The Hindu Business Line : Ab Mirza ko gussa nahin aata hai

“But coming back to my films… I must tell you that they gave me a lot of satisfaction. The films were made on shoe-string budgets, shot on real locations at homes, offices and on the streets of the city of Bombay, and each shooting experience was an adventure. The cast and crew were a wonderful group of people who worked on the films for a fraction of what they could earn elsewhere, and thanks to their support, for the first time in my life, I was saying what I wanted to say.

It was also because of the stories and the locations where I had set my films that I was able to get in touch with a large number of people who belonged to what is called ‘the marginalised’ of society. They were textile workers, street hawkers, petty thieves and pickpockets, small time gamblers, pimps, police informers, drug peddlers, factory workers, political activists, bootleggers, owners of small eateries and their clientele, policemen on the beat, pawnbrokers, singing girls and their regular clients, daily-wage labourers and even hit-men. The cast and characters which inhabited this world could not be imagined and night after night they heard me out, checked my credentials and began to speak out. We would sit down and talk about films, life, love and politics. And here was I, ‘the intellectual’, learning about a world I knew very little.”

Excerpt from Saeed Mirza’s recently released book Ammi: letter to a democratic mother.

In an immortal scene in Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, Naseeruddin Shah as the intense, bearded Albert Pinto is angry. He is on a scooter, his girlfriend is riding pillion, and her skirt is riding up. He turns around and snaps at her to pull down the skirt because he doesn’t want the world to leer at her legs.

Like Albert, his creator Saeed Mirza, 64, was angry for a long, long time. At the kind of world it was turning into, where words like ‘democracy’ and ‘terrorism’ were being bandied about by people who did not even know their meaning.

When he left Bombay in 1996, to ‘retreat’ to Goa and to travel the world, he had just finished making his last film, Naseem. Based on the Bombay riots and its horrifying aftermath, Naseem, says Mirza, “was like an epitaph. I left, because I had nothing left to say.” He criss-crossed India several times, punctuating those forays with travels to Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, Spain, and Iran.

He’s back now, 12 years later, with Ammi: letter to a democratic mother, a sprawling book which is a little bit of everything that Mirza is and has been — it’s part travelogue, part monologue, part diatribe, part nautanki: it even has a film script thrown in as epilogue, with a caveat to the reader. “You may choose to read, or not to read it.”

The book has been living in his head for a long time, but the writing of it took four years, and it has been like a catharsis. “The anger is over and done with, you just retain memories of it”, he says.

Mirza is in New Delhi for the launch of his book, and we are sitting on the lawns of the India International Centre, where the mild winter sun is working hard to take the edge off the chill breeze. The conversation revolves around his book, his films, and what he is up to these days.

The making

Ammi… started out as scraps Mirza wrote for himself; it turned into a book only after he was jolted out of his self-imposed checking out by the World Trade Centre attack on 9/11, and the widespread but widely misunderstood concepts about ‘the East’, ‘Islam’, and ‘civilisation’. Over a two-day read, Ammi, which engages you warmly from page one, yields interesting nuggets about the life and times of the filmmaker. Mirza likens it to a literary installation — ideas, politics, history, and a love story, all rolled into one.

His flagship TV serial Nukkad, and his films made in the 1970s and 1980s with long-winded titles like Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Daastan, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho, and Saleem Langde Pe Mat Ro were not just stories. They were products of the times they were made in, and out of Mirza’s abiding concerns. There was no make-believe about them; they were about issues.

His characters

And they had to do with the everyday joys and sorrows of people who looked and felt real: Albert Pinto and Stella D’ Costa, and the dispossessed mill workers; Mohan Joshi and his endless rounds of litigations; Saleem Langda and the Muslim youth who lived on the edge in maximum city, Bombay. Like Shyam Benegal and, a little later, Ketan Mehta, the other filmmakers of that time, Mirza’s cinema was powered by the personal and a strong sense of social justice. “Ours were very large dreams; we believed we could change the world.”

New Beginning

Times have changed, and he believes that in today’s cinema, the dreams have become smaller. He doesn’t knock it, though. Cinema is a reflection of its times, and we get the movies we deserve. But it looks like the “calming process” that was the writing and bringing out the book has helped Mirza, who now calls himself a Marxist with a Sufi bent, to reach a place where he wants to be in the director’s seat. All over again.

Rajat Kapoor has dragged him out of his hideaway in Goa, where he lives six months of the year, back to the teeming city of Bombay, which he still finds hard to call Mumbai.

The film, whose shooting title is Saavdhaan, Meri Jaan, will be about 60 (yes, count them) characters, ‘a huge mural’, with his favourite city as the backdrop. He’s intimidated. For the past 12 years, he has been alone. “Now it’s people, and people and people.” But he’s also excited.

It is, he says, a new beginning.