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Politics with a poetic vision
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FACE-TO-FACE Saeed Mirza says that a blend of Sufism and Socialism helps him navigate the world
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Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
War of Words Saeed Mirza
Sufi fables, childhood memories, love story, history, politics, dialogues, monologues and a short film script which the reader “may choose to read, or not to read”. Saeed Mirza’s book Ammi, Letter to a Democratic Mother packs in all this and more. The publisher chooses to call it a novel, but categories don’t matter to Mirza. He would rather describe it as “miniatures set in a mural” where Samuel Huntington and Mullah Nazaruddeen reside on neighbouring pages. With this book, the maker of the memorable serial Nukkad in the early days of television and path-breaking films such as Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai and Saleem Langde Pe Mat Ro makes a shift in medium. He will not make any more films after finishing the one he is currently working on for Rajat Kapoor. He has abandoned his plans of making a film on Kashmir because “too much blood has been spilt there from all sides and it is impossible to enter that space without feeling like a vulture.”
Even as he has moved from visual images to the written word, Mirza remains as deeply political as ever in his concerns. The book comes as a response to the events after 9/11 when people began to use words like “democracy” and “terrorism” without knowing what they mean. He shows how people like his mother lived by the values of liberal democracy without using catchphrases as crutches. But interestingly, much like in his later film Naseem, the tone of the book is not of fiery anger but of quiet indignation.
MetroPlus spoke to Mirza about his book:
Why this choice of form that seems beyond categorisation?
Is it a novel, an anti-novel, a memoir, a scrap book? I don’t know. But to be able to construct something like this is incredibly satisfying because it’s free. You can meander, take off on journeys, play with the form and include history, love story, travelogue, polemic… That’s the way I see life, not as one straight line. It also gives the reader the space to agree or disagree with me. In other words it’s a democratic book!
You call yourself a Sufi-leftist.
I believe that through Sufism comes poetry and a poetic vision of the world. I think Marxism has lost poetry and we need to get it back. The socialist idea was born in the East. The Bhuddha, Jesus Christ, Prophet Mohammed were all in a sense Socialists because they were reaching out. So were the Bhakti movement and the Sufi tradition which were so inclusive. People often tell me: “Saaed get real.” But what is the real? George Bush is real, Bin Laden is real, fascism is real. It takes the life of people. How do I deal with that? That’s why Sufism. It breaks away. It is about you, your relationship with God, the other human beings and the universe. You can’t let demagogues take over. Very few people with very huge agendas are running this world.
Who would you say runs the world of cinema and television now? We are told that multiplexes allow more experimentation, but there are no films like Albert Pinto..
Television is no longer what only the rich can afford, and yet there is no space for anything like Nukkad that looked at the underbelly of a metropolis. There is no space because it is not determined by the people but sponsors. Look at the images of Nukkad. What kind of product can you sell with them? Images have to be aspirational and not downmarket.
As someone famously put it, on television people never get what they like, but get to like what they get. In films too only a select few are called experimental. Bheja fry and Mixed Doubles are allowed. But those by young film-makes made on shoe-string budget like Missed Call or Cape Karma never get seen. I would say the space has not enlarged too much at all.
BAGESHREE S.
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