Today I played my Mughal-e-Azam music cassette. I have until now managed to continue the playing of some cassettes (that are still working) on my philips cassette player
Mughal-e-Azam's music is absolutely divine. Classical, Filmy, emotional, kathak thumris, Shayarana... Pardah nahin jabkoi khuda se, bandon se pardah karna kya... gets to me each time. I just started looking up Shakeel Badayuni's life story on wikipedia (yes that has become the first stop these days.. hopefully not always the last). he is the lyricist of the songs of this film. What a life this man had. what a beautiful contribution to life, to India, to music and emotion.
I read that he had been given an education in the usual persian, arabic, urdu and hindi at home, as was common in many muslim homes. Really an education in the languages and literature in a home-based scenario with a strict but concerned teacher, is probably the most beautiful thing of the pre-modern era... a sort of intellectual luxury.
Badayuni did not display an early bent towards poetry at a young age but when he went to study at Aligarh Muslim university he started taking part in inter-college mushairas and it turned out he was quite good at them. Imagine that these beautiful things used to happen in some of top universities... The wikipedia piece mentions that in those days (which is the 1930s and 40s, a period of nationalist ferment and also modern religious reform) shayars often used poetry to comment on the downtrodden sections of society and the betterment of all. Badayuni however was more inclined to romantic and heartfelt writing. Often we who have grown up later, think that shayari was only about weak emotion, soppy romanticism. we forget that it has had many other sides too. Even romance ought not to be taken lightly. Romance is after all about our highest ideals, our visions of the ideal life, not only for ourselves but our country, our world, the betterment of humanity. I recall that many a time my romantic visions involved meeting someone whom i loved and how we both would maybe set up a school, or open an organic farm, or set up and organise waste management and composting or some such crazy idea. change things, help people. my romance was always tied to some such activity as well. So romance is tied with idealism. In pride and prejudice romance was tied deeply with the question of how a man and women ought to treat each other and respect each other's intellect. for its time it was important idealism.
The shayars at our universities were expressing their concerns about equality and social reform through their poetry... and no poetry is complete without the edge and black humor about the realities of life. Badayuni grew in such an age. I feel that at that time soooo many beautiful, unforgettable musicians, lyricists and screenplay writers emerged in India... many but surely not all of them muslims. They expressed not only a 'muslim' sensibility but the very poetry that india was at that time.
What drove them? I feel that sometimes it happens this way... somewhere deep down the consciousness of a people living in a certain time is aware that the times they are living in are crucial, that they will never return, they will be gone forever. The ganga jumna sanskriti, the confluence of Indic, Hindu, Muslim and sikh sensibilities in northern India, were dying out in these years as independent India was marching ahead. So such people knew, without knowing, that they must pour out their entire creativity, their nostalgia, their entire knowledge because even poetry is knowledge - a model of relating with interiority. So they sang, and wrote and made stories which channelled the very mood and warp and woof of their times. These expressions carry an entire 'dharohar' (heritage) of a certain kind of personhood. funnily it emerges as its brightest just before it is going to be overrun... and then the memories drive the next generations... teaching them important tales, built on their own very bonfire.
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