A poet for all moods

turned 70 in August, is in the midst of a brilliant phase of fecundity as a lyricist. He explores new modes of expression but, magically, he doesn’t lose touch with his personal creative credo, grounded in the golden era of Hindi cinema.

So even as he writes the rustic Beedi, the playful Kajrare and the conversational Ek lo ek muft (Guru), he is capable of stunning flights of poetic fancy as in Dekhna mere sar se aasmaan udd gaya hai (Bunty Aur Babli), Puchhe jo koi meri nishaani rang heena likhna (Yahaan) or Naina thug lenge (Omkara).

Even in Jaan-e-Mann, probably the most mainstream of the films he has written lyrics for in recent years, he manages to craft a gem like Ajnabi shahar mein ajnabi shaam hai, a throwback to Ek akela is shahar mein. “The sensibility is mine, the rendition is modern,” he says.

Gulzar is, however, aware that his in-your-face item songs have taken some of his admirers by surprise. “The way a song is eventually presented on the screen is not in my hands,” he says, “but how it is actually written certainly is.”

His argument is simple enough: our everyday speech has changed just as much as popular Hindi cinema has since he debuted with the evocative Mora gora ang lai le (in Bimal Roy’s Bandini, 1963). “A lyricist,” he says, “has to keep the characters and their backgrounds in mind. When a character in a film speaks a language that has a generous smattering of English words or folksy expressions from a rustic patois, he or she certainly won’t sing a Ghalib ghazal.”

“I have tried,” he explains, “to expand the vocabulary of the item song by going beyond dil, pyaar, masti… and adding words like lihaaf and ghilaaf to the repertoire.”

“I have lived in a particular frame for too long… It’s time to move on,” he says. The past few years of Gulzar’s eventful lyric-writing career have indeed represented a concerted endeavour to “get out of the old shell and adopt a new idiom”.

The past couple of years have been particularly remarkable. Everything he’s touched has turned to gold. His lyrics for Bunty Aur Babli,

Yahaan, Paheli, Omkara, Jaan-e-Mann and now Guru have catapulted him into the pantheon of all-time greats.

Interestingly, Gulzar prefers teaming up with younger filmmakers. “I enjoy working with them. It gives me an understanding of how creative minds of this generation think and that helps me reinvent myself,” he says.

“This generation,” says Gulzar, “is worth travelling with. This generation has made it possible for Hindi cinema to break into the global mainstream on its own terms.” Earlier, he points out, a Mumbai film had to drop its songs and shorten its length for overseas distribution.

Today’s filmmakers, Gulzar says, are doing outstanding work. He singles out Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal and Dor, Aparna Sen’s Mr & Mrs Iyer and Naseeruddin Shah’s Yun Hota To Kya Hota for special praise. “These films are close to my heart because they seem essentially literary,” he says. The textbook may be an old one, but the chapter that Bollywood’s younger filmmakers are adding to it is new. “I want to be an integral part of this process,” says Gulzar. “The essence of creativity is to keep growing all the time.” He has done just that, and how! His association with the gifted Mani Ratnam began with Dil Se… and is now set for an extension with the about-to-be-released Guru. “None of the filmmakers I am working with at present are new to me,” says Gulzar. “I have worked with all of them before.”

He’s been involved as lyricist with each one of Vishal Bhardwaj’s four directorial ventures — Makdee, Maqbool, The Blue Umbrella and Omkara — and is now all set to write the songs of the music director-turned-filmmaker’s next project, a period drama set in the days of World War II on the Burma-Japan border. “It was great working on the Omkara songs because of their sheer variety,” says Gulzar. “The album has a lullaby, a ballad, a romantic song, a thumri…” Guru, he adds, has pretty much the same sort of range. “It’s a treat working with AR Rahman. With him a song evolves in the manner of a poem. For him, I don’t have to write songs to fit predetermined formats.”

Gulzar has also written the lyrics for Meghna Gulzar’s second film, Baat Pakki, which has a musical score by another youngster, Pritam. “I was very much a part of Meghna’s first film (Filhaal…) as well,” he says. With Shaad Ali, too, Gulzar has had a continuing partnership — Saathiya (scripted by Mani Ratnam), Bunty Aur Babli and the upcoming Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.

Nothing gets Gulzar more animated than talk of things literary. He is, therefore, understandably excited about his next collaboration with Mani Ratnam — the Aamir Khan-Kareena Kapoor starrer Lajjo, adapted from an Ismat Chughtai short story, Gharwali. Gulzar is writing the script for the upcoming film, as he is for a period romance to be directed by Shoojit Sircar.

When Shoojit came to Gulzar, what the young director had in mind was a reinterpretation of Bimal Roy’s classic Madhumati. The veteran poet-filmmaker-lyricist told him: “Yeh purani lagti hai. You have to change it for our times.” As a result, the film is no longer a remake of Madhumati — it’s now a love story set against the backdrop of the construction of the Kalka-Shimla railway tunnel. “The story may be set in the past, but the sensibility has to be new,” says Gulzar.

“If I make a film on the Partition today, it wouldn’t obviously look anything like what it would have two or three decades back,” he says. So is a film on the Partition somewhere in the Gulzar pipeline? Romu N. Sippy, the producer of Gulzar’s debut film, Mere Apne, has evinced interest in returning to film production by teaming up with the poet-filmmaker.

“Romu has told me that he’d love to complete the circle that began way back in the early 1970s,” says Gulzar. For both men, the proposed film,

if it does materialise, would be a comeback. Gulzar hasn’t made a big-screen directorial foray since 1999’s Hu Tu Tu. Romu Sippy hasn’t likewise produced a film since 1998. Wouldn’t that be worth the wait?