Tushar Bhatt
BHAVNAGAR:
Some people are like an iceberg; only one-tenth of their person-ality would be visible. Krishnalal Shridharani, who would have been only two years short now of centenary, had he been alive, is a prime example.
Known to Gujarat mostly as a very sensitive poet of the freedom struggle vintage, he is also vaguely recalled as having been a jour-nalist. Even in the city of Bhavnagar that boasts of him as one of its own, most think of him as Kavi Shridharani, a poet in Gujarati. Yet, this was only one part of his warm, vibrant, radiant and multifac-eted totality.
Though little remembered today, Krishnalal's lasting contribution in the world beyond the boundaries of Gujarat, was in his pioneer-ing efforts at explaining Gandhi and his tactics of fighting the British Empire, to the world at large in English, through writing and books. He was a follower of the Mahatma in strangely contrary ways. He did not believe in aping the Mahatma in his outward appearance and style; he loved pipe-smoking, was always nattily dressed and could easily pass off as a pucca Brown Sahib. But he was not. At heart, he was an Indian, who understood Gandhi and opted to tell the world about the Mahatma through words, rather than through clothes. In the process, he acquired the Western idiom, but re-mained a staunch Indian in values.
It is perhaps ironical, as also symbolic of his home state, Guja-rat, hardly anyone seemed to think of Shridharani, the youngest participant in the epoch-making Dandi March in 1930, save in Bhavnagar.
The city Bhavnagar appears to particularly revel in nostalgia in a general way, and in remembering those who made a name for themselves in arts, literature and culture. It boldly takes pride, pleasure and initiative in reminding itself and others of the greats it had produced.Shridharani's alma mater, Dakshinamurti, the Bhav-nagar Sahitya Sabha, his friends and admirers unfailingly think of the man, with gratitude and affection, on his birthday in September, something the rest of the State too ought to do, at least to erase the stigma that it is a land of the forgetful and the ungrateful.
Although he studied at Dakshinamurti and Gujarat Vid-yapeeth,Shridharani was apparently not cut out to be a conven-tional khadi-clad.He struck his own path and went to Shantini-ketan.Rabindranath Tagore was highly impressed by the sensitive Gujarati and urged him to travel to the West. It was to be a mo-mentous journey; it changed the course of his life.Gujarati literature was perhaps the only loser.
Late Harindra Dave, another sensitive soul, poet and journalist, once introduced Shridharani as a man who would swim against not just the current but also the flood. Anybody can make speed with the current, but only those with a rare force of soul could do so against the flow. At Karadi, just before reaching Dandi for the salt satyagrah, Krishnalal wrote a piece, Saput, and earned Gandhiji's affectionate rebuke for spinning yarn instead of the wheel.
His lifelong passion was writing. He was a journalist par excel-lence and an equally perceptive radio commentator, and in those days one of the rare breed of those who would wield their pens with facility both in Gujarati and English.
His books in English, including his auto-biography, My India My America, became best-sellers in the early 1940s.Long before he went abroad and began writing in English; Shridharani had won recognition as a poet and dramatist in Gujarati.
Born on September 16, 1911, at Umrala, Krishnalal's childhood passed mostly in Umrala, Bhavnagar and Junagadh. He lost his fa-ther, Jethalal, a lawyer with a roaring practice, when Shridharani was barely eight. The man that grew up did not remember much about his father, but a lot about his mother, Laheriben.
Krishnalal wrote about his mother in a poem, Maari Baa
Aradhanaman smarun roop Baanu,
Ne Baane smarine Prabhuroop pamun.
In 1957,in the revised edition of Kodiyan, Krishnalal noted that the first thing he would see while doing dhyan, just before getting up and when retiring for the day, was that instead of Om,his mind will show him the image of his mother.
His early days carried vivid memories of Girnar, the Gir, its flora and fauna. He joined an innovative educational institution, Dakshi-namurti in Bhavnagar. The schooling, full of experiments, proved beneficial for Krishnalal. He would not only take interest in poetry, but also took a hand at painting. When he was hardly 12,he wrote a raasdo, a folk song ,Halya Talakchand Sasare Lo.He penned in-numerable such things while in school, but his critical faculty was so sharp that he never included many of these in his collections published later, rejecting them as containing little of poetic ele-ments. But some were really brilliant, such as when he wrote about Gandhi, Daahbhari aankhon Matani,tenu tun aansu tapakyun. His love for painting reflected in his poems too.
Way back in 1941, Balwantray Thakore thought that Krishnalal's poetry was markedly different from that of either Umashankar Joshi or Sundaram, both tall poets. How and in what specific way,Thakore could not pinpoint but he underlined the language and art as having achieved a fusion in Krishnalal's poems.His dic-tion, other critics judged , was superb and the sensuousness of his poetry reminded a reader of Keats.
Poetry was not all. Shridharani also did considerable work in drama.
He joined Gujarat Vidyapeeth and was with Mahatma Gandhi during the Dandi March. For his part in the freedom struggle, Krishnalal served a term in jail. He also spent a couple of years at Shantiniketan and was one of the Gurudev's favourite pupils. He then went to the U.S. for studies ,and during his 12 years there took PhD in Sociology and Political Theory at Columbia University.
He continued writing at a breakneck speed in America, and the outcome was spectacular. In 1939, he gave a book in English, War Without Violence, explaining to the materialist West,the spiritual onslaught of the satyagrah, a non-violent and yet deadly weapon against repression and injustice. In 1946, he returned to India and made Delhi his home, joined the External Affairs Ministry, then un-der Jawahar Lal Nehru as an officer on special duty. But the poet did not fit in with the Babu culture of government and left the job to become a journalist, writing for the Amrita Bazar Patrika, travelling all over the country and world. In those days Delhi was not as crowded as it is today, and certainly not the madhouse of busybod-ies that it has become in the past three decades. He used to pen a column for the Gujarati daily, Sandesh too.
He married Sundari, artist daughter of noted Sindhi writer,philosopher and nationalist,Dayaram Didumal,in March,1950.He had wide ranging contacts and was very friendly with a lot of leaders including Nehru, Mrs Indira Gandhi, her hus-band, Phiroze Gandhi,and Dr S.Radhakrishnan,as also a host of foreign dignitaries.
When in Delhi and not doing anything else, he would potter around his flower-beds and lilly-ponds and read stories to children.
His contribution to the Gujarati literature was immense, mainly as a poet and dramatist. Yet, he was recognised rather belatedly only. Even Gujarat did nothing. It was only in 1958, Krishnalal was suddenly discovered by the literary establishment. He was named for the Ranjitram gold medal for services to literature.
Krihsnalal died unexpectedly on July 23,1960,when he was hardly 49. It was not an age to go and considering what he had al-ready written, much more was yet to come. That was not to be.
Among the noteworthy literary creations of Krishnalal, besides Kodiyan, are Punarpi, Vadlo, Sonapari and three plays, Piyo Gori, Morna Inda and Padmini. His English books include My India,My America, War Without Violence, Warning to the West, The Big Four of India, The Adventures of the Upside-Down, The Journalist in India, Smiles From Kashmir and the Mahatma and the World.
All his works in both languages have a common thread; all re-veal him to be a highly sensitive and equally perceptive person. My India,My America won Shridharani ecstatic reviews in the American Press. Thomas Sigrue writing in the New York Herald Tribune hailed it as a "fascinating mixture of autobiography, biography, po-litical analysis,philosophical exposition and fine writing." The 646-page book's writer was described by others as a young man who has the wisdom of the ages of his people.
On his return to India, he kept on writing. His four portraits in words of Nehru,Rajendra Prasad,Rajaji and Sardar Patel,as also his monograph on journalism show him as a journalist far ahead of his time,in his style of wrting, his assessment of people and events and his perception of the future.He wrote of India's first prime min-ister,Nehru , as a man who seldom had intimate friends who was most of the time,"mangificently and dangerously aloof.The passing away of the Mahatma and Patel had removed from the Indian scene the last men who could admonish Nehu."Every individual,in order to keep his sanity, must have some people who can tell him when the occasion arises that ' you are making a fool of yourself'. The man who occupies too high a pedestal for anybody to stand on equal level with him,runs the risk of losing his sense of proportion", Krishnalal observed.Of Sardar Patel whom he called a practical man,Krishnalal said: "The death of Patel marked a sharper turning point in the infant career of independent India than did the martyr-dom of Mahatma Gandhi....Gandhi left a universal void; the void created by Patel's passing away is purely national, and so it is felt more intensely...Patel was a strong man, and now India is without a strong man.The passing away of a strong man always creates a serious situation.For,when a strong man dies, he not only creates a void,but he also removes the lid. Pent-up, seething forces begin to find expression." These portraits were illustrated by caricatures drawn by late cartoonist, Shankar, who later started the celebrated, and now defunct Shankar’s Weekly, a world class cartoon journal.
Most of Shridharani’s English books are not available now. Those few copies that are there are the possessions of pride for their owners.That Krishnalal Shridharani should have passed away so early in his life was a tragic loss not only to literature but also to journalism.The best way to commemorate his memory would be to republish some of his unavailable literature and scan the family ar-chives to see if there was anything unpublished left behind.
Showing posts with label WordSketches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WordSketches. Show all posts
A living and CLICKING legend,
Pranlal Patel
Tushar Bhatt
Seldom do we realise that photography uses light and time as its primary raw materials to serve the mankind in more than one ways. It not only captures a frozen moment of life and presents to us a unique authentication of history. The credibility of the written word can be easily suspected but the photograph is trusted as a reflection of truth. This makes photog-raphy more significant than merely a tool of capturing images.
Again, as an art tool, photography presents us with a challenging task of capturing the right moment and freezes it for posterity. There is a terrific thrill in doing this, which is why out of millions of people clicking away everyday around the globe. Yet,only a fraction would emerge as real artists. Photographers are a galore, but photo-artists are rare.
With the invention of photography we acquired a new means of expression more closely associated with memory than any other. A photograph constitutes another way of expres-sion or telling. It just does not depend fully on cinematic effect which helps trigger memory and it has little to do with reportage because it freezes a specific moment in time.
Propounding this line of thought two renowned theorists and thinking photographers, John Berger and Jean Mohr said that “A photograph arrests the flow of time in which the event photographed once existed. Every photograph presents us with two messages, a message concerning the event photographed and another concerning a shock of discontinuity.”
They further argued that “between the moment recorded and the present moment of look-ing, there is an abyss. We are so used to photography that we no longer consciously record the second of these twin messages”- except when the subject shown in the photograph is known to us and evokes memory or in case of unknown subjects, the image has a mys-tique of its own.
This mystique cannot be brought about save by maestros of the art of photography. They have a magic in the coordination of their body and the camera acquired through long years of intense practice. It is a semi-spiritual pursuit, a sadhna.
Even among these true photo-artists, Pranlal Patel, an Ahmedabad (Gujarat)-based lens man is the rarest of the rare. Active in photography for nearly 70 years, Pranlal in 2009 is in the hundredth year of life, and still kicking and CLICKING. He still wields a camera, walks upright, though slowly, and has most of his slightly yellowish teeth intact and in service. He enjoys food more than people half his age, is curious like a child, and again like an inno-cent small boy, gets easily absorbed into the present moment, here and now. Behind his spectacles, eyes sparkle with abundant interest in life. He is equally comfortable with the children, youngsters and oldies.
He is a simple person, though certainly not a simpleton, frugal with words but fluent in thought. What keeps him fit and full of zest for living? “I don’t know. I do nothing special. I eat normal Gujarati vegetarian meal, do padmasan, and eat five pieces of dates with ghee (clarified butter) every morning and drink milk. I regard myself as an eternal student, keen to learn newer things. I have many Gurus; even my grandson Piyush is my Guru because he taught me a lot about harnessing computer as a tool for photography. Among my clos-est friends are two noted young photographers, awards-winner Vivek Desai and Ketan Modi, who runs a highly-acclaimed photography training institution. Vivek is also my dear-est disciple. I am proud of them”.
Pranlal is very popular among young professionals and helps them a lot by patiently pass-ing on insights obtained through decades of photography. His photography has been mostly based on box cameras of the old genre and in black and white, without using the flash. He firmly believes that “the real art of photography does not reside in gadgets, whether a flash light or the modern-day digital cameras. It does not rely solely on composi-tion, light and shade, but on the eyes and fingers. There must be a perfect co-ordination between the eyes and the fingers. In turn the eyes and fingers must harmonise with the camera in such a way that they know simultaneously what unusual feature is there in the subject, compose in a way that highlights that feature and decide in unison when to press the shutter. They must become one with each other and the subject being clicked.”
Alas, there is no device in the market that can achieve this feat for the lesser mortals! Those who have learnt the secret are photo-artists, the Masters. The rest are slaves of technology.
Of course, people like Pranlal can throw some hints. “You should think before you pick up the camera to shoot. Most of us do not contemplate in advance. Before going in for shoot-ing, you should think of some unusual angle, slant, symbolism, colours, light and shadow in the composition. Almost every thing has been previously photographed. You have to bring out something that is different.”
He says “It doe not mean that you should ignore day-to-day life. It means you must learn to concentrate in the present assignment, not just take a fleeting interest in the subject of the assignment but view it as the most important thing in your life, here and now. Your mind should neither wander hither and thither nor waver. You must see what is in front of you at the present moment. Nothing else matters. This cannot be accomplished overnight. You have to practise endlessly. Like a music maker you must never stop doing the riyaz all your life.”
Pranlal quotes an example. Ages ago, he was on an assignment to create a photo portfolio of the new building of a local company. Says he, “I could have done it in two or three weeks. But I took nearly six months. I would go to the building, sit in different places outside and study the light and shade and the time. I wanted to find out the timing and season when there would be best sunlight. I did not even open my camera bag till I had decided that in the forenoon of May there would be ideal light. The portfolio was much appreciated.”
It all began in an innocuous way.
It was a hot day in May in 1940.The world was, for several months, at war for the second time in the 20th century. The Quit India movement was a good two years away in the future and the independence of the country as yet a dream.
Thirty years old then Pranlal, a Rolie-flex camera slung on the shoulder, set out for Kash-mir, long hailed as paradise on the earth, with a return ticket from Ahmedabad to Srinagar via Rawalpindi. Inclusive of the bus-fare from Rawalpindi to Srinagar, the cost per head was a meagre Rs.42.5. But the young man was not from among the rich in search of pleasure.
He was setting out to take photographs, in an era when a camera was a rare thing to pos-sess, more a hobby of the wealthy or the crazy. A Kodak 120 reel cost 14 annas. Like the anna coins, the 120 film too is extinct now.
The photographs taken during that trip continue to fascinate even today, not only because of their excellence but as a collection of historic value. It effectively brings out how much more enchanting was Kashmir just 70 years ago and what damage man has done to it.
The 99-year-old Patel is still in photography. He took it up as a hobby in 1932. In no time it became a supplementary profession and then got transformed into a life-long passion. He may be the oldest photo professional alive and still active in India, if not in the world. A rep-resentative collection of his vintage photographs at Jaipur (Rajsthan), in March,2009, has been dscribed by Pranlal as fulfillment of a long standing desire. “I have desire left unful-filled.Now, I am waiting for one way travel on God’s train.” He brushed aside protests from listeners. “I have had everything in life.”
The photographs are not only technically perfect, underlining the superb sense of composi-tion, and skilful management of light and shade but also are so evocative that they seem to have an enduring life of their own, vibrant, vivacious and memorable.
Another trait that separates Pranlal in the rare category is the habit of preserving and main-taining his thousands of negative, repository of images of over 70 years. Together they are a massive documentation of India’s march of progress and social change.
These images also seem to re-assert the prime position black and white pictures occupied in the art of photography, notwithstanding the rapid advancement of colour photography. There is a stream of defeatism about black and white photography these days and in many cities there are no studios that will wash, develop and print black and white pictures.
Pranlal Patel’s pictures celebrate the glory of black and white, re-inforcing what W.D. Wright, a British professor of Applied Optics at the Imperial College of Science & Technol-ogy, observed years ago. He contended that the black and white photographs may appear to the viewers more real than the colour pictures. Over the years, viewers have learned to supply their own colour information to a black and white photograph.” You may get closer to reality with colour but the closer you get the more obvious it becomes that it is a pic-ture,(and) not the real thing.”
Pranlal is reluctant to take to colour photography. He thinks that the black and white photo-graphs have an immense capacity for subtlety, rich sensitivity of detail and graphic urgency. To him it also is a stimulating mental challenge to transform every colour around us into two shades of black and white only and bring a still photograph to life.
Pranlal has, over the past 70-odd years of photography, earned a reputation as a pictorial-ist, extending far beyond the shores of India, bagging awards and prizes. His work has been published in international media for decades. Pranlal has an innate sense of history. For example, take his photographs of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad over the past half a century. They instantly tell you a visual story of the degradation of the ecology. Or take the images of a typical wedding in the Patel farming community over past half century. They highlight subtle changes in customs and attire, attitudes and behaviour over time.
At his age most people would be bed-ridden, if alive. Countless others would have hung up their professional equipment and sunk into senility. Pranlal continues to explore life with the same sense of wonder and romance that first made him give up his job as a teacher in a municipal primary school in Ahmedabad.
Born on January 1,1910, Pranlal has come up the hard way in life, but the harshness has left no trace on his personality. A man with a largish nose, twinkling eyes hidden behind a 25 per cent darkness goggles glasses, he is quick to smile and enthuse. Hailing originally from Jamnagar district, he traces his family home now to Kolki in Upleta taluka of Saurash-tra. He grew up at his maternal uncle’s place, working in Ahmedabad in petty jobs to help family. “I have sold peanuts, soda and lemon soft drinks near Victor cinema hall in Fuvara in olden days, delivered at home newspapers of Ahmedabad, which included at one time Gandhiji’s Navjivan. Remembering his childhood, Pranlal says: “I was, however, a bright boy from the very beginning, who was made to jump several years from Standard I in pri-mary school. I passed my vernacular final (which was not the final year of secondary stage in education but of the primary stage, but in those days, something of a qualification).I be-came a primary school teacher, with an initial salary of Rs.15 supplemented with one or two tuitions”
But,recalls Pranlal, he had an urge to do something different, something so well that people will remember him by.“This yearning brought me in contact with photography in 1932 when I acquired a box camera. In the early years, I learnt a lot from Col.Balwant Bhatt, an ace photographer himself.” He does not make any claims, but Pranlal must have had a gift from birth to identify visuals, compose them automatically and then capture them exactly as he saw them with his mind’s eye. He began to work as a free-lance photographer even while continuing as a primary teacher. A meticulous diary-keeper, Pranlal noted in 1937 that he had made an income Rs.710 in that year from photography. In 1938,the figure jumped to Rs.1,241. Not much by today’s standards, but as Pranlal notes humorously: “The rupee was not so cheap in those days.”
Remembers Pranlal: “I was debating with myself if I should continue as a teacher or do something else that will make me stand out. I had been going to Ravishankar Raval’s school of fine arts,dabbling in painting to see if that was going to be my way of life. I think it was around 1938-39 that I got an opportunity to see an exhibition of photographs of Kash-mir, taken by a famous photographer, Abid Saiyed of Palanpur. My mind was, as if, under a spell. I too wanted to capture in the photo frame the beautiful landscapes, natural scenes, snow-capped mountains, the serene life style and lovely Kashmiri people.”
Abid was a sympathetic listener to the young man and not only gave him all the dope, but also a promise to speak to Kodak people to give him film at the dealers’ rate. Three friends from Mumbai and Ahmedabad agreed to join Pranlal on the safari to Kashmir. Before they undertook the trip, something happened that landed Pranlal full-time into photography.
Recalls Pranlal: “ One day I was taking class III in Madalpur municipal school, teaching Gu-jarati to the pupils, A camera, as usual hung on the back of my chair. An Inspector arrived from the municipal administrative office for his annual inspection, saw my Super Iconta, and asked : ‘What is this?’ I told him politely it was a camera, to which the inspector re-torted loudly,’ If you are so fond of photography and the camera, then open a studio on Gandhi Road. Such things are no good for an ideal teacher.’ I was stunned.”
Pranlal could not sleep that night. The next morning, he went to his principal to tell him he was quitting. “I was rattled by the rude remark. I had the confidence that I would be able to eke out a living from photography, my obsession. Already I was making Rs.200 a month as side income from photography at social and official functions. It was a good enough amount to live on.”
The young man who went to Srinagar in May, 1940, via Rawalpindi, spent a month in the valley. “Among other things, at Srinagar we stayed in a shikara for three days, paying a princely sum Rs.2.50 a day, and then moved on.” The days would be spent photographing the heart-stopping beauty of the Kashmiri landscape and people.
They went to Pahelgam and to remote villages, mountainsides, water-falls and everywhere in the beautiful valley. “One could buy a hundred apricots for six annas. Oh, it was like liv-ing in paradise for a month.”
Says Pranlal :”What all we saw can never be described in words or even in pictures. It was an era of black and white photography, and of mechanical cameras, with no modern tech-nology available to aid a lens man. I took pictures of Kashmir with these limitations, expos-ing fifty rolls of XX film. These rolls were washed locally in Srinagar.On return to Ahmeda-bad, we started enlarging them into prints. Friends and others who saw them exclaimed words like Oh! Wow! Fantastic! Wonderful! Exra-ordinary! Balwant Bhatt helped and guided me into sending these pictures to national and international magazines, earning me a name as a pictorialist.That was a golden period, those days 30 days in Kashmir. I yearn to go Kashmir once more, and capture as it looks today.”
The lucky break into photography via Kashmir made the life for Pranlal. Scores of journals in and outside the country carried his pictures every now and then. He never looked back, becoming more and more famous as a pictorialist with rare sensitivity and dedication, trav-elling widely in the country, capturing events like the wedding in the Mysore Royal family in the fifties and that in the Royal family of Rajkot. He has a huge collection of rare pictures of cities, famines, landscapes and people.
Among the prized possessions are huge albums of photographs of the Iron Man of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel whose every visit to Ahmedabad whose mayor he earlier had been captured on his camera. His presence was so routine that when Junagadh princely State was liberated from the Nawab’s rule and merged in the Union, Pranlal was present in the city when Sardar arrived. He hailed Pranlal, saying,” if I come, you too should. Do you keep tracking me? Is it not so?” Pranlal did a lot of photography during the Quit India movement. His pictures were lapped up by photo-hungry newspapers and magazine. His earnings shot up and he filed his Income Tax returns in 1947, to the great surprise of offi-cials. It was hard to imagine so much income from free-lance photography only in those days. Nearly 90 per cent of surplus was used in buying newer equipment.
Along with still photography, he also undertook movie photography. He filmed extensively and in 1947 and 1957, recorded some 16,000 feet of movie of a religious head’s pilgrimage of Vrajbhoomi; it was so massive that the divine personality got tired of merely watching it. But the photographer was indefatigable.
He has dozens of albums and has held numerous exhibitions. His work was not just superb photography but also a social, visual history.
His wife Damayanti, their son, Anand, their two daughters and grand-children all have taken to photography. Damayanti was a self-made darkroom wizard who could rescue very fuzzy photographs by dexterously doing washing, developing and printing. She was a sort of record-keeper too.
Some 40 years ago when Queen Elizabeth came to Ahmedabad, the state government wanted a hundred copies of an old photograph of the Somnath temple. Pranlal was not at home when Manubhai Trivedi, an information official, came to their studio-cum-residence. Damayanti requested the officer to wait for five minutes during which she spotted the me-ticulously preserved negative. Within ten more minutes she came out of the darkroom with a perfect print of the old picture. The government got a hundred copies before morning. She passed away a few years ago, leaving a big void in Pranlal’s life. His grandson looks after the library work now
Today,Pranlal looks back with great satisfaction that he will leave behind foot-prints in the form of photographic prints to remember him by. But he has by no means called it a day. Tell him of a topic and his eyes shine. A routine day, till recently, began at 5.30 in the morn-ing when he would wake up. After breakfast at 9 a m he would set out on foot from his home for his studio, a distance of two kilometres. If the son and others were not using the studio, he would get into the darkroom, working up to 1 in the afternoon.
He helps youngsters willingly in learning photography, emphasing the importance of com-position, painstaking care for capturing details, judging light correctly and developing and printing the photographs meticulously.
He advocates working not only with body and mind, but also heart. His own involvement in the work is such that he does not remember time or gets tired or hungry when engrossed in photography. Some years ago the Kankaria lake in Ahmedabad had a huge fish population dying out suddenly and the stench of the dead fish floating in the water was awful. But Pranlal took out a boat, taking his own time in capturing just one memorable picture of the dead fish panned by empty boats on either side of the frame. He never noticed the stink, as he clicked away till he had captured the right composition.
He says “photography is something done with the eye, the mind and the heart. The equip-ment ,though important ,is secondary. With the best equipment in the world, you could turn up with lousy pictures. With primitive equipment but alert mind, you could transform ordi-nary things into photographs of extra-ordinary charm and beauty.”
He generally does not use a flash and none of his memorable pictures has had the use of artificial lights. He believes that the real fruits of good photography cannot be reaped unless one takes an equal amount of care in washing, developing and printing. His one-liner to aspiring photographers is “Do not compromise, either in quality, costs or time de-voted in getting a good picture. Quality always remains in the vogue, whatever the era, whatever the state of technological development. It was so yesterday, it is so today, and will be so tomorrow and the day after too.”
It is all pure Zen of photography.
(THE END)
Pranlal Patel
Tushar Bhatt
Seldom do we realise that photography uses light and time as its primary raw materials to serve the mankind in more than one ways. It not only captures a frozen moment of life and presents to us a unique authentication of history. The credibility of the written word can be easily suspected but the photograph is trusted as a reflection of truth. This makes photog-raphy more significant than merely a tool of capturing images.
Again, as an art tool, photography presents us with a challenging task of capturing the right moment and freezes it for posterity. There is a terrific thrill in doing this, which is why out of millions of people clicking away everyday around the globe. Yet,only a fraction would emerge as real artists. Photographers are a galore, but photo-artists are rare.
With the invention of photography we acquired a new means of expression more closely associated with memory than any other. A photograph constitutes another way of expres-sion or telling. It just does not depend fully on cinematic effect which helps trigger memory and it has little to do with reportage because it freezes a specific moment in time.
Propounding this line of thought two renowned theorists and thinking photographers, John Berger and Jean Mohr said that “A photograph arrests the flow of time in which the event photographed once existed. Every photograph presents us with two messages, a message concerning the event photographed and another concerning a shock of discontinuity.”
They further argued that “between the moment recorded and the present moment of look-ing, there is an abyss. We are so used to photography that we no longer consciously record the second of these twin messages”- except when the subject shown in the photograph is known to us and evokes memory or in case of unknown subjects, the image has a mys-tique of its own.
This mystique cannot be brought about save by maestros of the art of photography. They have a magic in the coordination of their body and the camera acquired through long years of intense practice. It is a semi-spiritual pursuit, a sadhna.
Even among these true photo-artists, Pranlal Patel, an Ahmedabad (Gujarat)-based lens man is the rarest of the rare. Active in photography for nearly 70 years, Pranlal in 2009 is in the hundredth year of life, and still kicking and CLICKING. He still wields a camera, walks upright, though slowly, and has most of his slightly yellowish teeth intact and in service. He enjoys food more than people half his age, is curious like a child, and again like an inno-cent small boy, gets easily absorbed into the present moment, here and now. Behind his spectacles, eyes sparkle with abundant interest in life. He is equally comfortable with the children, youngsters and oldies.
He is a simple person, though certainly not a simpleton, frugal with words but fluent in thought. What keeps him fit and full of zest for living? “I don’t know. I do nothing special. I eat normal Gujarati vegetarian meal, do padmasan, and eat five pieces of dates with ghee (clarified butter) every morning and drink milk. I regard myself as an eternal student, keen to learn newer things. I have many Gurus; even my grandson Piyush is my Guru because he taught me a lot about harnessing computer as a tool for photography. Among my clos-est friends are two noted young photographers, awards-winner Vivek Desai and Ketan Modi, who runs a highly-acclaimed photography training institution. Vivek is also my dear-est disciple. I am proud of them”.
Pranlal is very popular among young professionals and helps them a lot by patiently pass-ing on insights obtained through decades of photography. His photography has been mostly based on box cameras of the old genre and in black and white, without using the flash. He firmly believes that “the real art of photography does not reside in gadgets, whether a flash light or the modern-day digital cameras. It does not rely solely on composi-tion, light and shade, but on the eyes and fingers. There must be a perfect co-ordination between the eyes and the fingers. In turn the eyes and fingers must harmonise with the camera in such a way that they know simultaneously what unusual feature is there in the subject, compose in a way that highlights that feature and decide in unison when to press the shutter. They must become one with each other and the subject being clicked.”
Alas, there is no device in the market that can achieve this feat for the lesser mortals! Those who have learnt the secret are photo-artists, the Masters. The rest are slaves of technology.
Of course, people like Pranlal can throw some hints. “You should think before you pick up the camera to shoot. Most of us do not contemplate in advance. Before going in for shoot-ing, you should think of some unusual angle, slant, symbolism, colours, light and shadow in the composition. Almost every thing has been previously photographed. You have to bring out something that is different.”
He says “It doe not mean that you should ignore day-to-day life. It means you must learn to concentrate in the present assignment, not just take a fleeting interest in the subject of the assignment but view it as the most important thing in your life, here and now. Your mind should neither wander hither and thither nor waver. You must see what is in front of you at the present moment. Nothing else matters. This cannot be accomplished overnight. You have to practise endlessly. Like a music maker you must never stop doing the riyaz all your life.”
Pranlal quotes an example. Ages ago, he was on an assignment to create a photo portfolio of the new building of a local company. Says he, “I could have done it in two or three weeks. But I took nearly six months. I would go to the building, sit in different places outside and study the light and shade and the time. I wanted to find out the timing and season when there would be best sunlight. I did not even open my camera bag till I had decided that in the forenoon of May there would be ideal light. The portfolio was much appreciated.”
It all began in an innocuous way.
It was a hot day in May in 1940.The world was, for several months, at war for the second time in the 20th century. The Quit India movement was a good two years away in the future and the independence of the country as yet a dream.
Thirty years old then Pranlal, a Rolie-flex camera slung on the shoulder, set out for Kash-mir, long hailed as paradise on the earth, with a return ticket from Ahmedabad to Srinagar via Rawalpindi. Inclusive of the bus-fare from Rawalpindi to Srinagar, the cost per head was a meagre Rs.42.5. But the young man was not from among the rich in search of pleasure.
He was setting out to take photographs, in an era when a camera was a rare thing to pos-sess, more a hobby of the wealthy or the crazy. A Kodak 120 reel cost 14 annas. Like the anna coins, the 120 film too is extinct now.
The photographs taken during that trip continue to fascinate even today, not only because of their excellence but as a collection of historic value. It effectively brings out how much more enchanting was Kashmir just 70 years ago and what damage man has done to it.
The 99-year-old Patel is still in photography. He took it up as a hobby in 1932. In no time it became a supplementary profession and then got transformed into a life-long passion. He may be the oldest photo professional alive and still active in India, if not in the world. A rep-resentative collection of his vintage photographs at Jaipur (Rajsthan), in March,2009, has been dscribed by Pranlal as fulfillment of a long standing desire. “I have desire left unful-filled.Now, I am waiting for one way travel on God’s train.” He brushed aside protests from listeners. “I have had everything in life.”
The photographs are not only technically perfect, underlining the superb sense of composi-tion, and skilful management of light and shade but also are so evocative that they seem to have an enduring life of their own, vibrant, vivacious and memorable.
Another trait that separates Pranlal in the rare category is the habit of preserving and main-taining his thousands of negative, repository of images of over 70 years. Together they are a massive documentation of India’s march of progress and social change.
These images also seem to re-assert the prime position black and white pictures occupied in the art of photography, notwithstanding the rapid advancement of colour photography. There is a stream of defeatism about black and white photography these days and in many cities there are no studios that will wash, develop and print black and white pictures.
Pranlal Patel’s pictures celebrate the glory of black and white, re-inforcing what W.D. Wright, a British professor of Applied Optics at the Imperial College of Science & Technol-ogy, observed years ago. He contended that the black and white photographs may appear to the viewers more real than the colour pictures. Over the years, viewers have learned to supply their own colour information to a black and white photograph.” You may get closer to reality with colour but the closer you get the more obvious it becomes that it is a pic-ture,(and) not the real thing.”
Pranlal is reluctant to take to colour photography. He thinks that the black and white photo-graphs have an immense capacity for subtlety, rich sensitivity of detail and graphic urgency. To him it also is a stimulating mental challenge to transform every colour around us into two shades of black and white only and bring a still photograph to life.
Pranlal has, over the past 70-odd years of photography, earned a reputation as a pictorial-ist, extending far beyond the shores of India, bagging awards and prizes. His work has been published in international media for decades. Pranlal has an innate sense of history. For example, take his photographs of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad over the past half a century. They instantly tell you a visual story of the degradation of the ecology. Or take the images of a typical wedding in the Patel farming community over past half century. They highlight subtle changes in customs and attire, attitudes and behaviour over time.
At his age most people would be bed-ridden, if alive. Countless others would have hung up their professional equipment and sunk into senility. Pranlal continues to explore life with the same sense of wonder and romance that first made him give up his job as a teacher in a municipal primary school in Ahmedabad.
Born on January 1,1910, Pranlal has come up the hard way in life, but the harshness has left no trace on his personality. A man with a largish nose, twinkling eyes hidden behind a 25 per cent darkness goggles glasses, he is quick to smile and enthuse. Hailing originally from Jamnagar district, he traces his family home now to Kolki in Upleta taluka of Saurash-tra. He grew up at his maternal uncle’s place, working in Ahmedabad in petty jobs to help family. “I have sold peanuts, soda and lemon soft drinks near Victor cinema hall in Fuvara in olden days, delivered at home newspapers of Ahmedabad, which included at one time Gandhiji’s Navjivan. Remembering his childhood, Pranlal says: “I was, however, a bright boy from the very beginning, who was made to jump several years from Standard I in pri-mary school. I passed my vernacular final (which was not the final year of secondary stage in education but of the primary stage, but in those days, something of a qualification).I be-came a primary school teacher, with an initial salary of Rs.15 supplemented with one or two tuitions”
But,recalls Pranlal, he had an urge to do something different, something so well that people will remember him by.“This yearning brought me in contact with photography in 1932 when I acquired a box camera. In the early years, I learnt a lot from Col.Balwant Bhatt, an ace photographer himself.” He does not make any claims, but Pranlal must have had a gift from birth to identify visuals, compose them automatically and then capture them exactly as he saw them with his mind’s eye. He began to work as a free-lance photographer even while continuing as a primary teacher. A meticulous diary-keeper, Pranlal noted in 1937 that he had made an income Rs.710 in that year from photography. In 1938,the figure jumped to Rs.1,241. Not much by today’s standards, but as Pranlal notes humorously: “The rupee was not so cheap in those days.”
Remembers Pranlal: “I was debating with myself if I should continue as a teacher or do something else that will make me stand out. I had been going to Ravishankar Raval’s school of fine arts,dabbling in painting to see if that was going to be my way of life. I think it was around 1938-39 that I got an opportunity to see an exhibition of photographs of Kash-mir, taken by a famous photographer, Abid Saiyed of Palanpur. My mind was, as if, under a spell. I too wanted to capture in the photo frame the beautiful landscapes, natural scenes, snow-capped mountains, the serene life style and lovely Kashmiri people.”
Abid was a sympathetic listener to the young man and not only gave him all the dope, but also a promise to speak to Kodak people to give him film at the dealers’ rate. Three friends from Mumbai and Ahmedabad agreed to join Pranlal on the safari to Kashmir. Before they undertook the trip, something happened that landed Pranlal full-time into photography.
Recalls Pranlal: “ One day I was taking class III in Madalpur municipal school, teaching Gu-jarati to the pupils, A camera, as usual hung on the back of my chair. An Inspector arrived from the municipal administrative office for his annual inspection, saw my Super Iconta, and asked : ‘What is this?’ I told him politely it was a camera, to which the inspector re-torted loudly,’ If you are so fond of photography and the camera, then open a studio on Gandhi Road. Such things are no good for an ideal teacher.’ I was stunned.”
Pranlal could not sleep that night. The next morning, he went to his principal to tell him he was quitting. “I was rattled by the rude remark. I had the confidence that I would be able to eke out a living from photography, my obsession. Already I was making Rs.200 a month as side income from photography at social and official functions. It was a good enough amount to live on.”
The young man who went to Srinagar in May, 1940, via Rawalpindi, spent a month in the valley. “Among other things, at Srinagar we stayed in a shikara for three days, paying a princely sum Rs.2.50 a day, and then moved on.” The days would be spent photographing the heart-stopping beauty of the Kashmiri landscape and people.
They went to Pahelgam and to remote villages, mountainsides, water-falls and everywhere in the beautiful valley. “One could buy a hundred apricots for six annas. Oh, it was like liv-ing in paradise for a month.”
Says Pranlal :”What all we saw can never be described in words or even in pictures. It was an era of black and white photography, and of mechanical cameras, with no modern tech-nology available to aid a lens man. I took pictures of Kashmir with these limitations, expos-ing fifty rolls of XX film. These rolls were washed locally in Srinagar.On return to Ahmeda-bad, we started enlarging them into prints. Friends and others who saw them exclaimed words like Oh! Wow! Fantastic! Wonderful! Exra-ordinary! Balwant Bhatt helped and guided me into sending these pictures to national and international magazines, earning me a name as a pictorialist.That was a golden period, those days 30 days in Kashmir. I yearn to go Kashmir once more, and capture as it looks today.”
The lucky break into photography via Kashmir made the life for Pranlal. Scores of journals in and outside the country carried his pictures every now and then. He never looked back, becoming more and more famous as a pictorialist with rare sensitivity and dedication, trav-elling widely in the country, capturing events like the wedding in the Mysore Royal family in the fifties and that in the Royal family of Rajkot. He has a huge collection of rare pictures of cities, famines, landscapes and people.
Among the prized possessions are huge albums of photographs of the Iron Man of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel whose every visit to Ahmedabad whose mayor he earlier had been captured on his camera. His presence was so routine that when Junagadh princely State was liberated from the Nawab’s rule and merged in the Union, Pranlal was present in the city when Sardar arrived. He hailed Pranlal, saying,” if I come, you too should. Do you keep tracking me? Is it not so?” Pranlal did a lot of photography during the Quit India movement. His pictures were lapped up by photo-hungry newspapers and magazine. His earnings shot up and he filed his Income Tax returns in 1947, to the great surprise of offi-cials. It was hard to imagine so much income from free-lance photography only in those days. Nearly 90 per cent of surplus was used in buying newer equipment.
Along with still photography, he also undertook movie photography. He filmed extensively and in 1947 and 1957, recorded some 16,000 feet of movie of a religious head’s pilgrimage of Vrajbhoomi; it was so massive that the divine personality got tired of merely watching it. But the photographer was indefatigable.
He has dozens of albums and has held numerous exhibitions. His work was not just superb photography but also a social, visual history.
His wife Damayanti, their son, Anand, their two daughters and grand-children all have taken to photography. Damayanti was a self-made darkroom wizard who could rescue very fuzzy photographs by dexterously doing washing, developing and printing. She was a sort of record-keeper too.
Some 40 years ago when Queen Elizabeth came to Ahmedabad, the state government wanted a hundred copies of an old photograph of the Somnath temple. Pranlal was not at home when Manubhai Trivedi, an information official, came to their studio-cum-residence. Damayanti requested the officer to wait for five minutes during which she spotted the me-ticulously preserved negative. Within ten more minutes she came out of the darkroom with a perfect print of the old picture. The government got a hundred copies before morning. She passed away a few years ago, leaving a big void in Pranlal’s life. His grandson looks after the library work now
Today,Pranlal looks back with great satisfaction that he will leave behind foot-prints in the form of photographic prints to remember him by. But he has by no means called it a day. Tell him of a topic and his eyes shine. A routine day, till recently, began at 5.30 in the morn-ing when he would wake up. After breakfast at 9 a m he would set out on foot from his home for his studio, a distance of two kilometres. If the son and others were not using the studio, he would get into the darkroom, working up to 1 in the afternoon.
He helps youngsters willingly in learning photography, emphasing the importance of com-position, painstaking care for capturing details, judging light correctly and developing and printing the photographs meticulously.
He advocates working not only with body and mind, but also heart. His own involvement in the work is such that he does not remember time or gets tired or hungry when engrossed in photography. Some years ago the Kankaria lake in Ahmedabad had a huge fish population dying out suddenly and the stench of the dead fish floating in the water was awful. But Pranlal took out a boat, taking his own time in capturing just one memorable picture of the dead fish panned by empty boats on either side of the frame. He never noticed the stink, as he clicked away till he had captured the right composition.
He says “photography is something done with the eye, the mind and the heart. The equip-ment ,though important ,is secondary. With the best equipment in the world, you could turn up with lousy pictures. With primitive equipment but alert mind, you could transform ordi-nary things into photographs of extra-ordinary charm and beauty.”
He generally does not use a flash and none of his memorable pictures has had the use of artificial lights. He believes that the real fruits of good photography cannot be reaped unless one takes an equal amount of care in washing, developing and printing. His one-liner to aspiring photographers is “Do not compromise, either in quality, costs or time de-voted in getting a good picture. Quality always remains in the vogue, whatever the era, whatever the state of technological development. It was so yesterday, it is so today, and will be so tomorrow and the day after too.”
It is all pure Zen of photography.
(THE END)
Chandrakant Bakshi’s Journey through literary jungle
Tushar Bhatt
With 126 books already to his credit, the 64-year-old Gujarati writer,Chandrakant Bakshi,did not look like a spent-force,either physically or mentally. It was our first one-to-one chat.There were several surprises.
He smiles easily,laughs heartily,even at a joke at his own ex-pense,behaves what the British gentry would have described as correctly,and generally comes across as an amiable person.
Which profile,many of his detractors-- and they are in a legion --would testify,does not sit easily with his profile as an author.If his tongue is witty,his pen is generally barbed,and prone to dripping vitriol more often than not,or so it would seem to the detractors.
That makes Bakshi a highly controversial writer,and he positively loves controversies.Some say he chases a few if none comes his way naturally.A man who takes life as it comes,and likes to take it at a flood,Bakshi is ameticulous craftsman of words.
But,he is not a man with the gift of the gab and nothing to say.He backs his skill as a wordsmith with an equally meticulous re-search,meshed with ideas designed to create an agitation.Simply put, he is a writer who hates to be ignored and does his damn best not to go unnoticed.
Bakshi divides his writing into two compartments,journalistic writ-ing,aimed at specific target audiences of the young,of women, of people in far-flung areas,striving to learn more, know more.It is studded with information and writing in a lively fashion-- a definite infortainment.His other writings,such as novels,short stories are what he says bring him into his element.But,in both types the backbone is research and experience.
He began writing for publication at the age of 18 and has never stopped,producing during the years 25 novels,12 collections of short stories,two collections of plays,seven travelogues,14 on his-tory and culture,41 anthologies of articles,two biographies,three containing excerpts,10 of translations and 41 anthologies of arti-cles in addition to three volumes of autobiography.Even is autobi-ography,begun in 1987,is an on-going work; more volumes are yet to come.The only branch he has left alone is poetry-writing."I did write some 20 poems but early on my life, I realised poetry was not my forte."
A rebel,who is often at odds with the establishment,he was twice awarded first prizes by the Gujarat Sahitya Academy and the Guja-rat government,but did not accept,contending these should go to younger writers.By temperament,he appears to be more at home in combat than in agreement with the powers that be.Many ridicule him as a one-man army,always itching for a fight; others think of him as a Don Quixote of Gujarati literature, forever tilting at real or imaginary windmills-- or windbags.
In reality,Bakshi is a warm-hearted person,with a strong sense of personal loyalty and a community sense of rebellion.He loves Cal-cutta dearly,although he left it many years. He disregards the criti-cism of the eastern India megapolis as a dying city:"I spent the best years of my life in Calcutta.I have rich memories.Your friends may not happen to be the most beautiful people in the world,but they are (italics) your friends (italics over)",he says,in explaining his loyalty to Calcutta.
His growth as a writer is some kind of an anti-thesis to the envi-ronment in which he was brought up.He hails from a family that was not poor.
Born on August 20,1932,at Palanpur in north Guja-rat,Chandrakant did his matriculation from Bombay university in 1948,taking the first class.He did his B.A. from St.Xavier's col-lege,Calcutta with distinction in 1952,took his degree in Law in 1956 and finished his post-graduation from Calcutta university in History and Political Science in 1963.In 1970,he moved to Bombay as a college teacher,joining the Mithibai College of Arts,taking un-der-graduate classes in history and political science for a dec-ade.For five years between 1975 and 1980,he also taught the post-graduate students at the Bombay university in the same sub-jects.For two years he worked as the principal of L.S.Raheja Col-lege of Arts and Commerce in Bombay,till 1982.
But what made him take to writing? Chandrakant has no clear-cut answer,save the memory that he started writing very early.His first short story,in Gujarati,Makanna Bhoot,was written in 1950,when he was 18,and published the next year in the prestig-ious Kumar magazine.
What prompted him to write in Gujarati was the location of his stores in an area in Calcutta,where no Gujarati was spoken all day."As it was my Gujarati was bad, it was atrocious,and I began to fear I will forget it altogether if did not write."
Remembers Bakshi of his olden days:"I did not know a soul in Gujarti literature,did not even know the language very well. But there was no looking back after I made a breakthrough in 1951. My writing contained the real raw experience of the river-side,of life in a decaying city, of murders and may-hem in day-to-day life, of fish.This somehow made an impact.Bachubhai Rawat told me in those days that for the first time a short story has come where there is real life,you feel the throb of it, feel it breathing.I think that was it.I feel art for me comes from real life.I believe the story con-tent has to be there in whatever you are writing,it should pertain to real life."
He does not think that he is avidly read because he loves to shock people,by being outrageously different."That is a misconcep-tion about me.Actually, earlier there never was any tradition of hard work in Gujarati writing,of marshalling facts,, mounting meticulous research,doing a lot of home-work. I have fortunately had the disci-pline of history and law in my training,and I tend to do a lot of work before I put words on to the paper.I read up,move around,talk to people,look at landscape.Nothing gets out of my hands, my control in my writing.I am outcast in literature,am never called for anything, am not on any committee, no official accolade comes my way.The Soviet Union called me,but not in our state.That rankles me some-times,but only momentarily.There has been a conspiracy of si-lence".
"I have only one ambition; I want to be able to live as long as I do in the same way as I am doing now.I ask God to grant me that.I also do not want to die an invalid.I have no mandate to improve the world."He is full of joie de vivre and wishes to be that way till the very last breath."I am I,and I want to be so till I am there".It requires superb arrogance or self-confidence to wish that,or perhaps both.
That was our first encounter, and many more wereto follow, with both the parties surviving. He marched into the sunset,one day suddenly. It is unbelievable that he did not conquer the Yama.
ends
Tushar Bhatt
With 126 books already to his credit, the 64-year-old Gujarati writer,Chandrakant Bakshi,did not look like a spent-force,either physically or mentally. It was our first one-to-one chat.There were several surprises.
He smiles easily,laughs heartily,even at a joke at his own ex-pense,behaves what the British gentry would have described as correctly,and generally comes across as an amiable person.
Which profile,many of his detractors-- and they are in a legion --would testify,does not sit easily with his profile as an author.If his tongue is witty,his pen is generally barbed,and prone to dripping vitriol more often than not,or so it would seem to the detractors.
That makes Bakshi a highly controversial writer,and he positively loves controversies.Some say he chases a few if none comes his way naturally.A man who takes life as it comes,and likes to take it at a flood,Bakshi is ameticulous craftsman of words.
But,he is not a man with the gift of the gab and nothing to say.He backs his skill as a wordsmith with an equally meticulous re-search,meshed with ideas designed to create an agitation.Simply put, he is a writer who hates to be ignored and does his damn best not to go unnoticed.
Bakshi divides his writing into two compartments,journalistic writ-ing,aimed at specific target audiences of the young,of women, of people in far-flung areas,striving to learn more, know more.It is studded with information and writing in a lively fashion-- a definite infortainment.His other writings,such as novels,short stories are what he says bring him into his element.But,in both types the backbone is research and experience.
He began writing for publication at the age of 18 and has never stopped,producing during the years 25 novels,12 collections of short stories,two collections of plays,seven travelogues,14 on his-tory and culture,41 anthologies of articles,two biographies,three containing excerpts,10 of translations and 41 anthologies of arti-cles in addition to three volumes of autobiography.Even is autobi-ography,begun in 1987,is an on-going work; more volumes are yet to come.The only branch he has left alone is poetry-writing."I did write some 20 poems but early on my life, I realised poetry was not my forte."
A rebel,who is often at odds with the establishment,he was twice awarded first prizes by the Gujarat Sahitya Academy and the Guja-rat government,but did not accept,contending these should go to younger writers.By temperament,he appears to be more at home in combat than in agreement with the powers that be.Many ridicule him as a one-man army,always itching for a fight; others think of him as a Don Quixote of Gujarati literature, forever tilting at real or imaginary windmills-- or windbags.
In reality,Bakshi is a warm-hearted person,with a strong sense of personal loyalty and a community sense of rebellion.He loves Cal-cutta dearly,although he left it many years. He disregards the criti-cism of the eastern India megapolis as a dying city:"I spent the best years of my life in Calcutta.I have rich memories.Your friends may not happen to be the most beautiful people in the world,but they are (italics) your friends (italics over)",he says,in explaining his loyalty to Calcutta.
His growth as a writer is some kind of an anti-thesis to the envi-ronment in which he was brought up.He hails from a family that was not poor.
Born on August 20,1932,at Palanpur in north Guja-rat,Chandrakant did his matriculation from Bombay university in 1948,taking the first class.He did his B.A. from St.Xavier's col-lege,Calcutta with distinction in 1952,took his degree in Law in 1956 and finished his post-graduation from Calcutta university in History and Political Science in 1963.In 1970,he moved to Bombay as a college teacher,joining the Mithibai College of Arts,taking un-der-graduate classes in history and political science for a dec-ade.For five years between 1975 and 1980,he also taught the post-graduate students at the Bombay university in the same sub-jects.For two years he worked as the principal of L.S.Raheja Col-lege of Arts and Commerce in Bombay,till 1982.
But what made him take to writing? Chandrakant has no clear-cut answer,save the memory that he started writing very early.His first short story,in Gujarati,Makanna Bhoot,was written in 1950,when he was 18,and published the next year in the prestig-ious Kumar magazine.
What prompted him to write in Gujarati was the location of his stores in an area in Calcutta,where no Gujarati was spoken all day."As it was my Gujarati was bad, it was atrocious,and I began to fear I will forget it altogether if did not write."
Remembers Bakshi of his olden days:"I did not know a soul in Gujarti literature,did not even know the language very well. But there was no looking back after I made a breakthrough in 1951. My writing contained the real raw experience of the river-side,of life in a decaying city, of murders and may-hem in day-to-day life, of fish.This somehow made an impact.Bachubhai Rawat told me in those days that for the first time a short story has come where there is real life,you feel the throb of it, feel it breathing.I think that was it.I feel art for me comes from real life.I believe the story con-tent has to be there in whatever you are writing,it should pertain to real life."
He does not think that he is avidly read because he loves to shock people,by being outrageously different."That is a misconcep-tion about me.Actually, earlier there never was any tradition of hard work in Gujarati writing,of marshalling facts,, mounting meticulous research,doing a lot of home-work. I have fortunately had the disci-pline of history and law in my training,and I tend to do a lot of work before I put words on to the paper.I read up,move around,talk to people,look at landscape.Nothing gets out of my hands, my control in my writing.I am outcast in literature,am never called for anything, am not on any committee, no official accolade comes my way.The Soviet Union called me,but not in our state.That rankles me some-times,but only momentarily.There has been a conspiracy of si-lence".
"I have only one ambition; I want to be able to live as long as I do in the same way as I am doing now.I ask God to grant me that.I also do not want to die an invalid.I have no mandate to improve the world."He is full of joie de vivre and wishes to be that way till the very last breath."I am I,and I want to be so till I am there".It requires superb arrogance or self-confidence to wish that,or perhaps both.
That was our first encounter, and many more wereto follow, with both the parties surviving. He marched into the sunset,one day suddenly. It is unbelievable that he did not conquer the Yama.
ends
A Wounded Soul of Gujarati Ghazals: Amrut Ghayal
-- Tushar Bhatt
Numerous scrolls of honour, mementos and photographs adorn the walls of a rather Spartan-looking room at Dev Ami.Near the window opening into a modest foreground of the house is a bed on which till some years ago a visitor would have found Ghayal, grand-daddy of Gujarati ghazal, whose only ambition was to be remembered as a martyr to the ghazal-- shaheed-e-ghazal.
He not only brought the ghazal form as authentic poetry into Gu-jarati, insisting on using the words of his mother tongue, but also elevated its status to a spiritual level, to a level reflecting the trials and tribulations of the masses, rather than remaining a vehicle of the love-lorn.
Ghayal - a wounded soul - was his pen-name, but even the poet himself had given up using his surname, Bhatt, and signed as Am-rut Ghayal.Why did he take this particular pen-name? With a tooth-less, hearty laughter, he said: “It is not a pen-name taken in the af-termath of a broken love-affair. In a way, all human beings are wounded souls. I sing their songs."
There was not a trace of bitterness in Ghayal,although he yearned to be thought of a martyr;. in truth, he came across as a man who had lived a full life, had no complaints ,and more impor-tantly,who,unlike so many of his age, was never tired of life. There was a peculiar zest for life, which made Ghayal an unusual ghazal-kar, who had seen many ups and downs in his long innings. Teeth had taken leave rather early, and so had hair on his head, deep lines furrowed his largish forehead and veins stood out prominently on his shrivelled hands. But the mind was alert, registering as truth-fully as ever. Though his throat parched easily, he spoke fluently, and coherently, never lost for either words or thought. The memory served the master efficiently, and Ghayal wrote incessantly. "You see, I cannot sleep much, and am much too restless to give up liv-ing."
The old world courtesy, long association with royalty and a mod-esty of soul, all made the man, bent with age. He would get up when visitors came, and see them off at the gate of the house when they depart, even though he had to walk with a stick.
Modest he was, but Ghayal was no servile a soul. He had seen a lot of ups and downs in life, but had not allowed them either to dent his spirit or to be cowed down by the worldly-wise, powerful. His modesty went hand in hand with an outspokenness that had struck many as unabashed arrogance.Yet; he was full of self-deprecating wit, a caring parent and affectionate individual, who would not over-look the ways of the world. In the middle of making a profound re-mark on ghazals, he would suddenly stop, switch gears and would call out:"Listen, bring some tea or coffee for our guests", and then pick up the thread of what he was saying effortlessly.
His literary journey of life had a journey of a single-minded devo-tion to the word .He had written nearly 1000 ghazals,brought out seven volumes of poetry, taken part in hundreds of mushairas.Still,he was as joyfully into it all as he was in his younger days. "I get involved in writing, once the imagination is trig-gered, often by a single word, a single phrase or sentence, uttered in utterly normal affairs of the day to day life. Words have such an effect on me that my thinking process gets started by them sud-denly and I go into a trance like situation.Then,I would not get any sleep, would not remember the time of the day, or even to eat.” Some call it ras samadhi.
He went on: “I have an inner voice, ordering me about. It just does not get drowned by any external noise, distraction or difficul-ties." But, that did not mean he was an escapist, a romantic living in a make-believe world. Another poet, Makarand Dave, has noted that his spiritual bend of mind, made Ghayal a poet in this world, but not of this world. He did not run away from pain, but digested the pain so well that it led to a rare sensitivity and high-grade po-etry. He took life at a high flood, unafraid of the intensity of the tur-bulence, and neither having the slightest doubt that he shall over-come.
Ghayal himself summed it up all in one of the ghazals:
Valan hun eak sarkhun rakhun chhun asha-nirashaman,
Barabar bhag laun chhun zindagina sau tamashaman
Sada jitun chhun evun kain nathi,harun chhun bahudha pan -
Nathi hun harne palatva deto hatashaman.
(I maintain the same frame of mind in hope and in despair,
I partake fully in the drama of life without allowing it to impair,
Not that I always win ; many a time I do get trounced,
But,not allowing it to drown me, I get back into it bounced)
Past eight decades into life,this man could still talk as if he was a mere 20-year-old, so full of ideas,joys,setbacks,life itself.He had a life-long habit of keeping a pencil and paper,handy,whether he was at dinner table or in prayer.But, that does not mean that Ghayal depended on the Muse to transmit him a signal and do all the work. He had mastered both Sanskrit and Urdu,although he wrote in Gu-jarati. He had studied the classics in ghazals,learnt techniques of word-play,meter,and to care of every word that he may care to use. "I do not depend on certificates from others; I must get a cer-tificate from myself before I finish writing, re-writing and re-writing." That often meant the writing stretched over many days for a single composition.He,of course, was not in a hurry,nor was he bent upon mass-production,partly because he did not write to order, -- that is, any external order.
For all this, Ghayal was a simple person,not given to any show-manship or snobbery, two hallmarks of creative writers these days.
Born on August 19,1916, at Sardhar in Rajkot taluka,he remem-bered the prediction his father, Laljibhai ,had made about his son. Laljibhai was a chef in the royal household of Lakhajiraj of Rajkot, and since Amrut was born on the day of Randhan Chhath (which fell on August 19 that year),when people cook delicacies,he fore-cast:"The boy will spend a life getting heat, getting boiled." Like noted painter Vasudeo Smart,young Amurt's early days were also spent watching the colourful rites at the Vaishnav Haveli in the vil-lage.He would play the role of Krishna in the Krishna Lila stage in the haveli,go to a Sanskfit pathshala in the morning, and to the vil-lage primary school in the afternoon."On way back from school, I would go to the fields,catch-hold of the family mare,and bring her home,picking up vegetables for the kitchen.I would occasionally go to the tiny village library, read books and poems by Kalapi and Jhaverchand Meghani.Under the spell of Kalapi's poetry in Kekarav,I had imagined to pen poems,sitting on the bank of the vil-lage pond.But nothing got written. Upto the seventh standard,this more or less was my childhood."
He recalled: "I came to Rajkot for the eighth standard, and be-gan learning English.Prabhudas,our teacher ,would patiently ex-plain everything,but I just would not understand anything,would get fed up and jump classes.Most of my evenings were spent playing cricket,volley ball and wrestling.I was the school cricket team's opening batsman as well as bowler and had played against a Jam-nagar team in which famous cricketer,Vinoo Mankad, was one of the players.Because of him, we got beaten. Another famous crick-eter of the old time, Amarsinh, was also known to me,and thanks to him I played for a year in the Morvi team,after three years in Alfred high school in Rajkot.In 1936,after Mankad left the Jamnagar team,we managed to wrest the shield from his home team."
But all this,plus reading of literature and poetry,took a toll on his routine studies. He failed four times in his matriculation,and in 1938,wrote to the ruler of Pajod princely state, Pajod Darbar,Khan Imamuddinkhan, who later assumed the pen name of Ruswa Mazlumi,for a job,becoming his confidential secretary,in 1939. He held that job till 1948, during which he systematically learnt Urdu,getting his first ghazal published in Beghadi Mauj jour-nal.Ghayal also happened to meet a lot of leading Urdu writ-ers,such as Jigar Moradabadi,Josh Malihabadi,Bharat Vyas,Krishan Chander and Shoonya Palanpuri in those years.
Ghayal spoke with great warmth of his association with Pajod Darbar.He was the first person to recognise the potential in Gha-yal's pen.An athlete and a player,Ghayal had been hobnobbing with writing.A sports contact with the grandson of Kalapi,Prahladsinhji,invited him in 1938 to go to the Kalapi festival at Lathi.Kalapi's son,Joravarsinhji too was there and so was the noted poet, Lalit. Joravarsinhji was a great fan of Kalapi and would recite poems of sorrow from Kekarav,Kalapi's collection of po-ems,every night with deep passion and anguish,tears rolling down his cheeks even as he sang."This made a deep impact on me",said Ghayal. In the mornings there would a visit to the samadhi of Kalapi.
Said Ghayal:"One day, while at the samadhi, I started feeling an unbearable,unrecognisable pang of mental anguish.Pajod Darbar had asked me to bring something for myself from Lathi. I started thinking about what I should receive from the precincts so poetic.I could not fathom my unease,nor could I decide what was it that was bothering me.I started crying and Joravarsinhji, who was known as Kakasaheb, consoled me."
Ghayal recalled:" I told Kakasaheb that I felt I had found what I was looking for. I was looking for the ghazal,and the ghazal itself has apparently found me. I do not think I will have peace with my-self till I devoted my life to the ghazal.But how to do that was be-yond me."
In the drawing room of the palace, Prahladsinhji asked the same question as was posed by Kakasaheb."I repeated the answer,but then suddenly my eyes caught the fish whirling in the aquarium in the room.I wrote a few lines comparing the slave Indians with the fish in the glass vessel. In the evening,Lalitji blessed me.He wrote the blessings in a poem,which unfortunately I later lost."
On return to Pajod from Lathi,Ghayal was as if in another world.The uneasiness lasted for sometime during which he went on inquiring about ghazal with every literary figure who visited the state.He had noted that the ghazal writers of those years used a lot of Persian and Urdu words and determined to write ghazals in Sorathi dialect in Gujarati.The editor of a journal, Karavan,from Rander,Vahesi,recommended to Ghayal a study of a two-part vol-ume ,Shayari. He also asked Asar Saleri,to take him as a disci-ple.Asar told him to send him his ghazals.When Ghayal sent one,Asar wrote an advice that Ghayal followed all his life. "You do not have to show any ghazals of yours to anyone." He started de-pending on his own judgement,his own conscience.All his life,Ghayal never permitted any of his works to go into print till he had satisfied himself. "It requires writing and re-writing, but I am not a poet in haste and would not make compromise about my inner satisfaction.If conscience certified it,then only a ghazal of mine would be worthy of being called ghazal." He had implacably fol-lowed this golden rule,and maintained a total self-honesty.
In 1947,Ghayal's first wife, Taramati,died, but in the same year he managed to pass his matriculation.For a brief while,he went to college in Rajkot but gave it up. Soon thereafter when princely states were merged into Indian union, left Pajod too,to become a clerk in the public works department in Rajkot,and rose to senior clerk's position. In 1950,he married for the second time. He gave a lot of credit for his literary work to the wife, Bhanumati. In 1951,he got promoted as an accountant.His first collection of ghazals,Shul Ane Shamna,was published in 1954,when he got transferred to Junagadh.After serving the government iin Sunrendranagar,Bhuj and Nakhtrana,he settled for good in Rajkot in 1973,upon retire-ment. In 1978,Ghayal went to the Soviet Union and by 1982 four more publications were to his credit. In 1984, he got affected by TB,but recovered.Since 1985,he had been devoting time to writing only.A thousand-page compendium of his collected works was published as part of the celebrations of his 80 years of life.
He never stopped,however. "I write every day",Ghayal said, pat-ting a black colour briefcase,lying next to him on the bed on which he was sitting when I went to see him once,never realising it was our last meeting.He planned to complete at least 1,001 ghazals in his life time; some 900 had already been written. "I plan to bring out one more book ,my ninth,coinciding with the philosophy of nine rasas",he said without any boasting.Modest he always was,but he was also proud to be an original poet.Once he was asked if he could be called Gujarat's Ghalib.With humility,he submitted: I do not believe in copying,and I would only say this much:
Anadi chhun matlab adal man adal chhun,
Nathi nakal hun dar asal hun asal chhun.
Nathi samrat athva rushi hun;
Kharun jo kahun to shaheed-e-ghazal chhun.
(Am with neither a root nor a top. I am I am,
Am not a copy. Originally I am an original.
I am not an emperor ,nor am I a saint,
I am just a martyr to the ghazal,if must it be said.)
His ghazals talk a lot about life and death."I want to tell you I have not been a soft,cry-baby type. I would rather say this:
Tane kone kahi didhun maranni baad mukti chhe?
Rahe chhe ked eani ea fakt diwal badale chhe.
(Who told you there is salvation after death?
Prison remains the same,only the walls change.)
Once,when he was down with hepatitis-B,there was dim hope of his survival. But Ghayal was not one of those pessimists."I told my children I am not going to die . I am going to live for 89 years.Even thereafter,it would be like changing clothes. I will come back.There is nothing like death; it is only a change of clothes."
His advice to the young writers was equally frank,and fear-less."Study the ghazal first. Read everything you can. Respect the word,its finer nuances,exact meaning,proper usage.The word is a very pious thing. Use it with devotion.Do not soil it. Only such a de-votion to the word will bring in the real element of poetry into your writing."
People still remember how Ghayal recited a Gujarati composi-tion to Jawaharlal Nehru when the first prime minister of India was on a visit to Rajkot during the days of the erstwhile Saurashtra state,some five decades ago. Another tall poet,Shaikh Adam Abu-wala,recorded the encounter evocatively.
Ghayal told Nehru that he would present something in Gujarati only,seeking the prime minister's indulgence if he could not follow it. A game Nehru said : "Go on. I have been with Bapu for many years and can understand Gujarati, and if need be can even speak a smattering of it too."
Then, Ghayal sang out something that must have left Nehru, who wore a red rose in the lapel of his coat, red also in face, espe-cially the part where the poet talks of giving the people at least a stale rose,:
Melun ghelu makan to aapo,
Dhul jevun ye dhan to aapo.
Saav juthun shun kam bolo chho ?
Kok saachi jaban to aapo.
Bagman chhe bhag amaro pan,
Eak vasi Gulab to aapo.
Sukhna be char shwas to aapo
Zindganino bhas to aapo
Mukt vatavaran na swamio,
Kain hawa kain ujas to aapo
Muktinu ene saaj to aapo.
Adamino avaj to aapo
Mai na put manvine pratham,
Manvino mijaj to aapo"
(Give us,the people, at least a dirty,squalid hovel,
Give at least grains like dust.
Should not someone tell the truth?
Is telling lies always a must?
Give us an account,
Maybe wrong, but some count.
Forget not we too partly own this flower bed,
If not much,give us at least a stale rose.
Give us a few fresh breaths of life,
Or, at least give us an illusion of life.
O you Gods of freedom,
Let us have some air,some light in all this darkness.
Give us an instrument of freedom,
Give our vocal chords some rhythm.
O you,darlings of the mother India,
Give Man first of all the temper of a free man.)
A stunned Nehru asked Ghayal when he completed,why was he saying those things? “Give us time.”
Ghayal replied:"A poet is a mouthpiece of the people and the mouthpiece should pass on the pains of the people." The prime minister said: "Certainly. But do you feel the country has not made any progress at all?" Ghayal riposted:"Nearly two decades of Inde-pendence would be over soon.The underground drainage is still to come into my street."
Today,after six decades of Independence,an underground drain-age is still to come in many streets of many cities.
There,however, was a paradox. If Ghayal could be brutally frank,he could be charming also. A freeze frame from the past has remained itched in memory. When this writer first went to meet Ghayal, he was in his pooja of the deity. As the visitors sat quietly for nearly half-an-hour,he went on unhurriedly, but not unmindful of our respectful waiting. Prior to getting up, he opened his eyes and softly called me and my wife Hansa and made us offer homage to the deity.He began reciting in Sanskrit. I believe in God but not in the rituals. But I did not utter a word but when the chanting ended looked quizzically at Ghayal. He read my mind and said” I was praying to Goddess Saraswati to make home in your inner being to give power to your words.” I kept mum for want of words.
Nearly three free-wheelling hours of talking passed in which eve-rybody present joined. Brushing aside the protests not to bother,he got up,picked up a stick and walked,firmly,chattering away in a firm voice,wheedling out a promise to come back soon.A spiritually erect man,bent with age; a rebelliously young mind,refusing to grow senile, stood as we left..
Ghayal is gone now. I have no idea if the goddess of letters has paid heed to his commendation. I do not think that she has but hope one day she will. What a daydream!
(END) ----
-- Tushar Bhatt
Numerous scrolls of honour, mementos and photographs adorn the walls of a rather Spartan-looking room at Dev Ami.Near the window opening into a modest foreground of the house is a bed on which till some years ago a visitor would have found Ghayal, grand-daddy of Gujarati ghazal, whose only ambition was to be remembered as a martyr to the ghazal-- shaheed-e-ghazal.
He not only brought the ghazal form as authentic poetry into Gu-jarati, insisting on using the words of his mother tongue, but also elevated its status to a spiritual level, to a level reflecting the trials and tribulations of the masses, rather than remaining a vehicle of the love-lorn.
Ghayal - a wounded soul - was his pen-name, but even the poet himself had given up using his surname, Bhatt, and signed as Am-rut Ghayal.Why did he take this particular pen-name? With a tooth-less, hearty laughter, he said: “It is not a pen-name taken in the af-termath of a broken love-affair. In a way, all human beings are wounded souls. I sing their songs."
There was not a trace of bitterness in Ghayal,although he yearned to be thought of a martyr;. in truth, he came across as a man who had lived a full life, had no complaints ,and more impor-tantly,who,unlike so many of his age, was never tired of life. There was a peculiar zest for life, which made Ghayal an unusual ghazal-kar, who had seen many ups and downs in his long innings. Teeth had taken leave rather early, and so had hair on his head, deep lines furrowed his largish forehead and veins stood out prominently on his shrivelled hands. But the mind was alert, registering as truth-fully as ever. Though his throat parched easily, he spoke fluently, and coherently, never lost for either words or thought. The memory served the master efficiently, and Ghayal wrote incessantly. "You see, I cannot sleep much, and am much too restless to give up liv-ing."
The old world courtesy, long association with royalty and a mod-esty of soul, all made the man, bent with age. He would get up when visitors came, and see them off at the gate of the house when they depart, even though he had to walk with a stick.
Modest he was, but Ghayal was no servile a soul. He had seen a lot of ups and downs in life, but had not allowed them either to dent his spirit or to be cowed down by the worldly-wise, powerful. His modesty went hand in hand with an outspokenness that had struck many as unabashed arrogance.Yet; he was full of self-deprecating wit, a caring parent and affectionate individual, who would not over-look the ways of the world. In the middle of making a profound re-mark on ghazals, he would suddenly stop, switch gears and would call out:"Listen, bring some tea or coffee for our guests", and then pick up the thread of what he was saying effortlessly.
His literary journey of life had a journey of a single-minded devo-tion to the word .He had written nearly 1000 ghazals,brought out seven volumes of poetry, taken part in hundreds of mushairas.Still,he was as joyfully into it all as he was in his younger days. "I get involved in writing, once the imagination is trig-gered, often by a single word, a single phrase or sentence, uttered in utterly normal affairs of the day to day life. Words have such an effect on me that my thinking process gets started by them sud-denly and I go into a trance like situation.Then,I would not get any sleep, would not remember the time of the day, or even to eat.” Some call it ras samadhi.
He went on: “I have an inner voice, ordering me about. It just does not get drowned by any external noise, distraction or difficul-ties." But, that did not mean he was an escapist, a romantic living in a make-believe world. Another poet, Makarand Dave, has noted that his spiritual bend of mind, made Ghayal a poet in this world, but not of this world. He did not run away from pain, but digested the pain so well that it led to a rare sensitivity and high-grade po-etry. He took life at a high flood, unafraid of the intensity of the tur-bulence, and neither having the slightest doubt that he shall over-come.
Ghayal himself summed it up all in one of the ghazals:
Valan hun eak sarkhun rakhun chhun asha-nirashaman,
Barabar bhag laun chhun zindagina sau tamashaman
Sada jitun chhun evun kain nathi,harun chhun bahudha pan -
Nathi hun harne palatva deto hatashaman.
(I maintain the same frame of mind in hope and in despair,
I partake fully in the drama of life without allowing it to impair,
Not that I always win ; many a time I do get trounced,
But,not allowing it to drown me, I get back into it bounced)
Past eight decades into life,this man could still talk as if he was a mere 20-year-old, so full of ideas,joys,setbacks,life itself.He had a life-long habit of keeping a pencil and paper,handy,whether he was at dinner table or in prayer.But, that does not mean that Ghayal depended on the Muse to transmit him a signal and do all the work. He had mastered both Sanskrit and Urdu,although he wrote in Gu-jarati. He had studied the classics in ghazals,learnt techniques of word-play,meter,and to care of every word that he may care to use. "I do not depend on certificates from others; I must get a cer-tificate from myself before I finish writing, re-writing and re-writing." That often meant the writing stretched over many days for a single composition.He,of course, was not in a hurry,nor was he bent upon mass-production,partly because he did not write to order, -- that is, any external order.
For all this, Ghayal was a simple person,not given to any show-manship or snobbery, two hallmarks of creative writers these days.
Born on August 19,1916, at Sardhar in Rajkot taluka,he remem-bered the prediction his father, Laljibhai ,had made about his son. Laljibhai was a chef in the royal household of Lakhajiraj of Rajkot, and since Amrut was born on the day of Randhan Chhath (which fell on August 19 that year),when people cook delicacies,he fore-cast:"The boy will spend a life getting heat, getting boiled." Like noted painter Vasudeo Smart,young Amurt's early days were also spent watching the colourful rites at the Vaishnav Haveli in the vil-lage.He would play the role of Krishna in the Krishna Lila stage in the haveli,go to a Sanskfit pathshala in the morning, and to the vil-lage primary school in the afternoon."On way back from school, I would go to the fields,catch-hold of the family mare,and bring her home,picking up vegetables for the kitchen.I would occasionally go to the tiny village library, read books and poems by Kalapi and Jhaverchand Meghani.Under the spell of Kalapi's poetry in Kekarav,I had imagined to pen poems,sitting on the bank of the vil-lage pond.But nothing got written. Upto the seventh standard,this more or less was my childhood."
He recalled: "I came to Rajkot for the eighth standard, and be-gan learning English.Prabhudas,our teacher ,would patiently ex-plain everything,but I just would not understand anything,would get fed up and jump classes.Most of my evenings were spent playing cricket,volley ball and wrestling.I was the school cricket team's opening batsman as well as bowler and had played against a Jam-nagar team in which famous cricketer,Vinoo Mankad, was one of the players.Because of him, we got beaten. Another famous crick-eter of the old time, Amarsinh, was also known to me,and thanks to him I played for a year in the Morvi team,after three years in Alfred high school in Rajkot.In 1936,after Mankad left the Jamnagar team,we managed to wrest the shield from his home team."
But all this,plus reading of literature and poetry,took a toll on his routine studies. He failed four times in his matriculation,and in 1938,wrote to the ruler of Pajod princely state, Pajod Darbar,Khan Imamuddinkhan, who later assumed the pen name of Ruswa Mazlumi,for a job,becoming his confidential secretary,in 1939. He held that job till 1948, during which he systematically learnt Urdu,getting his first ghazal published in Beghadi Mauj jour-nal.Ghayal also happened to meet a lot of leading Urdu writ-ers,such as Jigar Moradabadi,Josh Malihabadi,Bharat Vyas,Krishan Chander and Shoonya Palanpuri in those years.
Ghayal spoke with great warmth of his association with Pajod Darbar.He was the first person to recognise the potential in Gha-yal's pen.An athlete and a player,Ghayal had been hobnobbing with writing.A sports contact with the grandson of Kalapi,Prahladsinhji,invited him in 1938 to go to the Kalapi festival at Lathi.Kalapi's son,Joravarsinhji too was there and so was the noted poet, Lalit. Joravarsinhji was a great fan of Kalapi and would recite poems of sorrow from Kekarav,Kalapi's collection of po-ems,every night with deep passion and anguish,tears rolling down his cheeks even as he sang."This made a deep impact on me",said Ghayal. In the mornings there would a visit to the samadhi of Kalapi.
Said Ghayal:"One day, while at the samadhi, I started feeling an unbearable,unrecognisable pang of mental anguish.Pajod Darbar had asked me to bring something for myself from Lathi. I started thinking about what I should receive from the precincts so poetic.I could not fathom my unease,nor could I decide what was it that was bothering me.I started crying and Joravarsinhji, who was known as Kakasaheb, consoled me."
Ghayal recalled:" I told Kakasaheb that I felt I had found what I was looking for. I was looking for the ghazal,and the ghazal itself has apparently found me. I do not think I will have peace with my-self till I devoted my life to the ghazal.But how to do that was be-yond me."
In the drawing room of the palace, Prahladsinhji asked the same question as was posed by Kakasaheb."I repeated the answer,but then suddenly my eyes caught the fish whirling in the aquarium in the room.I wrote a few lines comparing the slave Indians with the fish in the glass vessel. In the evening,Lalitji blessed me.He wrote the blessings in a poem,which unfortunately I later lost."
On return to Pajod from Lathi,Ghayal was as if in another world.The uneasiness lasted for sometime during which he went on inquiring about ghazal with every literary figure who visited the state.He had noted that the ghazal writers of those years used a lot of Persian and Urdu words and determined to write ghazals in Sorathi dialect in Gujarati.The editor of a journal, Karavan,from Rander,Vahesi,recommended to Ghayal a study of a two-part vol-ume ,Shayari. He also asked Asar Saleri,to take him as a disci-ple.Asar told him to send him his ghazals.When Ghayal sent one,Asar wrote an advice that Ghayal followed all his life. "You do not have to show any ghazals of yours to anyone." He started de-pending on his own judgement,his own conscience.All his life,Ghayal never permitted any of his works to go into print till he had satisfied himself. "It requires writing and re-writing, but I am not a poet in haste and would not make compromise about my inner satisfaction.If conscience certified it,then only a ghazal of mine would be worthy of being called ghazal." He had implacably fol-lowed this golden rule,and maintained a total self-honesty.
In 1947,Ghayal's first wife, Taramati,died, but in the same year he managed to pass his matriculation.For a brief while,he went to college in Rajkot but gave it up. Soon thereafter when princely states were merged into Indian union, left Pajod too,to become a clerk in the public works department in Rajkot,and rose to senior clerk's position. In 1950,he married for the second time. He gave a lot of credit for his literary work to the wife, Bhanumati. In 1951,he got promoted as an accountant.His first collection of ghazals,Shul Ane Shamna,was published in 1954,when he got transferred to Junagadh.After serving the government iin Sunrendranagar,Bhuj and Nakhtrana,he settled for good in Rajkot in 1973,upon retire-ment. In 1978,Ghayal went to the Soviet Union and by 1982 four more publications were to his credit. In 1984, he got affected by TB,but recovered.Since 1985,he had been devoting time to writing only.A thousand-page compendium of his collected works was published as part of the celebrations of his 80 years of life.
He never stopped,however. "I write every day",Ghayal said, pat-ting a black colour briefcase,lying next to him on the bed on which he was sitting when I went to see him once,never realising it was our last meeting.He planned to complete at least 1,001 ghazals in his life time; some 900 had already been written. "I plan to bring out one more book ,my ninth,coinciding with the philosophy of nine rasas",he said without any boasting.Modest he always was,but he was also proud to be an original poet.Once he was asked if he could be called Gujarat's Ghalib.With humility,he submitted: I do not believe in copying,and I would only say this much:
Anadi chhun matlab adal man adal chhun,
Nathi nakal hun dar asal hun asal chhun.
Nathi samrat athva rushi hun;
Kharun jo kahun to shaheed-e-ghazal chhun.
(Am with neither a root nor a top. I am I am,
Am not a copy. Originally I am an original.
I am not an emperor ,nor am I a saint,
I am just a martyr to the ghazal,if must it be said.)
His ghazals talk a lot about life and death."I want to tell you I have not been a soft,cry-baby type. I would rather say this:
Tane kone kahi didhun maranni baad mukti chhe?
Rahe chhe ked eani ea fakt diwal badale chhe.
(Who told you there is salvation after death?
Prison remains the same,only the walls change.)
Once,when he was down with hepatitis-B,there was dim hope of his survival. But Ghayal was not one of those pessimists."I told my children I am not going to die . I am going to live for 89 years.Even thereafter,it would be like changing clothes. I will come back.There is nothing like death; it is only a change of clothes."
His advice to the young writers was equally frank,and fear-less."Study the ghazal first. Read everything you can. Respect the word,its finer nuances,exact meaning,proper usage.The word is a very pious thing. Use it with devotion.Do not soil it. Only such a de-votion to the word will bring in the real element of poetry into your writing."
People still remember how Ghayal recited a Gujarati composi-tion to Jawaharlal Nehru when the first prime minister of India was on a visit to Rajkot during the days of the erstwhile Saurashtra state,some five decades ago. Another tall poet,Shaikh Adam Abu-wala,recorded the encounter evocatively.
Ghayal told Nehru that he would present something in Gujarati only,seeking the prime minister's indulgence if he could not follow it. A game Nehru said : "Go on. I have been with Bapu for many years and can understand Gujarati, and if need be can even speak a smattering of it too."
Then, Ghayal sang out something that must have left Nehru, who wore a red rose in the lapel of his coat, red also in face, espe-cially the part where the poet talks of giving the people at least a stale rose,:
Melun ghelu makan to aapo,
Dhul jevun ye dhan to aapo.
Saav juthun shun kam bolo chho ?
Kok saachi jaban to aapo.
Bagman chhe bhag amaro pan,
Eak vasi Gulab to aapo.
Sukhna be char shwas to aapo
Zindganino bhas to aapo
Mukt vatavaran na swamio,
Kain hawa kain ujas to aapo
Muktinu ene saaj to aapo.
Adamino avaj to aapo
Mai na put manvine pratham,
Manvino mijaj to aapo"
(Give us,the people, at least a dirty,squalid hovel,
Give at least grains like dust.
Should not someone tell the truth?
Is telling lies always a must?
Give us an account,
Maybe wrong, but some count.
Forget not we too partly own this flower bed,
If not much,give us at least a stale rose.
Give us a few fresh breaths of life,
Or, at least give us an illusion of life.
O you Gods of freedom,
Let us have some air,some light in all this darkness.
Give us an instrument of freedom,
Give our vocal chords some rhythm.
O you,darlings of the mother India,
Give Man first of all the temper of a free man.)
A stunned Nehru asked Ghayal when he completed,why was he saying those things? “Give us time.”
Ghayal replied:"A poet is a mouthpiece of the people and the mouthpiece should pass on the pains of the people." The prime minister said: "Certainly. But do you feel the country has not made any progress at all?" Ghayal riposted:"Nearly two decades of Inde-pendence would be over soon.The underground drainage is still to come into my street."
Today,after six decades of Independence,an underground drain-age is still to come in many streets of many cities.
There,however, was a paradox. If Ghayal could be brutally frank,he could be charming also. A freeze frame from the past has remained itched in memory. When this writer first went to meet Ghayal, he was in his pooja of the deity. As the visitors sat quietly for nearly half-an-hour,he went on unhurriedly, but not unmindful of our respectful waiting. Prior to getting up, he opened his eyes and softly called me and my wife Hansa and made us offer homage to the deity.He began reciting in Sanskrit. I believe in God but not in the rituals. But I did not utter a word but when the chanting ended looked quizzically at Ghayal. He read my mind and said” I was praying to Goddess Saraswati to make home in your inner being to give power to your words.” I kept mum for want of words.
Nearly three free-wheelling hours of talking passed in which eve-rybody present joined. Brushing aside the protests not to bother,he got up,picked up a stick and walked,firmly,chattering away in a firm voice,wheedling out a promise to come back soon.A spiritually erect man,bent with age; a rebelliously young mind,refusing to grow senile, stood as we left..
Ghayal is gone now. I have no idea if the goddess of letters has paid heed to his commendation. I do not think that she has but hope one day she will. What a daydream!
(END) ----
A Sudama called
Kanaiyalal
Tushar Bhatt
His name, Kanaiyalal, was the same as one of the innumerable names of the legendary Krishna; his surname too was that of the clan from which Dwarkadhish came, Yadav. Both, though not born in Gujarat, made it their home. Yet, Kanaiyalal R. Yadav, a painter par excellence of portraits and landscapes in oil and water colour, spent most of his career _ and life _ in a hut in penury, like a mod-ern-day Sudama.
His works are prized posses sions in several private collections, galleries and temples. Nobody knows exactly where these all are. Yadav was not just a master artist; he was a superb teacher as well, exploding the myth that those who can paint cannot teach. Among his friends and contemporaries such as Piraji Sagra, Nag-jibhai Chau han and others he stood apart, a proud man who could shower great affection and show greater considerations for others. He had been a teacher at the C.N. College of Fine Arts in Ahmed-abad for long years, moulding several of the young talents on the art scene to day.
His countless friends and stu dents tried as much as they could to help Yadav while he was alive. But the proud artist himself never sought any assistance. Nor could he ever learn how to realise a prop er commercial value of the master pieces he was creating. Recalls Madhav Ramanuj, a poet and close friend of the artist: ``Once we sent someone very wealthy to buy one of his paintings and told him to charge as much as he could think of, hinting at a sum of about Rs 7,000 or 8,000. Yadav did not put such a price tag on his work, shrug ging away with an unbelievable ex planation that how could he think that the buyer would be able to af ford a high price.'' Perhaps it was the innate unwillingness of the man to put a price label on his art _ he would not name a price and would part with whatever the buy er thought fit to pay, assuming the buyer could not afford to pay more.
His creative life was full of su perb works of art; his personal life full of miseries. It was spent eking out just enough for an existence but dogged by suffering. When things you do not like happen or you suffer, you have two choices _ you get bitter or better. Yadav never got bitter, though he was never better-off in the day-to-day sense.
Kanaiyalal was born on April 10, 1932, a Sunday, in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, where his fa ther, Ramachandra, and mother, Maniben, then lived. Ramachan dra, an overseer in the Public Works Department, hailed from Agra, but Maniben was a native of Patan in Gujarat. The young Ka naiya, as he was known, began his school in Ratlam, catching the at tention of his teachers because of his beautiful handwriting. A Eur opean woman teacher in drawing was the one to put a painting brush in the child's hand, setting him on a life-long course.
After a few years, the Yadav fa mily came to Ahmedabad as the world was in the grip of the Second World War. His studies at a Hindi school in Saraspur were rather in different, though he was becoming more proficient in the use of the brush. However, a ca-reer in paint ing was far from Kanaiyalal's mind then; he was charmed by the lure of the filmdom after seeing the film Andaz, leaving for the tinsel town of Bombay to shine on the silver screen. It remained a dream that was never fulfilled; the young man, after running from pillar to post, worked for a while even as a peon be-fore returning home. His stay in Bombay, otherwise un lucky, was a boon in one respect; he went to see the J.J. School of Art, and was inspired to study painting and drawing. Back home, he took up studies and passed an examination to become a drawing teacher. He started learning fur ther from the late Rasiklal Parikh, a stalwart painter, and sat in sever al examinations in art, for which one had then to go to Bombay. Yadav would put up with a distant relative in a hutment colony near Lalbag, often sleeping on the pa vement. But he stood first in the entire former state of Bombay for diploma in painting, an examina tion in which many other noted painters of today also sat. He also bagged the first prize for a creative paint-ing, `Bullock Sellers', and came first in the Art Master test.
But these successes were not en ough to make any change in the life-style of the young man; his ex istence was as wretched as ever, sometimes getting work as a tem porary drawing teacher in a school, other times as a substitute worker in a textile mill. He was married to Ram Dulari from Vrin davan, and the couple used to live in the slum opposite a textile mill in Saraspur, an eastern suburb of Ahmedabad. It was as rundown an area as ever. His friend Ra-manuj says that often he would hang a painting over a gap in the mud wall of the hut to stop wind from blow ing in. Innumerable hardships never ruffled Ram Dulari who, de spite terrible poverty, never com plained, allowing her talented hus band to devote what-ever time and money on painting. Ramanuj says Kanaiya's love for colours and brush was so great that he would spend recklessly on these as also on books at the cost of basic neces sities of life. This became a life- long pattern. Yadav's wife caught tuberculosis and died a few years later. Although perpetually short of money, the painter tried as much as humanly possible to com fort her during the ailment.
Suffering dogged him at every turn worse than like a shadow; shadow at least leaves you when it is dark. Yadav's 14-year-old daughter died, leaving him in a deep grief, which he never showed even to his closest friends. Around this time, he had to leave his job at the C.N. College of Fine Arts. The job had been the only break in his career. Students and friends still recall an unkempt, emaciated fig ure, with a beard, cycling 15 kilo metres from his home in Amrai wadi to the college in Ambawadi, be the weather fair or foul. He went into a mental depression, de stroying many in-valuable paint ings, sketches and portraits. Friends would send medicines, some money, but nothing seemed to help. For a while, Kanaiyalal had to be sent to a mental hospital; he drew portraits and did colour paintings there, earning praise and release as a normal person. He re turned to his slum dwelling. That was around 1964-65. He would roam around on his bicycle throughout the day, subsisting on a cup of tea at a roadside stall, do ing sketches and landscape draw ings. The information department of the Gujarat government asked him to do a sketch on the Nal Saro var bird sanctuary; Yadav had not enough money for the bus fare both ways. He walked to the sanc tuary to complete the assignment.
His was an artistically fierce re lationship with the world around him, and living in the slum areas of Amraiwadi he was never dampe ned in spirits. In art, more than anywhere else, forms result from existence and performance. Whe ther it is a lowly craftsman or an ac complished artist like Yadav, the making of the work of art gradual ly becomes a ritual of heart, see mingly unaffected by the sur rounding environment of his phy sical life. The landscape of heart matters rather than the landscape around. This was what had happe ned to Yadav too. If one were to look at his art only, one would never realise the trials and tribula tions Yadav suffered. With open eyes he saw the world around with a curious detachment. With eyes closed, as if, he saw the world within him, a world of beauty, of hazel-eyed lovely faces, of serene wood lots, so keen that his por traits would capture the likeness of the person and yet impart a mystic quality that would lift that work from the stream of routine output. A prime example of this is the landscape in water colour he had done of a wooded lot in the college compound. An-other was a portrait of the Swaminarayan monk, Yogi ji Maharaj. His vision was direct and still two-fold; he would, through immedi-ate intuition, re veal the image, and seeing aware ness clothe it with lineament which had the shape of man or landscape but with a recognisable spirit of man and place.
In 1976, friends persuaded Ya dav to rejoin the C.N. College, where he worked till the time of re tirement. The grateful authorities extended his tenure by a year. He would still come on the bicycle only from Amraiwadi. The only difference was that he had shifted to a modest flat under the Indira Awas Yojana from the hut. Still, it was as deprived a living as any; he would be painting on the first floor landing of the staircase, unmindful of the squalor, noise and stark poverty. The richness of his soul would reflect in his art. Come win ter, he would don a navy-blue long coat on top of his usual meagre at tire. Around this time, another break came; a cou-ple of monks from the Bochasanwasi Sanstha of the Swaminara-yan sect had been his art students. The Sanstha com missioned Yadav to do paintings and portraits, which today adore temples in Shahibaug, Ahmeda bad, and at Gondal.
But other difficulties persisted. He could never fulfil his wish to educate his three sons well. Disap pointments of life, however, never cast a shadow on his creations; they became, if anything, more powerfully evocative, with strong colour schemes, meticu-lously ob served details displayed in magni ficent proportions, su-perb in com position and pleasing to even a lay eye. Not for Yadav were the mod ern abstract styles which would need pundits to ex-plain and bring joy only to the initiated. His were works that brought visual plea sures, and were yet so different from photographs. Pho-tography captures the exterior beauty; Ya dav's brush could not only show the exterior loveliness vividly, it could bring out some-thing of an in ner mood as well. There is a magic in the active form, performance and transformation, all simulta neously. The net effect is the same as one looks at a snow-capped mountain peak or a wooded valley of flower, and say, how beautiful.
Yadav had retained an inner tranquillity all his life, made many friends and no foes in spite of his mercurial behaviour. He was do ing a painting of Laxmi and Vishu one June day, when a heart at-tack made him collapse with the brush in his hand.
More than a year and a quarter after Yadav's death, something sa tisfying about his memory is hap pening. His friends have chipped in to bring out a portfolio of repro ductions of 11 of his paintings as also a set of greetings cards. The money from these will go to his fa mily. Private collectors have will ingly allowed the paintings with them to be used; the Bochasanwa si Swaminarayan Sanstha has prin ted it and the Sahitya Mudranalay has given pa-per free for this effort. It sends a good signal to artists and others engaged in pusuits other than that of share markets. We may be a forgetful people; but we are not ungrateful.
His creative life was full of su perb works of art; his personal life so full of miseries of eking out en ough for an existence dogged by anything but suffering. When things you do not like happen or you suffer, you have two choices; you get bitter or better. Yadav never got bitter, though he was never better-off in the day-to-day sense.
Kanaiyalal
Tushar Bhatt
His name, Kanaiyalal, was the same as one of the innumerable names of the legendary Krishna; his surname too was that of the clan from which Dwarkadhish came, Yadav. Both, though not born in Gujarat, made it their home. Yet, Kanaiyalal R. Yadav, a painter par excellence of portraits and landscapes in oil and water colour, spent most of his career _ and life _ in a hut in penury, like a mod-ern-day Sudama.
His works are prized posses sions in several private collections, galleries and temples. Nobody knows exactly where these all are. Yadav was not just a master artist; he was a superb teacher as well, exploding the myth that those who can paint cannot teach. Among his friends and contemporaries such as Piraji Sagra, Nag-jibhai Chau han and others he stood apart, a proud man who could shower great affection and show greater considerations for others. He had been a teacher at the C.N. College of Fine Arts in Ahmed-abad for long years, moulding several of the young talents on the art scene to day.
His countless friends and stu dents tried as much as they could to help Yadav while he was alive. But the proud artist himself never sought any assistance. Nor could he ever learn how to realise a prop er commercial value of the master pieces he was creating. Recalls Madhav Ramanuj, a poet and close friend of the artist: ``Once we sent someone very wealthy to buy one of his paintings and told him to charge as much as he could think of, hinting at a sum of about Rs 7,000 or 8,000. Yadav did not put such a price tag on his work, shrug ging away with an unbelievable ex planation that how could he think that the buyer would be able to af ford a high price.'' Perhaps it was the innate unwillingness of the man to put a price label on his art _ he would not name a price and would part with whatever the buy er thought fit to pay, assuming the buyer could not afford to pay more.
His creative life was full of su perb works of art; his personal life full of miseries. It was spent eking out just enough for an existence but dogged by suffering. When things you do not like happen or you suffer, you have two choices _ you get bitter or better. Yadav never got bitter, though he was never better-off in the day-to-day sense.
Kanaiyalal was born on April 10, 1932, a Sunday, in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, where his fa ther, Ramachandra, and mother, Maniben, then lived. Ramachan dra, an overseer in the Public Works Department, hailed from Agra, but Maniben was a native of Patan in Gujarat. The young Ka naiya, as he was known, began his school in Ratlam, catching the at tention of his teachers because of his beautiful handwriting. A Eur opean woman teacher in drawing was the one to put a painting brush in the child's hand, setting him on a life-long course.
After a few years, the Yadav fa mily came to Ahmedabad as the world was in the grip of the Second World War. His studies at a Hindi school in Saraspur were rather in different, though he was becoming more proficient in the use of the brush. However, a ca-reer in paint ing was far from Kanaiyalal's mind then; he was charmed by the lure of the filmdom after seeing the film Andaz, leaving for the tinsel town of Bombay to shine on the silver screen. It remained a dream that was never fulfilled; the young man, after running from pillar to post, worked for a while even as a peon be-fore returning home. His stay in Bombay, otherwise un lucky, was a boon in one respect; he went to see the J.J. School of Art, and was inspired to study painting and drawing. Back home, he took up studies and passed an examination to become a drawing teacher. He started learning fur ther from the late Rasiklal Parikh, a stalwart painter, and sat in sever al examinations in art, for which one had then to go to Bombay. Yadav would put up with a distant relative in a hutment colony near Lalbag, often sleeping on the pa vement. But he stood first in the entire former state of Bombay for diploma in painting, an examina tion in which many other noted painters of today also sat. He also bagged the first prize for a creative paint-ing, `Bullock Sellers', and came first in the Art Master test.
But these successes were not en ough to make any change in the life-style of the young man; his ex istence was as wretched as ever, sometimes getting work as a tem porary drawing teacher in a school, other times as a substitute worker in a textile mill. He was married to Ram Dulari from Vrin davan, and the couple used to live in the slum opposite a textile mill in Saraspur, an eastern suburb of Ahmedabad. It was as rundown an area as ever. His friend Ra-manuj says that often he would hang a painting over a gap in the mud wall of the hut to stop wind from blow ing in. Innumerable hardships never ruffled Ram Dulari who, de spite terrible poverty, never com plained, allowing her talented hus band to devote what-ever time and money on painting. Ramanuj says Kanaiya's love for colours and brush was so great that he would spend recklessly on these as also on books at the cost of basic neces sities of life. This became a life- long pattern. Yadav's wife caught tuberculosis and died a few years later. Although perpetually short of money, the painter tried as much as humanly possible to com fort her during the ailment.
Suffering dogged him at every turn worse than like a shadow; shadow at least leaves you when it is dark. Yadav's 14-year-old daughter died, leaving him in a deep grief, which he never showed even to his closest friends. Around this time, he had to leave his job at the C.N. College of Fine Arts. The job had been the only break in his career. Students and friends still recall an unkempt, emaciated fig ure, with a beard, cycling 15 kilo metres from his home in Amrai wadi to the college in Ambawadi, be the weather fair or foul. He went into a mental depression, de stroying many in-valuable paint ings, sketches and portraits. Friends would send medicines, some money, but nothing seemed to help. For a while, Kanaiyalal had to be sent to a mental hospital; he drew portraits and did colour paintings there, earning praise and release as a normal person. He re turned to his slum dwelling. That was around 1964-65. He would roam around on his bicycle throughout the day, subsisting on a cup of tea at a roadside stall, do ing sketches and landscape draw ings. The information department of the Gujarat government asked him to do a sketch on the Nal Saro var bird sanctuary; Yadav had not enough money for the bus fare both ways. He walked to the sanc tuary to complete the assignment.
His was an artistically fierce re lationship with the world around him, and living in the slum areas of Amraiwadi he was never dampe ned in spirits. In art, more than anywhere else, forms result from existence and performance. Whe ther it is a lowly craftsman or an ac complished artist like Yadav, the making of the work of art gradual ly becomes a ritual of heart, see mingly unaffected by the sur rounding environment of his phy sical life. The landscape of heart matters rather than the landscape around. This was what had happe ned to Yadav too. If one were to look at his art only, one would never realise the trials and tribula tions Yadav suffered. With open eyes he saw the world around with a curious detachment. With eyes closed, as if, he saw the world within him, a world of beauty, of hazel-eyed lovely faces, of serene wood lots, so keen that his por traits would capture the likeness of the person and yet impart a mystic quality that would lift that work from the stream of routine output. A prime example of this is the landscape in water colour he had done of a wooded lot in the college compound. An-other was a portrait of the Swaminarayan monk, Yogi ji Maharaj. His vision was direct and still two-fold; he would, through immedi-ate intuition, re veal the image, and seeing aware ness clothe it with lineament which had the shape of man or landscape but with a recognisable spirit of man and place.
In 1976, friends persuaded Ya dav to rejoin the C.N. College, where he worked till the time of re tirement. The grateful authorities extended his tenure by a year. He would still come on the bicycle only from Amraiwadi. The only difference was that he had shifted to a modest flat under the Indira Awas Yojana from the hut. Still, it was as deprived a living as any; he would be painting on the first floor landing of the staircase, unmindful of the squalor, noise and stark poverty. The richness of his soul would reflect in his art. Come win ter, he would don a navy-blue long coat on top of his usual meagre at tire. Around this time, another break came; a cou-ple of monks from the Bochasanwasi Sanstha of the Swaminara-yan sect had been his art students. The Sanstha com missioned Yadav to do paintings and portraits, which today adore temples in Shahibaug, Ahmeda bad, and at Gondal.
But other difficulties persisted. He could never fulfil his wish to educate his three sons well. Disap pointments of life, however, never cast a shadow on his creations; they became, if anything, more powerfully evocative, with strong colour schemes, meticu-lously ob served details displayed in magni ficent proportions, su-perb in com position and pleasing to even a lay eye. Not for Yadav were the mod ern abstract styles which would need pundits to ex-plain and bring joy only to the initiated. His were works that brought visual plea sures, and were yet so different from photographs. Pho-tography captures the exterior beauty; Ya dav's brush could not only show the exterior loveliness vividly, it could bring out some-thing of an in ner mood as well. There is a magic in the active form, performance and transformation, all simulta neously. The net effect is the same as one looks at a snow-capped mountain peak or a wooded valley of flower, and say, how beautiful.
Yadav had retained an inner tranquillity all his life, made many friends and no foes in spite of his mercurial behaviour. He was do ing a painting of Laxmi and Vishu one June day, when a heart at-tack made him collapse with the brush in his hand.
More than a year and a quarter after Yadav's death, something sa tisfying about his memory is hap pening. His friends have chipped in to bring out a portfolio of repro ductions of 11 of his paintings as also a set of greetings cards. The money from these will go to his fa mily. Private collectors have will ingly allowed the paintings with them to be used; the Bochasanwa si Swaminarayan Sanstha has prin ted it and the Sahitya Mudranalay has given pa-per free for this effort. It sends a good signal to artists and others engaged in pusuits other than that of share markets. We may be a forgetful people; but we are not ungrateful.
His creative life was full of su perb works of art; his personal life so full of miseries of eking out en ough for an existence dogged by anything but suffering. When things you do not like happen or you suffer, you have two choices; you get bitter or better. Yadav never got bitter, though he was never better-off in the day-to-day sense.
A Mystic,an Officer and a Gentleman
Tushar Bhatt
It is a little after 3.30 p m,but it feels as if the sun has been firing the oven called earth for ages,not hours.The winding road in the sprawling housing colony in Bopal is totally bereft of anything mov-ing,and so are the trees.
Beyond the Club House,a small hand-painted board catches at-tention:C\19 and an arrow,in the spartan military style.
As one opens the small iron gate to the compound,a camel bell attached to it clangs.The door-frame reveals a man in dark glasses,attired in pale blue, loose-fitting kurta and pyjama.He does not look much beyond 60,although Lt.Col.C C Bakshi is 82,if a day.His face does not have the pallor of the aged.Nor has his walk-ing gait the burden of his years.It would be difficult to imagine that the man has had three heart attacks; he does not look cowed down a wee bit,even by the fierce heat.Chandudada,as Bakshi is almost universally known these days,gives an impression of a man in a different mould.
And, he is.Not because,barely a matriculate,he rose to become the deputy director of the cipher bureau,the store-house of secret information,in the Indian Army,nor because as a lieutenant,Bakshi was adviser at the time of the liberation of the former princely state of Junagadh in his native Saurashtra whose Nawab had foolishly tried to join Pakistan.Not even because later even as he was slowly rising in rank,Bakshi was picked up and seconded to International Commission in Indo-China.
There is something beyond all this in the personality of this grand old man that makes him stand taller than the sum total of all the things he has accomplished.A soft-spoken,unassumig man,who would love to merge in a crowd and still would stand out.He has not only been a model of physical fitness buthe has also excelled in exploring the mind,becoming something of a secu-lar ascetic.
If Chandrashanker Bakshi had just written Jeevan-Na Rang,a small book,he would have left behind a glittering memorial to him-self.The 120-page book is actually a bunch of letters to a young girl on the art of living, the culmination of a life-long journey in search of something that enables the human being to rise above himself.
Says a reader: "Mind you,Bakshi does not write like a literary genius not even like a pundit.He writes as if a grand father is talk-ing to his favourite child,passing on nuggets of wisdom on how to live even as one evolves as a good human being." Books on self-improvement,whether of body or mind,have a tremendous following the world over.Many advocate therapies and methods that are good as advice,but hardly ever followed by the preachers them-selves.They invariably are good prescription,very lucrative to pre-scribe but damn difficult to digest and benefit from,the Catch 22 be-ing that it was really the fault of the reader that he or she could not derive much from the devices suggested.
Bakshi's letters to the daughter of an acquaintance were not even written with an intention to publish.In the first quarter of 1992,he suffered a heart attack an was bed-ridden.The girl used to visit him and talk about herself,her problems,life around.The kindly old man,feeling as if living on borrowed time,was weak,not able to talk much,and yet eager to help.So he took to putting on paper what he had to say. The girl naturally was delighted;but so were others who came to know of the 26 letters. The upshot of it was Jeevan-Na Rang,brought out in 1993.Within three years now,it has gone into a second edition.
Chandudada,say those who have come in contact with him,is a man who has,or is very near realising the Self.This sounds like a mystical statement,but there just is no other explanation for his joi d' vivre at an age when many of his contemporaries are gone,some others may be in bed,losing all interest in the world around.Bakshi,on the other hand,has just learnt how to paint and is found engrossed in doing caricatures of birds and beasts,seen from the windows of his son,Nikhil's house in Bopal.He never gets bored,nor feels tired of living.
What he is talking about in the letters is what he has distilled from a life full of ups and downs,a result of his spiritual bend of mind,something that took away the killer instinct one normally comes to associate with a life of physical activity as in the army.He has a curious detachment about everything.He is disinterested but not uninterested-- which means he would not be curious to gossip-ping for want of anything else to do,but he would be listening with rapt attention if one tells him something.He can empathise and sympathise with his visitor,and yet remains unaffected.
Says Mr Narbheram Sadavrati, a veteran journalist who has known Bakshi for years,"He comes across as an eternal student,on a permanent quest, a totally centred man who knows what he wants."
Bakshi himself says,rather dismissively,he does not want any-thing. "I have very few worldly possessions,a meagre bank balance and the pension as a retired army officer being two." Half-mockingly,he takes the visitor to an ancient bicycle which nobody can use today :"This is the only thing here I can call my own."
In addition to Jeevan-Na Rang, there are three other books Bak-shi has penned.Minara is again a small collection of profiles of un-usual people,mostly those who came in his life,such as Bajrangdas Bapu of Bagdana.The other is a volume with pen portraits of Sufi saints,including that of Pagal Baba of Ranchi,who was his Guru.A linguist,who learnt severa languages,Bakshi has made studied the traditions of sufism.
The third volume is the biggest, a 435-page treatise on comsic consciousness,called Vaishwik Chetna.It has come out in Guja-rati,although Bakshi wrote it first in English,soon to get published soon as Cosmic Contact.It is a bit esoteric for a lay reader since it seeks to explore spirituality and allied world,vibrations,swarodaya system of achieving unity with nature,drawing on work done else-where in the world in allied topics.It took years for the Lt.Col to marshal his material and arguments,and he admits it is only a be-ginning.The subject of cosmic consciousness required a deeper,and more scientific study.
Born in 1914,Chandrashankaer had a chequered career, a ca-reer none could imagine then,and very few prepared to follow suit even today."I was an indifferent student,never learnt much.He passed matriculation in the third attempt,went to Shamaldas Col-lege in Bhavnagar for a month and a half and took a temporary commission in the army at the age of 31 in 1945.His father had been in the service of the former princely state of Jasdan."I cam more in contact with the Kathis,rather than my own community of Nagars.I learnt horse-riding,shooting,swimming,motor driving,but did not excel in routine subjects." His father's sudden illness com-pelled him to go with him to Bombay for his treatment and while there he learnt typing,short-hand,radio engineering and electrical engineering.He got married to Harshidaben in 1934 at the age of 20 and took up a job with the Jasdan ruler as personal assis-tance,including looking after the royal stable of some 50 horses and 20 cars besides looking after the correspondence.
Nothing very exciting,but even then ups and downs came. He had to give up the royal service and went to Porbandar,working in a cement factory ,earning eight annas (fifty paise today) a day.He had also enrolled for training in the police in Jamnagar and was all set to become a police officer when he fell sick.Later he did a year and a half's course in police in Baroda.He had ambition to join mili-tary right from the age of 15 but the opportunity never came."Despite all these setbacks,I was a voracious reader and had a gift of learning languages quickly. I had a good command over the English language."
He went to Ratlam in 1942 ,taking up a police job at Rs.40 a month,but fell sick again.Doctors in Rajkot had washed their hands off his case when by chance he came in contact with Swami Di-gambar at Kaivalyadham who cured his illness through yogic exer-cises and practices.In 1943,Bakshi joined service with another princly state ,Bantwa ,as teacher of the ruler's sons and personal assistant at a salary of Rs.50 a month."I was always ambitious and dreamt of joining the army.I went on trying and eventually in 1944 got selected for training as a commissioned officer at Mahu and was made a commissioned officer in 1945."But he was tenacious,if anything and quickly learnt cryptology and ciphers which took him as officer in Lord Mountbatten's headquarters in Delhi.After Inde-pendence,when the Junagadh problem came up,Bakshi made bold,and went to see Sardar Patel on his morning walk."I had heard the government was raising a Kathiawad Defence Force and wanted to see if I could have some role to play. I was just a Lieu-tenant then but nevertheless saw Patel's secretary,M C Bhatt,who said the best bet was to catch the Sardar's attention at the time of his morning." Armed with a brief note of who he was and what he could do,Bakshi met Patel and got sent to Junagadh as adviser for the army.Bakshi has a detailed diary of those days in Junagadh and its eventual liberation.Later he was posted on the Indo-Pak border in Kashmir, a posting given normally for a year since it was deemed to be a field area and which got stretched to four years.
Recalls Bakshi,"I had hoped to be posted after this stint either in Bombay or Pune,nearer my home in Saurashtra but much to my dismay got sent to Ranchi.In retrospect,however,I think it was all for my own good because I met a Bengali sadhu,Pagal Baba,my Guru there.It changed my entire perspective on life,although from the very beginning I had attraction for spiritualism." A year later,he went to Indo-China,a job under International Commission chair-man,Mr M J Desai." I enjoyed the work a lot and had an opportunity to meet people like Ho Chi Minh as also witness the heroic battle for independence the Vietnamese waged." By the time he retired in 1969, Bakshi had risen to Lt.Col's level and had been a deputy di-rector of the cipher bureau, a strategic assignment in those days.
Bakshi does not talk much about his spiritual evolu-tion,underlining again and again that he is nothing.But his letters in his book reveal a lot.He counsels against allowing the tongue to talk loosely and endlessly."Learn to control it.Speak in lower tone,softly.Do not react to injustice,humiliation or insults hurled at you personally.Jealousy is common and one should not feel upset by it.Hold your temper and do not react.You cannot order the world to suit you.Nor do you have to get bogged down in argument about anything."
Bakshi is a great believer in the power of the human mind and thinks that if one learns how to concentrate it,one can do won-ders.Anger,he feels,disturbs the mind and so do other tendencies such as craving for attention and praise,fear,greed and envy.He also puts a great store by service to humanity."Help others without expecting anything in return and you will be happy,even without seeking after the happiness." He is all praise for the sufi saints whose tolerance of others was legendary and whose affection for others as also willingness to serve and help others were bound-less.He thinks that various religions and their basic practices lead to a common goal of making the human beings realise their own Self."I do not criticise any religion,nor do I say there is only one way.I can pray in a temple,mosque and church.What is needed is a faith in the Supreme Element that pervades everything."
He does not make any claims of being a realised soul."All I have learnt is to be able to feel tremendously for everything around me. I see the manifestation of the Supreme Element in nature around us, in birds and bees,in everybody.The same cosmic consciousness manifests itself in all of us.Respect it,adore it,serve it."
In so many cases,words like these sound hollow.Bakshi would desist from declaiming these as his original declaration.But he leads a life that is a living example of what he believes.He is in a sort of bliss,never losing his temper and cool,never feeling put down or put on a pedestal.In fact, he would forbid anyone from do-ing a pranam to him,arguing that he is not worth it. His approach to life is to accept life as it is and it comes,both at flood and at low ebb,without preference for either.He rejoices in both.He is fond of quoting Pagal Baba:"Bhutkal bhut ho gaya" (The past has become the past tense).Why remember it and feel upset.The future is not here yet and nobody knows exactly what it will be like.The future,of course, depends on what one will do today.
Bakshi recommends a self-introspection,or monitoring,every night,before going to sleep: "Did I feel angry,jealous,greedy or in-sulted during the day? Why? Try finding an honest answer to these posers about our day to day action,and our entire attitude and be-haviour will change." Do these words go hand in hand with the de-mands of modern day living,where competitiveness is everything and failure is the modern equivalent of sin? They do.Says Bak-shi:"The art of living does not change from age to age.In a faster moving world,in truth, one might require a more and more stabi-lised mind.If everything is spinning at a mad rate,you have all the more reason to strive for stilling the mind so that a human being is not overwhelmed by passing fads,desires,notions and emotions." He quotes Dr.S.Radhakrishnan who said in 1962-63:"The greatest valour is in conquering one's mind." The way to do this is through continuous introspection,adds Bakshi,rather modestly.
The old man suddenly realises he has been talking,"talking too much".In his introspection session in the night,"there will be hell to pay for this.Who am I to teach anybody,anything? I am nobody,do not know anything." Somehow,he speaks with full conviction,a visi-tor does not want to believe these last words because only those who are aware of their ignorance are the one who arein the know.
The life went on.Bakshi's frail body began to shrink, he was once a ram=rod stiff when sitting,walking or standing. He started stooping, had difficulty in walking. He battled on,passing through bouts if illness that led to prolonged hospitalisation. When all right, he was his old self, but when ill he would become incoherent. His family took good care.
The old soldieer never said die till he breathed his last at the young age of 93.
)ENDS)
Tushar Bhatt
It is a little after 3.30 p m,but it feels as if the sun has been firing the oven called earth for ages,not hours.The winding road in the sprawling housing colony in Bopal is totally bereft of anything mov-ing,and so are the trees.
Beyond the Club House,a small hand-painted board catches at-tention:C\19 and an arrow,in the spartan military style.
As one opens the small iron gate to the compound,a camel bell attached to it clangs.The door-frame reveals a man in dark glasses,attired in pale blue, loose-fitting kurta and pyjama.He does not look much beyond 60,although Lt.Col.C C Bakshi is 82,if a day.His face does not have the pallor of the aged.Nor has his walk-ing gait the burden of his years.It would be difficult to imagine that the man has had three heart attacks; he does not look cowed down a wee bit,even by the fierce heat.Chandudada,as Bakshi is almost universally known these days,gives an impression of a man in a different mould.
And, he is.Not because,barely a matriculate,he rose to become the deputy director of the cipher bureau,the store-house of secret information,in the Indian Army,nor because as a lieutenant,Bakshi was adviser at the time of the liberation of the former princely state of Junagadh in his native Saurashtra whose Nawab had foolishly tried to join Pakistan.Not even because later even as he was slowly rising in rank,Bakshi was picked up and seconded to International Commission in Indo-China.
There is something beyond all this in the personality of this grand old man that makes him stand taller than the sum total of all the things he has accomplished.A soft-spoken,unassumig man,who would love to merge in a crowd and still would stand out.He has not only been a model of physical fitness buthe has also excelled in exploring the mind,becoming something of a secu-lar ascetic.
If Chandrashanker Bakshi had just written Jeevan-Na Rang,a small book,he would have left behind a glittering memorial to him-self.The 120-page book is actually a bunch of letters to a young girl on the art of living, the culmination of a life-long journey in search of something that enables the human being to rise above himself.
Says a reader: "Mind you,Bakshi does not write like a literary genius not even like a pundit.He writes as if a grand father is talk-ing to his favourite child,passing on nuggets of wisdom on how to live even as one evolves as a good human being." Books on self-improvement,whether of body or mind,have a tremendous following the world over.Many advocate therapies and methods that are good as advice,but hardly ever followed by the preachers them-selves.They invariably are good prescription,very lucrative to pre-scribe but damn difficult to digest and benefit from,the Catch 22 be-ing that it was really the fault of the reader that he or she could not derive much from the devices suggested.
Bakshi's letters to the daughter of an acquaintance were not even written with an intention to publish.In the first quarter of 1992,he suffered a heart attack an was bed-ridden.The girl used to visit him and talk about herself,her problems,life around.The kindly old man,feeling as if living on borrowed time,was weak,not able to talk much,and yet eager to help.So he took to putting on paper what he had to say. The girl naturally was delighted;but so were others who came to know of the 26 letters. The upshot of it was Jeevan-Na Rang,brought out in 1993.Within three years now,it has gone into a second edition.
Chandudada,say those who have come in contact with him,is a man who has,or is very near realising the Self.This sounds like a mystical statement,but there just is no other explanation for his joi d' vivre at an age when many of his contemporaries are gone,some others may be in bed,losing all interest in the world around.Bakshi,on the other hand,has just learnt how to paint and is found engrossed in doing caricatures of birds and beasts,seen from the windows of his son,Nikhil's house in Bopal.He never gets bored,nor feels tired of living.
What he is talking about in the letters is what he has distilled from a life full of ups and downs,a result of his spiritual bend of mind,something that took away the killer instinct one normally comes to associate with a life of physical activity as in the army.He has a curious detachment about everything.He is disinterested but not uninterested-- which means he would not be curious to gossip-ping for want of anything else to do,but he would be listening with rapt attention if one tells him something.He can empathise and sympathise with his visitor,and yet remains unaffected.
Says Mr Narbheram Sadavrati, a veteran journalist who has known Bakshi for years,"He comes across as an eternal student,on a permanent quest, a totally centred man who knows what he wants."
Bakshi himself says,rather dismissively,he does not want any-thing. "I have very few worldly possessions,a meagre bank balance and the pension as a retired army officer being two." Half-mockingly,he takes the visitor to an ancient bicycle which nobody can use today :"This is the only thing here I can call my own."
In addition to Jeevan-Na Rang, there are three other books Bak-shi has penned.Minara is again a small collection of profiles of un-usual people,mostly those who came in his life,such as Bajrangdas Bapu of Bagdana.The other is a volume with pen portraits of Sufi saints,including that of Pagal Baba of Ranchi,who was his Guru.A linguist,who learnt severa languages,Bakshi has made studied the traditions of sufism.
The third volume is the biggest, a 435-page treatise on comsic consciousness,called Vaishwik Chetna.It has come out in Guja-rati,although Bakshi wrote it first in English,soon to get published soon as Cosmic Contact.It is a bit esoteric for a lay reader since it seeks to explore spirituality and allied world,vibrations,swarodaya system of achieving unity with nature,drawing on work done else-where in the world in allied topics.It took years for the Lt.Col to marshal his material and arguments,and he admits it is only a be-ginning.The subject of cosmic consciousness required a deeper,and more scientific study.
Born in 1914,Chandrashankaer had a chequered career, a ca-reer none could imagine then,and very few prepared to follow suit even today."I was an indifferent student,never learnt much.He passed matriculation in the third attempt,went to Shamaldas Col-lege in Bhavnagar for a month and a half and took a temporary commission in the army at the age of 31 in 1945.His father had been in the service of the former princely state of Jasdan."I cam more in contact with the Kathis,rather than my own community of Nagars.I learnt horse-riding,shooting,swimming,motor driving,but did not excel in routine subjects." His father's sudden illness com-pelled him to go with him to Bombay for his treatment and while there he learnt typing,short-hand,radio engineering and electrical engineering.He got married to Harshidaben in 1934 at the age of 20 and took up a job with the Jasdan ruler as personal assis-tance,including looking after the royal stable of some 50 horses and 20 cars besides looking after the correspondence.
Nothing very exciting,but even then ups and downs came. He had to give up the royal service and went to Porbandar,working in a cement factory ,earning eight annas (fifty paise today) a day.He had also enrolled for training in the police in Jamnagar and was all set to become a police officer when he fell sick.Later he did a year and a half's course in police in Baroda.He had ambition to join mili-tary right from the age of 15 but the opportunity never came."Despite all these setbacks,I was a voracious reader and had a gift of learning languages quickly. I had a good command over the English language."
He went to Ratlam in 1942 ,taking up a police job at Rs.40 a month,but fell sick again.Doctors in Rajkot had washed their hands off his case when by chance he came in contact with Swami Di-gambar at Kaivalyadham who cured his illness through yogic exer-cises and practices.In 1943,Bakshi joined service with another princly state ,Bantwa ,as teacher of the ruler's sons and personal assistant at a salary of Rs.50 a month."I was always ambitious and dreamt of joining the army.I went on trying and eventually in 1944 got selected for training as a commissioned officer at Mahu and was made a commissioned officer in 1945."But he was tenacious,if anything and quickly learnt cryptology and ciphers which took him as officer in Lord Mountbatten's headquarters in Delhi.After Inde-pendence,when the Junagadh problem came up,Bakshi made bold,and went to see Sardar Patel on his morning walk."I had heard the government was raising a Kathiawad Defence Force and wanted to see if I could have some role to play. I was just a Lieu-tenant then but nevertheless saw Patel's secretary,M C Bhatt,who said the best bet was to catch the Sardar's attention at the time of his morning." Armed with a brief note of who he was and what he could do,Bakshi met Patel and got sent to Junagadh as adviser for the army.Bakshi has a detailed diary of those days in Junagadh and its eventual liberation.Later he was posted on the Indo-Pak border in Kashmir, a posting given normally for a year since it was deemed to be a field area and which got stretched to four years.
Recalls Bakshi,"I had hoped to be posted after this stint either in Bombay or Pune,nearer my home in Saurashtra but much to my dismay got sent to Ranchi.In retrospect,however,I think it was all for my own good because I met a Bengali sadhu,Pagal Baba,my Guru there.It changed my entire perspective on life,although from the very beginning I had attraction for spiritualism." A year later,he went to Indo-China,a job under International Commission chair-man,Mr M J Desai." I enjoyed the work a lot and had an opportunity to meet people like Ho Chi Minh as also witness the heroic battle for independence the Vietnamese waged." By the time he retired in 1969, Bakshi had risen to Lt.Col's level and had been a deputy di-rector of the cipher bureau, a strategic assignment in those days.
Bakshi does not talk much about his spiritual evolu-tion,underlining again and again that he is nothing.But his letters in his book reveal a lot.He counsels against allowing the tongue to talk loosely and endlessly."Learn to control it.Speak in lower tone,softly.Do not react to injustice,humiliation or insults hurled at you personally.Jealousy is common and one should not feel upset by it.Hold your temper and do not react.You cannot order the world to suit you.Nor do you have to get bogged down in argument about anything."
Bakshi is a great believer in the power of the human mind and thinks that if one learns how to concentrate it,one can do won-ders.Anger,he feels,disturbs the mind and so do other tendencies such as craving for attention and praise,fear,greed and envy.He also puts a great store by service to humanity."Help others without expecting anything in return and you will be happy,even without seeking after the happiness." He is all praise for the sufi saints whose tolerance of others was legendary and whose affection for others as also willingness to serve and help others were bound-less.He thinks that various religions and their basic practices lead to a common goal of making the human beings realise their own Self."I do not criticise any religion,nor do I say there is only one way.I can pray in a temple,mosque and church.What is needed is a faith in the Supreme Element that pervades everything."
He does not make any claims of being a realised soul."All I have learnt is to be able to feel tremendously for everything around me. I see the manifestation of the Supreme Element in nature around us, in birds and bees,in everybody.The same cosmic consciousness manifests itself in all of us.Respect it,adore it,serve it."
In so many cases,words like these sound hollow.Bakshi would desist from declaiming these as his original declaration.But he leads a life that is a living example of what he believes.He is in a sort of bliss,never losing his temper and cool,never feeling put down or put on a pedestal.In fact, he would forbid anyone from do-ing a pranam to him,arguing that he is not worth it. His approach to life is to accept life as it is and it comes,both at flood and at low ebb,without preference for either.He rejoices in both.He is fond of quoting Pagal Baba:"Bhutkal bhut ho gaya" (The past has become the past tense).Why remember it and feel upset.The future is not here yet and nobody knows exactly what it will be like.The future,of course, depends on what one will do today.
Bakshi recommends a self-introspection,or monitoring,every night,before going to sleep: "Did I feel angry,jealous,greedy or in-sulted during the day? Why? Try finding an honest answer to these posers about our day to day action,and our entire attitude and be-haviour will change." Do these words go hand in hand with the de-mands of modern day living,where competitiveness is everything and failure is the modern equivalent of sin? They do.Says Bak-shi:"The art of living does not change from age to age.In a faster moving world,in truth, one might require a more and more stabi-lised mind.If everything is spinning at a mad rate,you have all the more reason to strive for stilling the mind so that a human being is not overwhelmed by passing fads,desires,notions and emotions." He quotes Dr.S.Radhakrishnan who said in 1962-63:"The greatest valour is in conquering one's mind." The way to do this is through continuous introspection,adds Bakshi,rather modestly.
The old man suddenly realises he has been talking,"talking too much".In his introspection session in the night,"there will be hell to pay for this.Who am I to teach anybody,anything? I am nobody,do not know anything." Somehow,he speaks with full conviction,a visi-tor does not want to believe these last words because only those who are aware of their ignorance are the one who arein the know.
The life went on.Bakshi's frail body began to shrink, he was once a ram=rod stiff when sitting,walking or standing. He started stooping, had difficulty in walking. He battled on,passing through bouts if illness that led to prolonged hospitalisation. When all right, he was his old self, but when ill he would become incoherent. His family took good care.
The old soldieer never said die till he breathed his last at the young age of 93.
)ENDS)
Upendra Trivedi : Lone
Shining Star of the Gujarati Cinema
Tushar Bhatt
His face averted from the rest of the workers,an old man was digging earth at the drought relief work.The general deportment in-dicated he must have been a man from a well-placed rural family that had fallen on bad days because of the failure of the monsoon,but that did not prevent him from working like a fury.
As his pick hit the land with gusto,he sang in Gujarati: "Khandaniya Ma Mathan Ram, Zinko Ram Zinko Ram, Dukale Pidhan Lohida Ram" ( We are like the grains being pounded in the mortar.O God, go on pounding us with as much force as you like in this famine which is sucking our blood.)
A visitor who was at the site to distribute buttermilk among the workers was overhearing it,as if petrified by the sorrow and pain the old man,as alsothousands and thousands like him,were suffer-ing,uncomplaining and yet with dignity facing miseries inflicted by the vagaries of the rain God.
"It sort of sent a flashlight through my head",said Upendra Trivedi,noted Gujarati thespian,whose depiction on the celluloid of the terrible famine in Gujarat nearly a hundred years ago,done on paper with great mastery by the late author Pannalal Patel,Manvini Bhavai,had bagged a silver lotus award for a regional film at the 41st national film festival.
Basically, Upendra is a show man in the genre of Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar. After a life time in films, he had a stint in politics and found out that the real life is far more complicated than the reel life. For some time now he has been in wilderness and was almost in the oblivion. Politicians, cricketers and denizens of the filmdom cannot afford to remain out of public limelight.Perhaps , Upendra Trivedi had perceived it to be a clear danger. His friends and well-wishers rallied round with a volume containing the actor’s own life statement and writings by others and released it on July 9, 2009 at Gandhinagar. Among those who were present was Morari Bapu, a noted Ramayan preacher. An exhibition of cartoons and caricatures on Upendra by Nirmish Thaker, whose cartoons appear in a number of publications, including Opinion was another hightlight of the programme. Nirmish said later his was the first solo exhibition of cartoons on a single actor.
Rahul Gandhi notwithstanding, aged people rule the political arena, but perpetual youth is expected of sport persons and show people.So it is difficult to make whether Upendra’s political career blooms once more or his screen life, his real life or his reel life! Whichever it is, it remains true that had he not done anything else but the film on Pannalal’s novel, Upendra Trivedi’s name would always deserve respect.
The novel,on which the film is based,itself had won laurels for Pannalal, eversince he wrote it in 1947,capping it with a Jnanpith award for 1985,given in 1986.The late poet Umashankar Joshi had hailed Pannalal as a writer no less than Shakespeare.Upendra Trivedi would compare him with Chekhov;others have drawn parallel between Pannalal and Maxim Gorky.Like Gorky,Pannalal had graduated from the university of life,portraying life around him pow-erfully, graphically and beautifully.Man was at the centre of the best produced by Pannalal,and yet it was no fanciful flight of imagination in individualism totally delinked from the society around him.In the struggles of ordinary people he portrayed,Pannnalal never came out as an escapist." Man ," he once said," is not evil as such.Hunger is.And a worse evil than poverty is begging."
Upendra Trivedi,who has been a leading light of the Gujarati silver screen and stage for years,had acquired film rights of Manvini Bhavai even before it got the Jnanpith award to Pannalal.The story,its social relevance,its pathos,its immediacy all appealed to him as something that would lend for a powerful movie.But,said Upendra Trivedi later," I could not clarify in my own mind as to what I wanted to do with the story. That day when I saw the old man on the drought relief work,heard his song,and later spoke to him to find out details of his life,it all clarified in an instant-- as if like a flash."
He said that almost every Gujarati who can read has either heard of or read Pannalal's Manvini Bhavai.What kind of treatment should be given to it in picturising it was the million rupee question that had been exercising his thought-process. "When I saw the old man and his dignified struggle,learnt of the fact that although he had a rich son in law,he was loathe asking for help,that during lunch time,he would go running home to look up his cattle,all touched my heart,and gave me a cinema idiom,so to say."
He could as if fathom the suffering of the old man at the relief work,and strove to transform that suffering in filming Manvini Bha-vai."It was not a story of Kalu and Raju,or of any of the characters portrayed in the novel only. It was during a famine that most of the established demarcations of behaviour disappear.Famliy ties became strenuous; man and animal both would be compelled to drink dirty water from the same source.It was a timeless tale of the rural folks pitted against hard times, the story of a drought, a famine,whether it is is in Bhiloda,my constituency,north Gujarat,Saurashtra or Kutch,or entire Gujarat.It transcended boundaries; it could be the tale of farmers in Somalia or Ethiopia."
"Time is the hero,the nature its leading lady,and the famine the villain. Man's battle against the drought,the shortage of food and water,the miseries all around are enough to defeat him,crush his spirit.But man,fights on,often on the strength of fragile threads of non-existent hope.I made the film on this concept",Upendra Trivedi said."I realised how magnificent this epic struggle of human beings against the vagaries of nature has been.I have tried to celebrate it,eulogise his fighting spirit,pay tribute to his ingenuity. Look at Kalu,one shower of rain and he revives as if Shiv has returned with the Ganga in his hairlock." He also felt that a paucity of water -- for drinking,for farming, for animals-- was at the root of most of his miseries. "Water is life."
In filming the novel, Upendra made a few changes ; " I have dropped a few charaacters,added some,added some descriptive scenes to make it all the more focused. For instance, to drive home the real face of the famine of the 1890,which Pannalal wrote about in the book,I have added a pre-drought scene of charming rural scenery.But I have remained faithful to the basic purpose of Manvini Bhavai."
In a way,this is the graduation of Upendra Trivedi,successful ac-tor,from the days he used to play varied roles such as Veer Mang-dawalo,Malavpati Munj,to Kalu,the famine-ravaged rustic from rural Gujarat.If he began with Veer Mangdawalo, a beautiful story of his-tory,in which a newly-married man goes out from the marriage pan-dal to save cows. He remembered,with visible signs of pain,how the literati in Gujarat used to scoff at his such roles in historical movies made on low budget in Gujarati in the 1970s and early 80s.They made him a household name in the villages,but did not earn him respect among the elite. "The literati",he recalled as if to comfort himseflf, " had found fault even with Zaverchand Meghani half a century ago,when the poet and writer had roamed all over Saurash-tra,collecting folk tales and songs.These had been the rich heritage of our people but the elite pooh-poohed it all.The same happened to me too."
But,this has been an education for Upendra Trivedi and has helped him in transformation from a popular screen figure into a producer ith some social insight and politician with some commitment. Born at Indore ,Madhya Pradesh,on July 14,1937,Upendra has seen many ups and downs. "For some time,we used to live at Ujjain and I did not even know much of Gujarati",he recalled.Then,he went to college in Mumbai,got a diploma in dramatics,studied Hindi,even as he pursued a career of acting on the stage. The exposure to the theatre gave him an abundant love for literature,an ability to put his finger on the popular pulse and courage to strive on and on. He remembered he had done an earlier picture in Gujarati just for a fat fee of Rs.500. Those were the days when one could be happy earning as little as Rs.125 a month.He got a break when he got a job as a producer on the All India Radio,but his first love,acting,made him gave it up."I was told I could not act at will if I was in the service.I chose not to be in service."
His search for the self had begun. One of Upendra's early works was a highly-successful play called Abhinay Samrat, a title that was soometimes applied to him in sniggering and derogatory reference.He played seven roles in the play,and yet the real identity of the heor was a mystery till the end; he was Radheshyam Maharaj,Haiderali Habib,Captain Rajesh Thakur,Rev.Johnny Walker,a tobacco trader from Talod,Pashabhai Patel. The story was that of a conman par excellence who could assume a different idenitity everytime he needed to cheat someone,and get away by pleading that "Hun te nathi (he was not that person)."
From "Hun te nathi",Upendra progressed to the silver screen,becoming the archetypal of Mangdawalo.But ,he has also made films like Zer To Pidhan Jani Jani,based on the literary work of the same name by Manubhai Pancholi,Darshak.He has some 125 films,and many plays,to his credit by now.He speaks almost regrtfully of the stunted growth of the Gujarati film industry; "It was beginning to blosom into its own after the inception of Gujarat as a separate state in 1960 and the formulation of a film policy later. But the video invasion,quickly followed by the satellite TV,aggression,dashed its hopes."
He said that despite this,it was his ambition to make a film version of Manvni Bhavai.He has directed the film,in addition to playing the main role,written the script,the dialogue and chosen the locations himself.While Upendra plays the role of Kalu,whose struggle against the drought and pining for his lost love for Raju are at the centre of the theme,Anuradha Patel plays the female lead role.Among others in the supporting cast are Chandrakant Pandya,Bhairavi Vyas,Anang Desai ,Kalpana Deewan and Ramesh Mehta.
The only fault some people have found in the film is a reference to the Narmada project at the end of the movie.While it is true that water is very important,and so is the Narmada project,the mention of the Narmada super-imposed thus,lends a touch of propaganda to the effort.
For a person who is a household name in countless village homes,Upendra is a very low profile person.He has an easy amia-bility, a presence and a good voice,but lacks the showbiz fizz.He had represented Bhiloda constituency in the backward Sabarkantha district for two terms,is very popular."I am not in politics for politick-ing", said Upendra,as if defending his place in it."I want to help the people; I am a people's artist and thought I could help them by working as their representative."He has an asset that may come handy in months ahead; he has a face that gets recognised by the crowds.
Shining Star of the Gujarati Cinema
Tushar Bhatt
His face averted from the rest of the workers,an old man was digging earth at the drought relief work.The general deportment in-dicated he must have been a man from a well-placed rural family that had fallen on bad days because of the failure of the monsoon,but that did not prevent him from working like a fury.
As his pick hit the land with gusto,he sang in Gujarati: "Khandaniya Ma Mathan Ram, Zinko Ram Zinko Ram, Dukale Pidhan Lohida Ram" ( We are like the grains being pounded in the mortar.O God, go on pounding us with as much force as you like in this famine which is sucking our blood.)
A visitor who was at the site to distribute buttermilk among the workers was overhearing it,as if petrified by the sorrow and pain the old man,as alsothousands and thousands like him,were suffer-ing,uncomplaining and yet with dignity facing miseries inflicted by the vagaries of the rain God.
"It sort of sent a flashlight through my head",said Upendra Trivedi,noted Gujarati thespian,whose depiction on the celluloid of the terrible famine in Gujarat nearly a hundred years ago,done on paper with great mastery by the late author Pannalal Patel,Manvini Bhavai,had bagged a silver lotus award for a regional film at the 41st national film festival.
Basically, Upendra is a show man in the genre of Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar. After a life time in films, he had a stint in politics and found out that the real life is far more complicated than the reel life. For some time now he has been in wilderness and was almost in the oblivion. Politicians, cricketers and denizens of the filmdom cannot afford to remain out of public limelight.Perhaps , Upendra Trivedi had perceived it to be a clear danger. His friends and well-wishers rallied round with a volume containing the actor’s own life statement and writings by others and released it on July 9, 2009 at Gandhinagar. Among those who were present was Morari Bapu, a noted Ramayan preacher. An exhibition of cartoons and caricatures on Upendra by Nirmish Thaker, whose cartoons appear in a number of publications, including Opinion was another hightlight of the programme. Nirmish said later his was the first solo exhibition of cartoons on a single actor.
Rahul Gandhi notwithstanding, aged people rule the political arena, but perpetual youth is expected of sport persons and show people.So it is difficult to make whether Upendra’s political career blooms once more or his screen life, his real life or his reel life! Whichever it is, it remains true that had he not done anything else but the film on Pannalal’s novel, Upendra Trivedi’s name would always deserve respect.
The novel,on which the film is based,itself had won laurels for Pannalal, eversince he wrote it in 1947,capping it with a Jnanpith award for 1985,given in 1986.The late poet Umashankar Joshi had hailed Pannalal as a writer no less than Shakespeare.Upendra Trivedi would compare him with Chekhov;others have drawn parallel between Pannalal and Maxim Gorky.Like Gorky,Pannalal had graduated from the university of life,portraying life around him pow-erfully, graphically and beautifully.Man was at the centre of the best produced by Pannalal,and yet it was no fanciful flight of imagination in individualism totally delinked from the society around him.In the struggles of ordinary people he portrayed,Pannnalal never came out as an escapist." Man ," he once said," is not evil as such.Hunger is.And a worse evil than poverty is begging."
Upendra Trivedi,who has been a leading light of the Gujarati silver screen and stage for years,had acquired film rights of Manvini Bhavai even before it got the Jnanpith award to Pannalal.The story,its social relevance,its pathos,its immediacy all appealed to him as something that would lend for a powerful movie.But,said Upendra Trivedi later," I could not clarify in my own mind as to what I wanted to do with the story. That day when I saw the old man on the drought relief work,heard his song,and later spoke to him to find out details of his life,it all clarified in an instant-- as if like a flash."
He said that almost every Gujarati who can read has either heard of or read Pannalal's Manvini Bhavai.What kind of treatment should be given to it in picturising it was the million rupee question that had been exercising his thought-process. "When I saw the old man and his dignified struggle,learnt of the fact that although he had a rich son in law,he was loathe asking for help,that during lunch time,he would go running home to look up his cattle,all touched my heart,and gave me a cinema idiom,so to say."
He could as if fathom the suffering of the old man at the relief work,and strove to transform that suffering in filming Manvini Bha-vai."It was not a story of Kalu and Raju,or of any of the characters portrayed in the novel only. It was during a famine that most of the established demarcations of behaviour disappear.Famliy ties became strenuous; man and animal both would be compelled to drink dirty water from the same source.It was a timeless tale of the rural folks pitted against hard times, the story of a drought, a famine,whether it is is in Bhiloda,my constituency,north Gujarat,Saurashtra or Kutch,or entire Gujarat.It transcended boundaries; it could be the tale of farmers in Somalia or Ethiopia."
"Time is the hero,the nature its leading lady,and the famine the villain. Man's battle against the drought,the shortage of food and water,the miseries all around are enough to defeat him,crush his spirit.But man,fights on,often on the strength of fragile threads of non-existent hope.I made the film on this concept",Upendra Trivedi said."I realised how magnificent this epic struggle of human beings against the vagaries of nature has been.I have tried to celebrate it,eulogise his fighting spirit,pay tribute to his ingenuity. Look at Kalu,one shower of rain and he revives as if Shiv has returned with the Ganga in his hairlock." He also felt that a paucity of water -- for drinking,for farming, for animals-- was at the root of most of his miseries. "Water is life."
In filming the novel, Upendra made a few changes ; " I have dropped a few charaacters,added some,added some descriptive scenes to make it all the more focused. For instance, to drive home the real face of the famine of the 1890,which Pannalal wrote about in the book,I have added a pre-drought scene of charming rural scenery.But I have remained faithful to the basic purpose of Manvini Bhavai."
In a way,this is the graduation of Upendra Trivedi,successful ac-tor,from the days he used to play varied roles such as Veer Mang-dawalo,Malavpati Munj,to Kalu,the famine-ravaged rustic from rural Gujarat.If he began with Veer Mangdawalo, a beautiful story of his-tory,in which a newly-married man goes out from the marriage pan-dal to save cows. He remembered,with visible signs of pain,how the literati in Gujarat used to scoff at his such roles in historical movies made on low budget in Gujarati in the 1970s and early 80s.They made him a household name in the villages,but did not earn him respect among the elite. "The literati",he recalled as if to comfort himseflf, " had found fault even with Zaverchand Meghani half a century ago,when the poet and writer had roamed all over Saurash-tra,collecting folk tales and songs.These had been the rich heritage of our people but the elite pooh-poohed it all.The same happened to me too."
But,this has been an education for Upendra Trivedi and has helped him in transformation from a popular screen figure into a producer ith some social insight and politician with some commitment. Born at Indore ,Madhya Pradesh,on July 14,1937,Upendra has seen many ups and downs. "For some time,we used to live at Ujjain and I did not even know much of Gujarati",he recalled.Then,he went to college in Mumbai,got a diploma in dramatics,studied Hindi,even as he pursued a career of acting on the stage. The exposure to the theatre gave him an abundant love for literature,an ability to put his finger on the popular pulse and courage to strive on and on. He remembered he had done an earlier picture in Gujarati just for a fat fee of Rs.500. Those were the days when one could be happy earning as little as Rs.125 a month.He got a break when he got a job as a producer on the All India Radio,but his first love,acting,made him gave it up."I was told I could not act at will if I was in the service.I chose not to be in service."
His search for the self had begun. One of Upendra's early works was a highly-successful play called Abhinay Samrat, a title that was soometimes applied to him in sniggering and derogatory reference.He played seven roles in the play,and yet the real identity of the heor was a mystery till the end; he was Radheshyam Maharaj,Haiderali Habib,Captain Rajesh Thakur,Rev.Johnny Walker,a tobacco trader from Talod,Pashabhai Patel. The story was that of a conman par excellence who could assume a different idenitity everytime he needed to cheat someone,and get away by pleading that "Hun te nathi (he was not that person)."
From "Hun te nathi",Upendra progressed to the silver screen,becoming the archetypal of Mangdawalo.But ,he has also made films like Zer To Pidhan Jani Jani,based on the literary work of the same name by Manubhai Pancholi,Darshak.He has some 125 films,and many plays,to his credit by now.He speaks almost regrtfully of the stunted growth of the Gujarati film industry; "It was beginning to blosom into its own after the inception of Gujarat as a separate state in 1960 and the formulation of a film policy later. But the video invasion,quickly followed by the satellite TV,aggression,dashed its hopes."
He said that despite this,it was his ambition to make a film version of Manvni Bhavai.He has directed the film,in addition to playing the main role,written the script,the dialogue and chosen the locations himself.While Upendra plays the role of Kalu,whose struggle against the drought and pining for his lost love for Raju are at the centre of the theme,Anuradha Patel plays the female lead role.Among others in the supporting cast are Chandrakant Pandya,Bhairavi Vyas,Anang Desai ,Kalpana Deewan and Ramesh Mehta.
The only fault some people have found in the film is a reference to the Narmada project at the end of the movie.While it is true that water is very important,and so is the Narmada project,the mention of the Narmada super-imposed thus,lends a touch of propaganda to the effort.
For a person who is a household name in countless village homes,Upendra is a very low profile person.He has an easy amia-bility, a presence and a good voice,but lacks the showbiz fizz.He had represented Bhiloda constituency in the backward Sabarkantha district for two terms,is very popular."I am not in politics for politick-ing", said Upendra,as if defending his place in it."I want to help the people; I am a people's artist and thought I could help them by working as their representative."He has an asset that may come handy in months ahead; he has a face that gets recognised by the crowds.
A prodigal who will never return; Adil Mansuri
By Tushar Bhatt
He had been a rebel,but did not look to be one even an inch.In his younger days,he had heaped ridicule on anybody and every-body connected with the literary establishment.But his mellifluent talking,carried on in a low key voice, did not betray an iota of the fire that remained buried,and yet smouldering in the depths of his heart.
Poet and playwright Adil Mansuri, even in his 60s,remained as enigmatic as ever.It did not matter if he had been living for many years as an NRI (Non-resident Indian).
On a brief visit to Ahmedabad ,which he adored for all its dust,its dirt and discomforts,Adil never came across as a man who went away to the El Dorado of all Gujaratis,the United States of America.
He had ,in spirit,always been here,and Gujarat and Gujarati lit-erature had always dwelled his mind.It is as if,he was on a leave of absence; he had never gone away, cannot go away,and will not go away even on the day of salvation.
Time,meanwhile,had been whitewashing his beard,his hair,making him even more look like a Gujarati Ghalib.He himself was not unaware of the comparison;years ago he wrote some lines about it:
Apna Ghar bhi Milata Jhulta hai Ghalib ke ghar se,
Do ghanta barasat jo barse, chhe ghanta chhat barse.
As he walked in,there was nothing NRI-ish about Adil.Clad in sherwani,zabbha and a jacket,he appeared exactly the way he dressed when he was working in an advertising firm in Ahmeda-bad.He smiled easily,chatted amiably and spoke effortlessly about life abroad.
Said Adil:"I went to the U.S.A. a little late. I was already 48 when I left India.The prime thought behind the move was to ensure a bet-ter life for my children, especially my three daughters. I did not want them to have a life of domestic drudgery,without exercising any personal choice in their lifestyle,something that I had no oppor-tunity to get when I was young."
It was a difficult choice because for a quarter century Adil had taken deep roots in Ahmedabad and Gujarat,and suddenly he was transplanting his life in an alien environment. "In the beginning it was very tough.My writing came to an almost full stop. Nobody knew me there and I did not know anyone. I had to do odd jobs in the initial stages before I landed a good job at an insurance firm.You see, in a way, I was not equipped for the demands of the life there. I had in Ahmedabad my friends, my poetry,mushairas,the familiar situation all around,the bitter-sweetness of a culturally sat-isfying life which was otherwise not very satisfying for my children's future. So, I took an adventurous decision to go to the U.S.A. I am satisfied that things have panned out all right. My two daughters are happily married and settled there.My literary output has also been increasing.”
After a blockage of some time, Adil began to write in magazines brought out by Gujaratis in America and Europe. He wrote ghazals and plays about his American experience."In the course of time, my literary output really went up. I must have written some 60 po-ems in 60 days once.” A collection of his work abroad was in the pipeline,expected to be published in two or three months,called New York Name Ek Gaam(A village called New York). He said dur-ing a visit when we met
Adil warmly spoke of a tiny organisation of Gujarati-speaking people with a literary bent of mind,named 60 Din (Sixty Days). We are about 25 couples, who meet once every two months to ex-change notes, read new writings by members together,to enjoy and make merry."
The only change visible in him was the addition of countless thank yous to his courteous mannerism. He will thank you for tele-phoning him, for inviting him, for offering him a chair,a cup of tea,a handshake,anything.
It was so much of politeness,of exaggerated formality,that after a while one began to wonder if it should be Adil who should thanking us. Or should it we who should thank him for remembering home, for returning ever so briefly,for continuing to pen poetry in Gujarati even as he battled with the key-board of a computer at an Ameri-can firm in New York.
In his long literary journey Adil had written a lot of ghazals,but can now that those creations left unpublished would be brought out as a tribute to his memory. Five publications to his credit—earlier --Wank,Pagrav and Satat,all collections of poetry,and two collections of plays, had stamped Gujarati literary register with his name force-fully.
Born on May 18, 1936,in Ahmedabad Adil came from a family of traders of Ahmedabad.Dr Chinu Modi,another rebel in Gujarati lit-erature,who prodded Adil to write in Gujarati,remembered that the poet,then writing mainly in Urdu, had first come in his contact nearly half-a-century ago."I think he was working in a cloth shop at that time,but later shifted to advertising."
Adil was a self-made man; he had mastered computers later, but at one point of time,his friends recalled,he used to describe his edu-cational background as something more than an M.A. -- M.A.B.F.,an arbitrary abbreviation of Matric Appeared But Failed. That was not strrictly true,but Adil just did not care about append-ages to establish his own credentials as a man of letters,or even as a human being.
Said Dr Modi:"Adil read a lot,not just in Gujarati or Urdu,but also in English.He wrote spontaneously and exceedingly well,a man capable of expressing his feelings in the most appropriate words and a man who was able to feel intensely." In fact, he seemed to have written only when he felt intensely about something.
Add to that intensity,an endless,never-to-be-satiated curiosity about everything around him,most of all people.This led him to a very successful career as an advertising copy writing in Guja-rati.Many remember Adil as a copy writer at a national advertising agency located in Ahmedabad some three decades ago.For years,the custom at such agencies had been to translate into Guja-rati advertising copy created originally in English or Hindi.Adil changed the rules.Remembered a friend:"His original copy in Guja-rati used to be so good that often copy writers in English would be asked to take a look at it and translate it into English,if possible."
But,it was as a poet that the rebelliousness of Adil,along with Dr Modi and Manhar Modi,earned him a reputation-- some would say a dubious reputation.The trio was all for experimentation,a lot of which they did in company of Labhsankar Thaker,another noted poet.They scoffed at the literati of the day,campaigned against them,and started an organisation,and a magazine,called "Re Math”,whose address deliberately,with the intent of causing out-rage,carried the mention it was situated opposite a public uri-nal.What did it mean,nobody knows for sure.Even the English spelling of the now-defunct set-up is unsual.According to Dr Chinu Modi, Re was spelt in English as Zreyagh.It did a lot of good to the development of literature in Gujarati;to begin with,by declaring that the only rule worth following was that there was no rule worth fol-lowing.They would heap ridicule on the leading literary figures of the day,resort to pranks and gimmicks,and made themselves and their work taken notice of.
Though the mists of time have covered many things,Adil re-membered vividly those days,which again revealed the complexity of his personality. In literature,he had been known as a rebel,a man who did a lot of experiments of form in penning his output, a sort of iconoclast.But that appeared to be only one facet of his personality as was underlined by his career in copy writing; in advertising one needs to abide by what the client wants and still add flashes of imagination and colour of concept to make it all attractive to look at and read.Adil did that effortlessly,his literary image of a rebel not-withstanding.And what was more, he did not seem to consider his days in advertising as a by-product of the necessity to make a liv-ing.As he talked fondly about "those days", Adil spoke of warmly colleagues such as Sharad Suchde, who died later.
Dr.Modi said that Adil had always been a complex personality; a rebel in letters,a traditionalist in person.There was no frenzy in his dissent;there was fire."He was like an ocean,outwardly so calm and yet running so deep.He was like a dormant volcano.He wore a shy smile,spok in a sweet manner,was meticulously dressed,and was polite to the limit of making others feel uneasy."
Adil once described himself succinctly in one of his ghazals thus:" dharm,dhandho,janm ne jati:Ghazal"(By relig-ion,profession,birth and community,he is of ghazal).About his po-etry,said Dr.Modi, one could easily do a doctoral thesis."If you do not submit the thesis for a Ph.D. any university would bestow an honorary D.Lit.on you for the work.Such is the sweep,depth and appeal of his poetry." His language could be deceptively sim-ple,and still full of depth, a depth that can be perceived by readers easily.He had done ghazals in the traditional style, and then had-broken the mould and ventured out in different directions."Before going against the traditions, Adil mastered the naunces of the tradi-tions,tried his hand, and when found them inadequate to be his proper vehicle,struck out in newer areas",Dr.Modi said.
About ghazal,he sang:
Jyare pranayni jagman sharuat thai hashe,
Tyare pratham ghazalni rajuat thai hashe.
When love first made its appearance in the world,the first ghazal was presented.
And,then, he could switch easily to modern ways:
Ena patanne billina kudakaman joine,
Maro vikas thay chhe sherina shwanman.
Seeing his downfall in the cat's jump,my own growth takes the form of the street dog.
Or, he could cry out thus:
Makanoman loko purai gaya chhe,
ke manasne manasno dar hoy jane.
People have shut themselves up in houses, as if man was afraid of man.
The same Adil could be sentimental about his city,Ahmedabad.He himself had rated his piece on the city as the one liked the best.Why? "I find that it creates echoes in the heart of the readers and listeners exactly in the same way as it did in mine when it was first created", said Adil.
Wherever,away from home, it has been rendered,it has been known to bring tears to innumerable eyes.Reflecting the yearning of a man going away from his home town, Adil said in the piece:
Nadini retman ramatun nagar male na male,
fari aa drashya smrutipat upar male na male.
Bhari lo shwasman eni sugandhno dariyo,
pachhi aa matini bhini asar male na male.
Parichitone dharaine joi leva do,
aa hasta chehra,aa mithi najar male na male.
Bhari lo aankhman rastao,baario,bhinto,
pachhi aa shaher,aa galio,aa ghar male na male.
Radi lo aaj sambadhone vintalai ahin,
pachhi koi ne koini kabar male na male.
Valava aavya chhe e chehara farashe aankhoman,
bhale safarman koi hamsafar male na male.
Vatanni dhulthi mathun bhari laun Adil,
Arey aa dhul pachhi umrabhar male na male.
[ Maybe this city,playing in the sands,will not be seen again by these eyes,
Fill the nostrils with the ocean of its smells,maybe it will not be available to smell again.
Drink in the sights of the acquaintances to the content of the heart,maybe these smiling face will not be seen again.
Fill the eyes with the images of these roads,these win-dows,these walls,maybe this city, these bylanes,this house may not be available again.
Cry,embracing the kins of the place,maybe some one or other's even grave will not be seen again.
Faces saying goodbye will live for ever in the eyes as perma-ment companions, maybe in the life's journey hereafter not even one companion will be there.
Adil, put the dust of the city on the head,maybe this dust will not grace the hair in this lifetime again.]
Although successful in America too,Adil yearned to be back home again. "I had gone for the good of my children.I will come back once that objective is accomplished." Already,he had decided that he should come to Ahmedabad more often.If in the past ten years he came twice only,he now planned to come for four months every two years."Those will be the months when I will spend time nursing my roots, deriving sustenance for myself,enhancing my joy of living.My roots are here."
The experience in every brief sojourn had been invigorating for Adil. He would go to a gathering of poets and recite some of his latest. The crowd would be so happy with what he had to say that the programme which began at 10.30 p m may end around 3.30 a m."People just would not leave",recalled Dr Modi.Adil found that there now was better appreciation of arts and culture,and men and women of letters in Gujarat than was there earlier. He found Guja-rat more prosperous,but also more crowded,and with apalling pub-lic health conditions.But,more important than everything else,he found that Ahmedabad and Gujarat responded to him,and he re-sponded to them magnificently.No one is more welcome anywhere in the world than in his own home,and even if one has been a prodigal son.
This son was not a prodigal in with bagful of grievance.He was so intense sentimental that he would treat stay elsewhere as tem-porary. Adil’s birthday slipped by unnoticed in his beloved city on May 18.Not many remembered this literary badshah who wanted as his crown nothing but the dust of Ahmedabad. No city can hope for a better tribute. But then, Adil was Adil was Adil.
On the day of kyamat, the city will owe him much and he will owe nothing. Yet, charactistically he will offer to pay up on behalf of his beloved Ahmedabad.
(END)
By Tushar Bhatt
He had been a rebel,but did not look to be one even an inch.In his younger days,he had heaped ridicule on anybody and every-body connected with the literary establishment.But his mellifluent talking,carried on in a low key voice, did not betray an iota of the fire that remained buried,and yet smouldering in the depths of his heart.
Poet and playwright Adil Mansuri, even in his 60s,remained as enigmatic as ever.It did not matter if he had been living for many years as an NRI (Non-resident Indian).
On a brief visit to Ahmedabad ,which he adored for all its dust,its dirt and discomforts,Adil never came across as a man who went away to the El Dorado of all Gujaratis,the United States of America.
He had ,in spirit,always been here,and Gujarat and Gujarati lit-erature had always dwelled his mind.It is as if,he was on a leave of absence; he had never gone away, cannot go away,and will not go away even on the day of salvation.
Time,meanwhile,had been whitewashing his beard,his hair,making him even more look like a Gujarati Ghalib.He himself was not unaware of the comparison;years ago he wrote some lines about it:
Apna Ghar bhi Milata Jhulta hai Ghalib ke ghar se,
Do ghanta barasat jo barse, chhe ghanta chhat barse.
As he walked in,there was nothing NRI-ish about Adil.Clad in sherwani,zabbha and a jacket,he appeared exactly the way he dressed when he was working in an advertising firm in Ahmeda-bad.He smiled easily,chatted amiably and spoke effortlessly about life abroad.
Said Adil:"I went to the U.S.A. a little late. I was already 48 when I left India.The prime thought behind the move was to ensure a bet-ter life for my children, especially my three daughters. I did not want them to have a life of domestic drudgery,without exercising any personal choice in their lifestyle,something that I had no oppor-tunity to get when I was young."
It was a difficult choice because for a quarter century Adil had taken deep roots in Ahmedabad and Gujarat,and suddenly he was transplanting his life in an alien environment. "In the beginning it was very tough.My writing came to an almost full stop. Nobody knew me there and I did not know anyone. I had to do odd jobs in the initial stages before I landed a good job at an insurance firm.You see, in a way, I was not equipped for the demands of the life there. I had in Ahmedabad my friends, my poetry,mushairas,the familiar situation all around,the bitter-sweetness of a culturally sat-isfying life which was otherwise not very satisfying for my children's future. So, I took an adventurous decision to go to the U.S.A. I am satisfied that things have panned out all right. My two daughters are happily married and settled there.My literary output has also been increasing.”
After a blockage of some time, Adil began to write in magazines brought out by Gujaratis in America and Europe. He wrote ghazals and plays about his American experience."In the course of time, my literary output really went up. I must have written some 60 po-ems in 60 days once.” A collection of his work abroad was in the pipeline,expected to be published in two or three months,called New York Name Ek Gaam(A village called New York). He said dur-ing a visit when we met
Adil warmly spoke of a tiny organisation of Gujarati-speaking people with a literary bent of mind,named 60 Din (Sixty Days). We are about 25 couples, who meet once every two months to ex-change notes, read new writings by members together,to enjoy and make merry."
The only change visible in him was the addition of countless thank yous to his courteous mannerism. He will thank you for tele-phoning him, for inviting him, for offering him a chair,a cup of tea,a handshake,anything.
It was so much of politeness,of exaggerated formality,that after a while one began to wonder if it should be Adil who should thanking us. Or should it we who should thank him for remembering home, for returning ever so briefly,for continuing to pen poetry in Gujarati even as he battled with the key-board of a computer at an Ameri-can firm in New York.
In his long literary journey Adil had written a lot of ghazals,but can now that those creations left unpublished would be brought out as a tribute to his memory. Five publications to his credit—earlier --Wank,Pagrav and Satat,all collections of poetry,and two collections of plays, had stamped Gujarati literary register with his name force-fully.
Born on May 18, 1936,in Ahmedabad Adil came from a family of traders of Ahmedabad.Dr Chinu Modi,another rebel in Gujarati lit-erature,who prodded Adil to write in Gujarati,remembered that the poet,then writing mainly in Urdu, had first come in his contact nearly half-a-century ago."I think he was working in a cloth shop at that time,but later shifted to advertising."
Adil was a self-made man; he had mastered computers later, but at one point of time,his friends recalled,he used to describe his edu-cational background as something more than an M.A. -- M.A.B.F.,an arbitrary abbreviation of Matric Appeared But Failed. That was not strrictly true,but Adil just did not care about append-ages to establish his own credentials as a man of letters,or even as a human being.
Said Dr Modi:"Adil read a lot,not just in Gujarati or Urdu,but also in English.He wrote spontaneously and exceedingly well,a man capable of expressing his feelings in the most appropriate words and a man who was able to feel intensely." In fact, he seemed to have written only when he felt intensely about something.
Add to that intensity,an endless,never-to-be-satiated curiosity about everything around him,most of all people.This led him to a very successful career as an advertising copy writing in Guja-rati.Many remember Adil as a copy writer at a national advertising agency located in Ahmedabad some three decades ago.For years,the custom at such agencies had been to translate into Guja-rati advertising copy created originally in English or Hindi.Adil changed the rules.Remembered a friend:"His original copy in Guja-rati used to be so good that often copy writers in English would be asked to take a look at it and translate it into English,if possible."
But,it was as a poet that the rebelliousness of Adil,along with Dr Modi and Manhar Modi,earned him a reputation-- some would say a dubious reputation.The trio was all for experimentation,a lot of which they did in company of Labhsankar Thaker,another noted poet.They scoffed at the literati of the day,campaigned against them,and started an organisation,and a magazine,called "Re Math”,whose address deliberately,with the intent of causing out-rage,carried the mention it was situated opposite a public uri-nal.What did it mean,nobody knows for sure.Even the English spelling of the now-defunct set-up is unsual.According to Dr Chinu Modi, Re was spelt in English as Zreyagh.It did a lot of good to the development of literature in Gujarati;to begin with,by declaring that the only rule worth following was that there was no rule worth fol-lowing.They would heap ridicule on the leading literary figures of the day,resort to pranks and gimmicks,and made themselves and their work taken notice of.
Though the mists of time have covered many things,Adil re-membered vividly those days,which again revealed the complexity of his personality. In literature,he had been known as a rebel,a man who did a lot of experiments of form in penning his output, a sort of iconoclast.But that appeared to be only one facet of his personality as was underlined by his career in copy writing; in advertising one needs to abide by what the client wants and still add flashes of imagination and colour of concept to make it all attractive to look at and read.Adil did that effortlessly,his literary image of a rebel not-withstanding.And what was more, he did not seem to consider his days in advertising as a by-product of the necessity to make a liv-ing.As he talked fondly about "those days", Adil spoke of warmly colleagues such as Sharad Suchde, who died later.
Dr.Modi said that Adil had always been a complex personality; a rebel in letters,a traditionalist in person.There was no frenzy in his dissent;there was fire."He was like an ocean,outwardly so calm and yet running so deep.He was like a dormant volcano.He wore a shy smile,spok in a sweet manner,was meticulously dressed,and was polite to the limit of making others feel uneasy."
Adil once described himself succinctly in one of his ghazals thus:" dharm,dhandho,janm ne jati:Ghazal"(By relig-ion,profession,birth and community,he is of ghazal).About his po-etry,said Dr.Modi, one could easily do a doctoral thesis."If you do not submit the thesis for a Ph.D. any university would bestow an honorary D.Lit.on you for the work.Such is the sweep,depth and appeal of his poetry." His language could be deceptively sim-ple,and still full of depth, a depth that can be perceived by readers easily.He had done ghazals in the traditional style, and then had-broken the mould and ventured out in different directions."Before going against the traditions, Adil mastered the naunces of the tradi-tions,tried his hand, and when found them inadequate to be his proper vehicle,struck out in newer areas",Dr.Modi said.
About ghazal,he sang:
Jyare pranayni jagman sharuat thai hashe,
Tyare pratham ghazalni rajuat thai hashe.
When love first made its appearance in the world,the first ghazal was presented.
And,then, he could switch easily to modern ways:
Ena patanne billina kudakaman joine,
Maro vikas thay chhe sherina shwanman.
Seeing his downfall in the cat's jump,my own growth takes the form of the street dog.
Or, he could cry out thus:
Makanoman loko purai gaya chhe,
ke manasne manasno dar hoy jane.
People have shut themselves up in houses, as if man was afraid of man.
The same Adil could be sentimental about his city,Ahmedabad.He himself had rated his piece on the city as the one liked the best.Why? "I find that it creates echoes in the heart of the readers and listeners exactly in the same way as it did in mine when it was first created", said Adil.
Wherever,away from home, it has been rendered,it has been known to bring tears to innumerable eyes.Reflecting the yearning of a man going away from his home town, Adil said in the piece:
Nadini retman ramatun nagar male na male,
fari aa drashya smrutipat upar male na male.
Bhari lo shwasman eni sugandhno dariyo,
pachhi aa matini bhini asar male na male.
Parichitone dharaine joi leva do,
aa hasta chehra,aa mithi najar male na male.
Bhari lo aankhman rastao,baario,bhinto,
pachhi aa shaher,aa galio,aa ghar male na male.
Radi lo aaj sambadhone vintalai ahin,
pachhi koi ne koini kabar male na male.
Valava aavya chhe e chehara farashe aankhoman,
bhale safarman koi hamsafar male na male.
Vatanni dhulthi mathun bhari laun Adil,
Arey aa dhul pachhi umrabhar male na male.
[ Maybe this city,playing in the sands,will not be seen again by these eyes,
Fill the nostrils with the ocean of its smells,maybe it will not be available to smell again.
Drink in the sights of the acquaintances to the content of the heart,maybe these smiling face will not be seen again.
Fill the eyes with the images of these roads,these win-dows,these walls,maybe this city, these bylanes,this house may not be available again.
Cry,embracing the kins of the place,maybe some one or other's even grave will not be seen again.
Faces saying goodbye will live for ever in the eyes as perma-ment companions, maybe in the life's journey hereafter not even one companion will be there.
Adil, put the dust of the city on the head,maybe this dust will not grace the hair in this lifetime again.]
Although successful in America too,Adil yearned to be back home again. "I had gone for the good of my children.I will come back once that objective is accomplished." Already,he had decided that he should come to Ahmedabad more often.If in the past ten years he came twice only,he now planned to come for four months every two years."Those will be the months when I will spend time nursing my roots, deriving sustenance for myself,enhancing my joy of living.My roots are here."
The experience in every brief sojourn had been invigorating for Adil. He would go to a gathering of poets and recite some of his latest. The crowd would be so happy with what he had to say that the programme which began at 10.30 p m may end around 3.30 a m."People just would not leave",recalled Dr Modi.Adil found that there now was better appreciation of arts and culture,and men and women of letters in Gujarat than was there earlier. He found Guja-rat more prosperous,but also more crowded,and with apalling pub-lic health conditions.But,more important than everything else,he found that Ahmedabad and Gujarat responded to him,and he re-sponded to them magnificently.No one is more welcome anywhere in the world than in his own home,and even if one has been a prodigal son.
This son was not a prodigal in with bagful of grievance.He was so intense sentimental that he would treat stay elsewhere as tem-porary. Adil’s birthday slipped by unnoticed in his beloved city on May 18.Not many remembered this literary badshah who wanted as his crown nothing but the dust of Ahmedabad. No city can hope for a better tribute. But then, Adil was Adil was Adil.
On the day of kyamat, the city will owe him much and he will owe nothing. Yet, charactistically he will offer to pay up on behalf of his beloved Ahmedabad.
(END)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Tusharsworld
AddThis
