Muzzafar Ali is more than just the creator of ‘Umrao Jaan’, the eponymous musical film of 1980’s remains only a part of his unbounded creativity. Zikr: In the Light and Shade of Time captures the wealth of experiences that shaped this enigmatic persona as a poet, a filmmaker, an author, a fashion designer, and a cultural revivalist. Born into the princely house of Kotwara, the boy in him was exposed to a wealth of experiences - happenings and encounters - that helped him locate and cultivate many passions that also include cars and couture. Manifest in this poetic and colorful autobiography is the importance of freedom ‘A person has to feel free in society to express himself’.
As an artist and a filmmaker, Muzaffar Ali’s deeply perceptive life reads like a poem in visual narrative. Zikr, meaning devoted mention, comes across as a journey in pursuit of author’s intellectual and spiritual evolution: ‘each person I have worked with has opened a new world of creativity inside me, and this is what adds value to our lives.’ Notable is the case of roadside cobbler at Opera House whom he had invited to join him in giving a creative meaning to the medium of leather. This moving relationship lasted several decades, till the end of the cobbler Bharat Waghchare’s life. “His contribution to my creativity is immeasurable’, recounts Ali, for whom art has been a way of sensitizing and humanizing people.
Muzaffar Ali is a man of many arts and says that it is through arts that everything feels connected. No surprise, Umrao Jaan is the coming together of art, science, and the philosophy of life. Making film is a visual journey, as much art as science, and as much method as madness. The author perceives filmmaking as both a learning and teaching process. Each of his many films, Gaman, Umrao Jaan and Anjuman bear testimony to it. Zikr is more than an autobiography as it explores deep love of life in all aspects of existence – from science to poetry and from music to cinema. Life has been a large shifting canvas for Muzaffar Ali that is both intriguing and inspiring – an empowering journey from the science class in Aligarh to being the curator of Jahan-e-Khusrau that seamlessly connects the past with the present and the future, beyond the life of the ordinary.
Written with a clarity worthy of Flaubert, it is an autobiographical journey that was designed to take others along in imaginative and creative pursuits. Zikr is therefore a virtual who’s who on some of the most creative people of his time who lent themselves to Muzaffar Ali for transforming an individual’s dream become a collective reality. The author rightfully claims to be a peoples’ person, a very accepting and tolerating kind as he was being enriched while enriching others. At the end, all such experiences and encounters with colorful people transcended and translated into expression of beauty. Throughout this richly textured personal memoir, one notices poetic expressions on love and beauty.
In connecting the dreadful dots of partition with the present rhetoric of communalism, the author advocates the need to realize a new scale to measure man. A new scale of softness is needed to build intangible bridges of compassion and tolerance. The annual Jahan-e-Khusrau event is a journey he has undertaken for others – for the eyes of others, the ears of others, and for the mind of others. Only by becoming someone else, can you see beauty in everyone else. The author concludes that these are the footprints he intends to leave behind.
Through Zikr: In the Light and Shade of Time, Muzaffar Ali reveals the genius of an artistic soul in him. Peppered with inspiring verses, the book is something to offer to everyone as it allows the reader to look out of the window at the hopeful promise of the future. Written in poetic prose, the book concludes that there is always more to life than what often gets perceived.
by Muzaffar Ali
Vintage/Penguin, New Delhi
Extent: 261, Price: Rs. 699.
