I am not easily star-struck or daunted by the physical proximity of a great achiever - yet there I was at the India Habitat Centre last week, moderating an event for the Penguin Spring Fever festival, when a part of me froze. Like a beam of light shooting through mist, this thought had leapt into my head: "The man sitting next to me has worked with Bimal Roy…and with Anurag Kashyap. He composed a gentle, meditative song for a classic like Bandini more than 50 years ago, but also won an Oscar for an exuberant number in a 2008 film."
It's staggering to think of it. The period mentioned above covers nearly 75 per cent of the history of sound cinema in this country - and Gulzar sahab has not just been there throughout, but he has also shaped a great deal of it with his own sensibility. As songwriter and occasionally dialogue-writer, he has made vital contributions to the work of Roy and Kashyap and dozens of film makers in between, in addition to helming many fine movies of his own.
Most remarkably, he has reinvented himself and adapted brilliantly. If Gulzar had retired from films at the end of the 1980s - the decade that marked the twilight of the beloved "middle cinema" epitomised by him, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterji - his legacy would still have been secure. Instead, as Hindi cinema began to shift towards edgier, more globalised forms of expression, he found fresh inspiration through his collaborations with Vishal Bhardwaj (who went from composing for Gulzar's film Maachis to becoming a celebrated director in his own right) and AR Rahman. Despite having been weaned on relatively straightforward narrative-driven cinema himself, he relished the chance to work on formally unusual movies such as No Smoking and Matru ki Bijli ka Mandola, inspiring a new generation of fans along the way.
The IHC amphitheatre last week seemed overrun by these young fans (the average age of the large audience couldn't have been more than 30 years), but the most young-at-heart person in attendance may have been the man in the spotlight. It's worth remembering that Gulzar has always had an impish streak that belies the image of the venerable poet unvaryingly dressed in a white kurta-pyjama. One of his notable qualities - a rare one for a man who came to cinema from the world of serious literature - is his ability to switch seamlessly, and often within the same stanza, between the soulful and the flippant. When he was a young man, his use of unusual metaphors often confounded purists: what is this aankhon ki mahekti khushboo, Rahi Masoom Raza once asked him, referring to a lyric from the film Khamoshi. "How can an eye have fragrance?"
Little wonder that even today, some of Gulzar's fans - including those who are less than half his age - are conservative in ways that Gulzar himself is not. Unlike them, he has little time for the simplistic, rose-tinted notion that the past was always a better place, that the films and music of today represent a degradation. Kashyap's very abstract No Smoking, which he worked on in 2007, was the high watermark of his achievement as a poet-lyricist, he told me before his session. And he spoke approvingly of the high standards of professionalism in today's film industry - it being a time of bound scripts (usually unheard of in the 1970s) and more attention to detail in areas such as production design and research.
With the nature of the musical sequence in Hindi cinema having undergone changes, lyric-writing has become more challenging - and invigorating - for him. In a '70s film like Aandhi, Gulzar could use exalted language for the songs, having the characters sing "Tum aa gaye ho, noor aa gaya hai / Nahin toh chiraagon se lau jaa rahi thi" - lines that the same characters would certainly not have used in the "prose" sections of the film, where their dialogue would be more casual. Because it was understood that a song marked a break in narrative space and logic. But in contemporary cinema, there is a greater self-consciousness about the need to "realistically" integrate songs with narrative. So when a gangster sings in Satya, the words - "Goli maar bheje mein" - must match his speech. The item song Beedi Jalayele (Omkara) is raunchy and suggestive, but that's because the priority is to be truthful to the rustic setting. How would these people express themselves? What Gulzar sahab has been doing in his recent work is to catch such truths and still make lasting poetry out of them. I hope he continues for many more years.
It's staggering to think of it. The period mentioned above covers nearly 75 per cent of the history of sound cinema in this country - and Gulzar sahab has not just been there throughout, but he has also shaped a great deal of it with his own sensibility. As songwriter and occasionally dialogue-writer, he has made vital contributions to the work of Roy and Kashyap and dozens of film makers in between, in addition to helming many fine movies of his own.
Most remarkably, he has reinvented himself and adapted brilliantly. If Gulzar had retired from films at the end of the 1980s - the decade that marked the twilight of the beloved "middle cinema" epitomised by him, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterji - his legacy would still have been secure. Instead, as Hindi cinema began to shift towards edgier, more globalised forms of expression, he found fresh inspiration through his collaborations with Vishal Bhardwaj (who went from composing for Gulzar's film Maachis to becoming a celebrated director in his own right) and AR Rahman. Despite having been weaned on relatively straightforward narrative-driven cinema himself, he relished the chance to work on formally unusual movies such as No Smoking and Matru ki Bijli ka Mandola, inspiring a new generation of fans along the way.
The IHC amphitheatre last week seemed overrun by these young fans (the average age of the large audience couldn't have been more than 30 years), but the most young-at-heart person in attendance may have been the man in the spotlight. It's worth remembering that Gulzar has always had an impish streak that belies the image of the venerable poet unvaryingly dressed in a white kurta-pyjama. One of his notable qualities - a rare one for a man who came to cinema from the world of serious literature - is his ability to switch seamlessly, and often within the same stanza, between the soulful and the flippant. When he was a young man, his use of unusual metaphors often confounded purists: what is this aankhon ki mahekti khushboo, Rahi Masoom Raza once asked him, referring to a lyric from the film Khamoshi. "How can an eye have fragrance?"
Little wonder that even today, some of Gulzar's fans - including those who are less than half his age - are conservative in ways that Gulzar himself is not. Unlike them, he has little time for the simplistic, rose-tinted notion that the past was always a better place, that the films and music of today represent a degradation. Kashyap's very abstract No Smoking, which he worked on in 2007, was the high watermark of his achievement as a poet-lyricist, he told me before his session. And he spoke approvingly of the high standards of professionalism in today's film industry - it being a time of bound scripts (usually unheard of in the 1970s) and more attention to detail in areas such as production design and research.
With the nature of the musical sequence in Hindi cinema having undergone changes, lyric-writing has become more challenging - and invigorating - for him. In a '70s film like Aandhi, Gulzar could use exalted language for the songs, having the characters sing "Tum aa gaye ho, noor aa gaya hai / Nahin toh chiraagon se lau jaa rahi thi" - lines that the same characters would certainly not have used in the "prose" sections of the film, where their dialogue would be more casual. Because it was understood that a song marked a break in narrative space and logic. But in contemporary cinema, there is a greater self-consciousness about the need to "realistically" integrate songs with narrative. So when a gangster sings in Satya, the words - "Goli maar bheje mein" - must match his speech. The item song Beedi Jalayele (Omkara) is raunchy and suggestive, but that's because the priority is to be truthful to the rustic setting. How would these people express themselves? What Gulzar sahab has been doing in his recent work is to catch such truths and still make lasting poetry out of them. I hope he continues for many more years.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer