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The wordsmith
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Javed Siddiqi on why writers need to be invisible
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write stuff Javed Siddiqi
A film or a play where the writer is visible can be disastrous,” says theatre and film writer Javed Siddiqi. “The writer should remain submerged, allowing the script and the character to do the talking. In all these years, I haven’t written my own dialogues. I’ve written to suit the diktats of the script and the characters. The dialogues of ‘Umrao Jaan’ reflect the language used in Lucknow in the 19th century, ‘Soni Mahiwal’ had a liberal sprinkling of Punjabi and ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’ spoke the language of contemporary youth. Know your words, for they are alive,” he explains.
Siddiqi says, “I thought what the world would be like without words. Perhaps the world would be beautiful. Raj Thackeray, whose complaint is about people like me who cannot speak Marathi, would perhaps be happy if we didn’t speak at all.”
Having studied Urdu and worked as a journalist in the 70s, he recollects his transition into theatre and cinema.
“During Emergency, one couldn’t write the truth. So I shifted to films where I could write everything else but the truth.” His first film as a dialogue writer was Satyajit Ray’s “Shatranj Ke Khilari”. “I remember Ray telling me to use words only when the pictures stop speaking. In cinema, you need not describe what the audience can see on screen. It is a visual medium. So I’ve kept my usage of words to the minimum. In fact, director Subhash Ghai accuses me of being miserly with words,” laughs Siddiqi. He also ascertained how the actor becomes the vital medium to communicate the writer’s message to the audience.
Theatre, he feels, allows the viewers to interpret and reinterpret the play over time. “Once a movie or a book is written, you cannot change anything about it. Whereas, in theatre, there is scope for improvisation and reinterpretation,” he says. Of his “Tumhari Amrita,” which is an adaptation of A. R. Gurney’s “Love Letters” Siddiqi says: “We had a format and a play before us that was timeless.
It was a challenging task, since we had to engage the audience with just two actors.”
SANGEETHA DEVI DUNDOO
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