorbed in his culture and celebrate his own culture. That’s when I thought to myself, why is Awadh missing out on this opportunity? Why has it gone and lost itself in Bollywood with no connection to the kind of elements that evoke a milieu. That's how it came alive as a metaphor. People of Bengal are very sensitive to their milieu, and fortunately they've had a Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen.
What went into recreating Awadh for screen? The words, sets, costumes, music, choreography… They all seem to come together to build a world…
To recreate a culture, you have to go into all the layers. You have to understand the power of light and sound, how it evokes nostalgia, the power of imagery, how it creates a feeling and emotion, the power of the body movement or the body language, how that tells a story. Her [Umrao Jaan's] whole story is told through Kathak and Ghazal. You don't realize what kind of power these two things can impart to a creative woman like Umrao Jaan or a Rekha performing Umrao Jaan.
When I delved into it, I worked into all the details of the poetry. And then from the poetry we went into the music, and from the music I went into the singing. The whole game was to add more value to what we were trying to do.
Then going through the whole book. It made me imagine a lot of things which become erased from the human mind. All these things come back in sharper focus and as they come back in sharper focus, they begin to create their own powerful way of storytelling. This happens very organically, step by step.
Then, understanding just pure textiles. Textiles telling the story. I didn't go to shops to buy clothes. I went into cupboards and trunks to find clothes that already had a story in their fragrance. These were from my mother, from different friends of my mother... So the textiles became a very rich first step of telling a story, and then second, is really sketching it out and imagining it out.
When you mentioned appropriation of Awadh in Hindi cinema, were you referring to the Muslim socials and/or the tawaif/courtesan character?
I would start with creative talent. Like Rahi Masoom Raza. He was a giant. It was my ambition that he should write for me, and he wrote the dialogues for Anjuman, and those dialogues are to die for. He has breathed so much life into those characters through his dialogues. When he saw Gaman, he said, he felt like he was the protagonist, the taxi driver. 'I felt that like him I'm also driving the taxi of my pen', he said. The pen becoming a taxi hit me so hard. Obviously he didn't say it for himself. He said it for his lot. I think people are driven to do things which are not coming from their soul. So, a lot of soul has been poured into Bollywood. A lot of very cultured souls have gone there, and they've become lost in the maze of people and projects. There have been people who've gone deeply into cultures, poetry and music. But the Awadh identity I couldn't find. I couldn't identify with any Awadhi flavour.
What about Ray's depiction of Awadh in Shatranj Ke Khiladi?
As a filmmaker he's very meticulous in a very detailed kind of a way. But he presented Munshi Premchand's cynical depiction of Awadh. He was trying to see the dichotomy, contradictions. I don't look at it like that. I look at it with a lot of heartfelt sympathy. And the other thing is that I didn't like certain portrayals. Sanjeev Kumar didn't come through as an Awadhi character. He didn't have those nuances which could have been really mind blowing. The film has just two characters, the two chess players. And then this overarching Wajid Ali Shah, who's waiting to be deposed. I think the effort was good. It was authentic in many ways visually, cinematically. But I think somewhere it didn't have the empathy.
Was Rekha your first choice for the titular role?
She was the first definite choice. The other choices were just wavering choices, but when I saw her picture in a magazine, and the look in her eyes, I realized it's this look which will tell the story. Every eye is different and every eye moves in a certain kind of a way and has its own narrative movement. So I felt that this person is the only person who has the synchronization of look and feel. Then there was no looking back. It was just about building confidence in each other to do this and how she got into it, and she got totally absorbed into it, and how I created an ecosystem for her, and how she created her own ecosystem to become Umrao Jaan. I think it’s one of the greatest miracles of my life to have found her to do this.
Was it also because she was poised at that particular juncture in her career when she was looking beyond the mainstream cinema? Was her star value of consequence for your film?
She was not an unknown person. She was a recognized person. She was star material. She'd come in good films like [Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s] Khoobsoorat (1980). She would have driven the film, and which she did.
Beyond her, you pulled off a casting coup with the ensemble. Shaukat Kaifi and veterans in small roles, like Gajanan Jagirdar, Mukri, Bharat Bhushan…
These people became larger than life, they became more real than real. And that is what helped Rekha. One way of directing her was to create a kind of a milieu in which all these people were so authentic that she had to organically fit into that. Bharat Bhushan, that little presence of his was very elevating. It's a great tribute to him and Gajanan Jagirdar. And Dina Pathak also, and Naseer [Naseeruddin Shah] was amazing. He was sceptical about that role and still he did wonders. He gathered so much punch and humour to it. He didn't know Urdu that well, but he had ways of playing with his expressions and his words which added a lot. His scenes with Rekha are amazing. I think the scenes of Rekha with all her co-stars are just amazing. They have a very powerful alchemy.
The film is obviously of its time. How do you think it resonates in today's day and age, when there’s a certain awareness about feminism? The element of patriarchy, how beauty is defined for a woman, the stress on the skin colour, how women are seen as repositories of family honour, the whole idea of the quirks of fate versus a woman's self-determination…
I can give you a very brief answer. Truth is timeless. Religions are going on, on the basis of timeless truths. That's how human beings are. People go back to the same timeless truth. Sometimes cultures deny the truth. Sometimes cultures celebrate the truth. I have looked at the truth from a very humane point of view. I think being humane is very important, because if you are humane, you're adding another dimension to the truth.
How has the restoration turned out?
National Film Development Corporation and National Film Archive of India of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting have set up a mission to restore films, National Film Heritage Mission. They've chosen to restore all my films.
It's very difficult to look after a celluloid print and negative. Whatever has gone in the public domain, on the net and the cloud will stay. Otherwise physical films will just evaporate. The weather is not very conducive unless the prints are kept under certain specified conditions. I think the government's awakening to this is timely and important.
My world rights controller had kept the negatives in his cupboard, and it got congealed, and in that 15 minutes were also missing. We went to the National Film Archive of India, and they found a print from their archives as well and went about the whole digitizing process through that, frame by frame.
In the process, I chose certain frames and we grabbed those frames and created a book that's going to come out on the same day. It is a coffee table book of 250 photographs taken both from the frames of the digitized film and also from Kamath Foto Flash, and some that I had.
Umrao Jaan’s figure is a prototype for the courtesan. Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah (1972) was there before that. What was that tawaif culture all about?
I've never experienced that culture. I have experienced the larger milieu of that culture, the aristocracy, the Ghazal, the Thumri and the Dadra. I don't know the mechanism of the Kotha. I just invented it from the book and what was there in my own imagination, and created the life of a young, helpless girl in that situation. This must have been the life of many courtesans. The writer had experienced it and put it into one character. The book leads you into that zone.
What did you think of the new Umrao Jaan?
I wouldn't have been able to go through it. There would have been too many comparisons in my head. So why torture yourself to those comparisons? It’s for others to decide what they make of it.
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