In tune with words Creative geniuses raise our mundane lives to dizzying heights of bliss. May we never ever lose our capacity to float on the wings of inspiration.
An image doing the rounds recently on WhatsApp caught my attention. It featured Zakir Hussain, Dr Manmohan Singh, Shyam Benegal and Ratan Tata, and was captioned ‘Our Heroes in Heaven’. A further caption described it in these words: A Parsi, a Muslim, a Sikh and a Hindu passed away in 2024 and the whole nation mourned and remembered them only as Indians. In the last month of the year, we lost many precious souls, including writers M T Vasudevan Nair and Bapsi Sidhwa. Inexorably, we are losing a whole generation that inspired us by their lives, their work, their leadership, their capabilities, their imagination, their magic. While we mourn in these dark times, Mark Antony’s words niggle at the back of my mind. Remember his eulogy at Julius Caesar’s funeral in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? ‘…the evil that men do live after them, the good is oft interred with their bones…’ I wonder, indeed, I fear: In the end, is this the legacy we shall leave behind?
Bapsi Sidhwa lived in the US for many years but surely everyone remembers the film that Deepa Mehta made based on her book, initially titled Cracking India and later, Ice Candy Man. The film was called Earth 1947 and was set during Partition. Gripping, shocking and moving in turns, it drew nuanced performances from all the actors, including Maia Sethna as Lenny, a Parsi child central to the novel and the film. It also features what I believe is one of the best love songs ever, written by Javed Akhtar, tuned by A R Rahman and sung by Hariharan: Dheemi dheemi, bheeni bheeni, khushboo hai tera badan… Imagine my delight when, just a few days ago while I was watching an interesting 2023 Pakistani serial called Working Women, I saw one of the characters shown reading Ice Candy Man! I came across the abstract of a study on the novel in light of New Historicism which sees how this novel ‘challenges Eurocentric and colonial concepts by elevating the voices of people who are marginalised’ while describing events in Lahore during the partition of India and Pakistan. New Historicism is described as a literary theory that looks at understanding history with the help of cultural context and intellectual history.
The following passage from Ice Candy Man quoted in City of Sin and Splendour sits in direct opposition to the WhatsApp image described earlier: ‘It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves — and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah, she is also a token. A Hindu. Carried away by a renewed devotional fervour she expends a small fortune in joss sticks, flowers and sweets on the gods and goddesses in the temples. … Imam and Yousuf, turning into religious zealots, warn Mother they will take Friday afternoons off for the Jumha prayers … Godmother and my nuclear family are reduced to irrelevance — we are Parsee. What is God?’
Making the voice of the marginalised emerge from the cacophony of the world was Bapsi Sidhwa’s special skill and although she will be missed, her books will live on. As will the stories and writings of that consummate Malayalam writer, M T Vasudevan Nair, whom we shall meet in a future column.
Inexorably, we are losing a whole generation that inspired us by their lives, their work, their leadership, their capabilities, their imagination, their magic.
In 2018, Nasreen Munni Kabir published a long conversations-based book titled Zakir Hussain: A Life in Music. If you are a music-lover, this is a must-read. Expectedly, it is replete with lovely anecdotes involving music/musicians, but it has so much more about life and living, and so I would recommend it to everyone. Zakir Hussain says, early in the conversation, how the sitar maestro Ravi Shankarji ‘was the only person I knew then who could talk on any subject. Whenever we travelled together by plane, he would buy ten magazines at the airport… and read them all during the flight. I started doing that too. I learned much more about language through reading than I had learned at school.’ He says he loved fiction best because ‘I’m basically an escapist’ and his favourite was the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.
We’ve seen an outpouring of expressions of affection with Zakir Hussain’s passing, and what he shares in this book reinforces the many reasons we feel this loss so deeply. For instance, when NMK asks him if he wanted to be like his father, Allarakha, both as a musician and as a person, Zakir Hussain’s response is that he realised he should not try to be like his father, just as his father was not and did not play like his guru, Mian Qadir Baksh. He tells us why. When, after a concert, someone told Allarakha that he should be so proud of his son, he played exactly like his father, the latter responded saying that since he had become Ustad Allarakha, another Ustad Allarakha would be merely a copy. ‘What is the point of that?’ he said. He prayed ‘he’ll be better than me, do something new and different’ and bold. ‘My father taught my two brothers, Fazal and Taufiq, and me, and also all his students that we had to find our own style. He was very comfortable with the idea that his sons would not be like him…’ explains Zakir Hussain. Look around and you will observe that this kind of approach or attitude is rare even today, not just in the creative sphere, but in other areas of endeavour as well.
Returning to Bapsi Sidhwa, that keen observer of life and morals, as well as history and cultural idiosyncrasies… As a Parsi, the Parsi view of life runs like a thread through all of her work, which is also woven in with her Pakistani heritage, her South Asian identity, and her consciousness as a citizen of the world. This is brilliantly laid out in her short story collection, Their Language of Love. She herself acknowledges that she is a novelist, not a short-story writer. So, yes, most of the stories in this collection are on the longer side. And no, not all of them fall typically into the category, in the sense that they do necessarily pivot around the resolution of a single idea or issue. Instead, they emerge and evolve out of a head-on meeting of cultures where differences of language, class and creed must be engaged with. Layer this with her local/global vision, and you get situations, characters, ideas that demand your attention, that urge you to reflect. Yet the narrative never flags, it keeps the momentum going. Which is why I was able to read the book practically in one sitting.
Two of the stories transformed themselves into novels: An American Brat and Cracking India (Ice Candy Man). The denouement in ‘Defend Yourself Against Me’ brought tears to my eyes as it boldly, bravely walks the slippery line between the sublime and the ridiculous. How Bapsi Sidhwa pulls it off is her genius. Perhaps because her writing fundamentally draws from lived experiences. For me, especially, the vivid picture she paints of Pakistan — a country not many Indians can hope to visit — the place, the people, the languages… all these enhanced the reading experience, expanding both mind and heart.
Now, Bapsi Sidhwa and Zakir Hussain, all we can do is take solace in your legacy.
The columnist is a children’s writer and senior journalist
