Art may come out as a reaction to hatred but not out of fear: Muzaffar Ali

At House of Kotwara, filmmaker, poet, painter and fashion designer Muzaffar Ali’s home located just off Gurgaon-Faridabad Highway, folk singer Malini Awasthi is perched on a vivid auburn Mughal carpet alongside her accompanying musicians. She is crooning a ghazal Bedam Shah Warsi – Parde uthe huye hain, unki idhar nazar hai – a piece not usual for her Awadhi and Bhojpuri folk concerts wherein, sometimes, in all the excitement, a lot of the soul gets lost. But in Ali’s ink-blue living room, with almost every wall adorned a mammoth oil on canvas and books on art in every nook and cranny, Awasthi sounds like a sovereign arte – the world of Sufi folk slowly finding home with her as she brings out the melody paired with poetry of the times gone .

Ali stops her, “Parde uthe huye ‘bhi’ hain,” he says, stressing on the addition of the syllable. The slight but significant change in meaning is palpable in the room. Awasthi notes it down in her diary and says, “I still remember, years ago I was sitting with Muzaffar saab in his Lucknow home and we were composing this piece, when he said, it needs to be sung like a recitation and not like a song. I have not forgotten that,” says Awasthi.
This is a rehearsal session for Ali’s two-decade old brainchild – Jahan-e-Khusrau – a festival devoted to Amir Khusrau – the father of Sufi poetry and music. The venue where it began and continued for many years – Arab Ki Sarai – has been the backdrop for it for most of the time. Incidentally, it’s here that Khusrau began the qawwali tradition in the 13th century.
After a break of two years due to the pandemic, Jahan-e-Khusrau has returned this year. But the venue has been shifted from Humayun’s Tomb ‘monuments’ to Tijara Fort Palace, a property restored and maintained the Neemrana Group about two hours away from the Capital. The three-day ongoing cultural retreat ends on Sunday.
“I always have to do it with the state government because of the logics. Private people are not going to support this kind of festival. They can make you compromise and we can’t do that. Till Delhi government warms up to the idea, and I haven’t spoken to them yet, I thought of trying the idea of a cultural retreat this time,” says Ali, who adds that another issue is that the moment they leave the venue, like they have for the last couple of years, “wo jagah ekdum veeran ho jaati hai (the space becomes desolate and deserted)”.
Ali visited Arab ki Sarai three-four months ago and saw a lot of tall trees that had come up in the last couple of years. “I was very durbed. The trees finish the venue in a way and one can’t just cut them off. So either the trees grow up and one sees through them when the time comes,” he says.
When Ali picked Arab ki Sarai as the venue for the first time in 2001, “it was just a thoroughfare” with a urinal and people crossing it to go to the other side of the road from Nizamuddin Railway Station. “It’s an impractical place, but also the rightful place for it, so we have done it there, even though the cost of building and designing the stage is very high. You literally have to create an auditorium,” says Ali. The other reason for the shift was to try and make Sufi music and poetry a more immersive experience. “In these times, this works better – with a combination of music, poetry, Sufi thought, curated food and being in the space for just this for about three days,” says Ali.

The world of Sufi folk that Awasthi is touching upon is especially close to Ali. “Shah Turab Ali, Shah Ali, Shah Niaz Shah Manzoor Alam – they have all written about it and have taken the local idioms – they have tried to reach people through camaraderie,” says Ali, adding that he’s learned a lot from a festival that holds a lot of archival value at this point with musicians like Abida Parveen, who added much gravitas to the stage during her performances.
It’s Ali’s penchant for the idea of storytelling – be it through his films such as Umrao Jaan and Gaman or through his paintings (he is working on his new series called ‘The Other Side’), or through his designs with wife and fashion designer Meera Ali, or through his writing, that has given birth to his new dance ballet – Huma – the story of a celestial bird who lets go of her shadow due to her hubric instincts. Choreographed Pt Birju Maharaj’s granddaughter Shinjini Kulkarni, the piece premiered on Friday at the retreat to much appreciation. Full of rough edges still in terms of its choreography and the female vocal whose voice was slightly ill-suited for the piece, what worked were the qawwalis from the old editions of the Jahan-e-Khusrau, that Ali used for a large part of the ballet. “Who am I to tell you a story? I can create the ambience where you can len to your own story and tell us about it. I just take what one has – their own sur from their soul and give it back to them. Sometimes people can’t identify what they have and they need that eye which looks at detail. Sur phir parvaaz chadta hai,” says Ali.
Called ‘Raja Faqir’ Amar Nath, the founder of the Neemrana Group, who is hosting the retreat this year, Ali, son of Raja Syed Sajid Husain Ali, the prince of Kotwara in Awadh, and who is presently the Raja of Kotwara, the oldest living civilization in Lakhimpur Kheri, which is the largest drict in Awadh grew up being fascinated poetry. Poets visited his home often and Ali found himself reading a lot of it.
In Lucknow, when he was at La Martinere school, there wasn’t any poetry or any Urdu. “But I was fond of Urdu zubaan and heard a lot of it in Lucknow,” says Ali. “Poetry is a journey. It’s how you open your mind and heart to the world and how your own experiences find resonance through it. One needs to read and spend time with poets to be able to understand this and go deep enough. It’s not like one day you will hear a couplet and it will touch you,” says Ali, who found his passion for poetry at Aligarh Muslim University during his graduation. Faiz, “the modern man’s poet”, impacted him then and Ali admits to having learned Urdu through Faiz’s poetry. “Since then the language stalked me and became a part of my expression. I used it in my films,” says Ali, who was close friends with Sheheryar, who wrote for both Umrao Jaan films, besides Anjuman, Daman, Gaman and Zooni, among others.
Ali hasn’t created a lot of cinema in the last few years and one keeps going back to his iconic project – Umrao Jaan – the story of a Lucknow-based courtesan named Umrao Jaan Ada who had once narrated the story of her life to poet Mirza Hadi Ruswa. He could not behold the idea of that musical or align with the makers of Umrao Jaan Ada, which, 38 years later, was created a four-member team comprising director Rajeev Goswami, composers Salim-Sulaiman and writer Irfan Siddiqui. “They had come to me first. But I just could not tune in. I wanted to make that musical on my own. Permissions aren’t so difficult. Now HMV does not have any ethics. Whoever pays for it can buy the music. They don’t know how much of me and days and nights have gone into that project besides who will sing, how will they sing, why will they sing, the music, the adakaari. Asha ji sang for so many years but she got her National Award for this,” says Ali, who isn’t impressed a lot of the work he is seeing today in terms of films and a lot of Indian cinema he sees on the OTT platforms. “They don’t get into the physical or spiritual soul of the idea, which is why we get everything that’s fast and in a hurry. That will not birth art. Technology has done well, but design of art comes from a higher purpose,” he says.
Talking about freedom of art and expression in the current times, Ali says that one needs to look at the purpose of art. “Art may come out as a reaction to hatred but art does not come out of fear. I have always made art that is political. But today you cannot express yourself to that extent. And it’s important to be able to do that because eventually this will unify people and build bridges,” says Ali.
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