THE EXTRA MILE

IN MUZAFFAR ALI'S MEMOIR, WE SEE THE SUM OF HIS MANY CREATIVE PURSUITS

- Suhani Singh

Muzaffar Ali is a man of many arts. He paints, makes films and runs a fashion house. He also stages music and dance shows and is an aficionado of Urdu poetry. “Everything is connected,” he says. “If you don’t know poetry, you won’t know music. If you don’t know either, you don’t know dance. And if you don’t know body language, you won’t know the moving image.” Now, with Zikr: In the Light & Shade of Time, he wears another hat—that of an author. Perhaps best known for his film Umrao Jaan (1981), Ali made use of Covid-19 restrictions to pen the story of his life. Entrenched in Awadh’s Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, Ali’s days have, in a sense, brimmed with creative journeys, but the polymath is not in the habit of imparting words of wisdom.

“Like many other things I write about here, I don’t recommend that anyone do this,” he writes. Instead, he lets poets be the experts, the voices of both beauty and intellect. By quoting them seamlessly, Ali makes his case for a more “poetry-driven” country. Be it Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of his biggest inspirations, or Shahryar, his most frequent collaborator, the book makes one appreciate often unread verse. “These poets made me who I am,” he says. “They were, at different points of time, a part of my being, and in different times, have explained life to me.”