Muzaffar Ali: The Aesthete

YOU’VE HEARD OF his love-hate relationship with the Mumbai film industry in the timeless song from Gaman (1978); “Seene mein jalan, aankhon main toofan sa kyun hai / Is shehar mein har shakhs pareshan sa kyun hai (Why is there a burning in the chest, a storm in the eyes, why is everyone so troubled in this city?).” You’ve seen him cutting a swathe in the first few minutes of Umrao Jaan (1981) as the tragic zamindar who loses his daughter to a poisonous neighbour. You’ve admired him as an impresario injecting life into memory through his annual world Sufi music festival Jahan-e-Khusrau. And you’ve observed the fine attention to detail in the couture he creates through House of Kotwara.

For Muzaffar Ali, 78, art is a way of life, and nostalgia is a kaleidoscope that refreshes and renews him. In an itinerant life that has taken him from Aligarh Muslim University, which prepared him for the political, personal and professional world to a now-lost Lucknow, from boxwallah Kolkata of the sixties to the Mumbai of Air India’s heyday to restor­ing the Kotwara haveli, Ali has accomplished much in many fields.

Now in a new memoir, Zikr: In the Light and Shade of Time (Vintage; 264 pages; ₹699), he describes his life as it was, his successes and his failures, his hits and misses, his loves and his losses. It is more than a personal account of a hitherto private life. It is a memoir that chronicles the coarsening of public culture and a civilisational decline. If Ali emerges as a hero, it is entirely incidental, and less a result of what he has written, and more because of the work he has done across the arts, whether it was as a com­munications specialist for Air India, a filmmaker in the heart of Bollywood, or a couturier who taught gentlemen how to dress again.

Zikr recounts how a new aesthetic renaissance was taking place: “Finally, one could see good Indian taste emerg­ing after two decades of independence. Pupul Jayakar and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay were giving a new meaning to the warp and weft of our culture. Great institutions like the Handicrafts and Handlooms Export Corporation of India (HHEC), Cottage Industries Emporium and India Tourism Development Corpo­ration (ITDC) were coming up. There was a national space being created in the world of tourism and design in Delhi, and new movements like FabIndia started by John Bissell. There were minds such as Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh, Joseph Allen Stein, Ebrahim Alkazi, Charles and Ratna Fabri, Ramesh and Raj Thapar, as well as Dr Moonis Raza, founder of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who set the tone for an exploration of what the new India would be.”

Reflecting on his work, Ali says: “Life moves like the wind. I want to be in a place where I believe in what I am doing, and where people believe in me. Whatever I have done has been people triggering me to do what I have done, at Air India for instance, when people for some inexplicable reason backed me, supported me. Like Bobby Kooka and Nari Dastur of Air India [where he worked first in publicity, then in tourism, and finally in the conventions division], who for some reason believed in me and then had the power to let that belief make a difference. You have to find a person who believes in you.”

Bollywood did not have such a person. “I have had a love-hate relationship with the industry. It is not a place for a free mind, for a dreamer. It is a place only for successful people. Others die in penury and loneliness. You become a legend only when you die. Then everyone turns up in white at the cremation or burial ground to offer their respect,” he says.

Art, for Ali, is a way of observation. It is like when you see something in long shot and then in a close-up, you enter into a wide frame, dwell on the details and see the light telling its story. “It’s all light and shade. Umrao Jaan I recorded the story on my long drives in my trusty old Fiat,” he says. He could see the light play. And then he was lucky that Rekha, a superstar at the time, surrendered to it. “When people don’t surrender, collective art suffers,” he says, underlining the malaise which affects much of Bollywood now. As he writes, “Everyone wants to become a Rekha as in Umrao Jaan but they have no idea what it takes to achieve that level of surrender.” It was a case of living Sufism for him.

HE SEES HIMSELF primarily as a painter. “That’s what I do. I’m not a commercial painter but more an internal, spiritual and individual painter. It’s a way for people to see what I saw. It has led to all my art. I consider myself ignorant. Everything I do is out of ignorance, or rather open-mindedness. I let people unfold, let them enter my world. I don’t tell them what to do. They should feel like welcome visitors,” he says. It has been so since he lived in a single room in Kolkata with his cook Tahir while working at the advertising agency Clarion, where the supremely gifted Satyajit Ray was already a legend. “I would walk in and out of his room, I observed him,” he says.

If Umrao Jaan is his most memorable movie then Zooni, his half-finished ode to the poet Habba Khatoon, is the one that got away. When he went to the Kashmir Valley, he felt he could turn his camera wherever he wished. How­ever, the timing was all wrong. The insurgency peaked in 1990 with the forced exile of Kashmiri Pandits, and the Valley was never the same again. “I didn’t realise I had walked into a trap. I went there to belong, to live there, to fall in love with the people and the place. I discovered there is a bigger trap laid by bigger forces. That’s when I found solace in the life and words of the mystics,” he says. And he cre­ated a new world of no boundaries where there was nothing to sell and nothing to buy, just artists looking for a platform. When there is a gap, he paints or works with those who work with their hands. “I’m still recreating beauty through other people’s efforts,” he says.

He lives a quiet life in Gwal Pahari near Gurgaon, with 15 dogs and a horse, occasionally travelling to Lucknow, where there are many memories, and to the family home in Kotwara. “My passion is to take people with me, with whom I can share the beauties of nature. I am not very successful there,” he says.

Mumbai is now his son’s city and his grandson’s home. He still loves the Fort area but the Mumbai that he loved, of the Air India building for which he bought works of the modern Indian masters, like Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde and MF Husain, is gone. As are many of the paintings, to offices abroad, to the homes of former managers. Delhi for him is the city of saints, and he doesn’t wish to shatter that belief. “A lot of things are better in your dreams,” he says, adding, “People have to find their own Lucknow, but also have to feel placeless.”

A variety of people and interesting anecdotes flit in and out of his memoir. He mentions that Amitabh Bachchan was known as “Coat on a hanger” during his days in Calcutta; once Mahesh Bhatt announced at a party at Shabana Azmi’s home that people like him should not be allowed to make films; a cobbler he met at Opera House, became his shadow; the late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee nursed his drink, and tackled Ali calmly as he stood against him from Lucknow in an election in 1998; New York fashion editor and designer Mary McFadden championed his work in Anjuman (1986) and Zooni.

ALI IS ALSO HONEST about the women in his life, his first wife Geeti Sen, art scholar, mother of his first-born Murad and his partner during his Air India days. His second wife Subhashini Ali, fierce Communist, daughter of Colo­nel Prem Sehgal and Captain Lakshmi Sehgal of the Indian National Army, mother of his second-born Shaad Ali. She was also the Rekha whisperer and friend, without whom his greatest work, Umrao Jaan, would not have been possible. And Meera, a gifted architect, mother of his daughter Sama, who shares his dream of Kotwara. “In order to do anything in my life, I have always depended on women,” he says.

His father’s life runs like a thread through the book. Raja Syed Sajid Husain of Kotwara, a man given to English Savile Row suits and striped silk shirts, who replaced them with coarse, handwoven, hand-spun khadi after 1947, and took a vow to never wear anything else till the day textile mills in India were nationalised. “He could envision a world beyond his time, and his sharp gaze assured him of the power of rational knowledge going public,” he writes. His father ran an informal group, the Indian Humanist Union, which met once a month over tea and Good Bakery biscuits, in Qaisar Bagh, Lucknow, discussing ideas that could change the world. “Such ideas never die. They go into hibernation, like many a tree or a bush in winter, biding its time for the spring to come,” he writes. His father would sit by the window, typing impas­sioned letters to the editor on his beloved Corona typewriter, hoping the world would listen. It didn’t.

Yet, his son has not lost faith, either in himself, or in the India of his father’s dreams. Nostalgia has to rise above being subjective, to become a driving force for social change. He sees art as the only source of beauty in this otherwise “power-hungry system, which is constantly turning black into white through its hold on all channels of communication.” He wants people to dream, but he also wants them to fulfil their dreams. “As long as my mind is open and my heart is free,” he writes, “new things will find me.” That is the Sufi way, the art­ist’s way, the journey of the soul, of the invisible sawaar (rider) on the horse of ishq (love).

autobiographybooksfilmmakerKamaladevi ChattopadhyayMuzzafar AliPupul JayakarUmrao Jaan