Poet of the Light

Javed Akhtar was born with poetry in his blood. His grandfather Muztar Khairatabadi was an established poet, as was his father Jan Nissar Akhtar, one of the leading poets of his time. His mother Safia was an established litterateur, his uncle Majaz among the most quoted. And by marrying the lovely Shabana, he acquired as father-in-law Kaifi Azmi, who is undoubtedly the king of Urdu poets of today. It could be said that composing poetry was poetic noblesse oblige for Javed Akhtar.

Javed made a late start. After finishing his education he came to Bombay to try his luck in Hindi films. He did not have any money; his father’s doors were closed to him. He spent many days trudging from one film studio to another and many nights sleeping on footpaths. The break came with writing scripts and dialogues for films in collaboration with Salim Khan. One box office hit followed another: Deewar, Sholay, Zanjeer and Trishul. Within a few years Javed the vagabond became the celebrity script writer and lyricist of Bollywood. Javed the drunkard of yesteryears turned a teetotaller. He ditched his first wife Daisy Irani and left his two children with her. His crowning success was marrying the gifted and beautiful Shabana Azmi. Since then the couple have rarely been out of the limelight. He has written a charmingly self-deprecatory essay on himself as a kind of preface to the translation.

Javed Akhtar’s poems can be divided into two categories: those written for films to suit the situation and those that came from his heart. Those in the latter category are of higher calibre than those composed on the dictates of film directors. However, in both categories he uses deceptively simple language which is easily understood by even those who find composite words favoured by most Urdu poets beyond their comprehension. There is little truth in his observation:

Which verse shall I recite for you now? I sometimes think/The new ones are obscure, the old ones far too hard

These lines may have been addressed to Shabana who came late into her Urdu legacy because there is nothing obscure or hard in Javed Akhtar’s compositions. His strength is in his simple diction and modern outlook. Unlike most Urdu poets who rarely write about the beauties of nature, Javed often turns to it for inspiration. One example of this is his lyrical description of mountains on a moonlit night:

The vista fades in evening mist, and every hill/Sleeps gently in a sheet of moonbeams, calm and still./ The trees are blue reflections in the tinted vale;/The haze is rising like the smoke of moonlight pale./The moon has melted; rocks grow softer in its light/And perfume even softer, scents the breath of night./The sky as silent as the breeze of dusk is calm;/The buds are drunk; the branches gave them heady balm./The road in sleep turns over, bending, winding, slow./And someone sings a song./For whom? We’ll never know.

Among Akhtar’s better-known poems is one on the phenomenon of time perhaps inspired by Stephen Hawking’s thesis on the subject.

What is time?/What is this thing that goes on without pause?/If it did not pass,/Then where could it have been?/It must have been somewhere./It has passed./So where is it now?/It must be somewhere./Where did it come from? Where did it go?/Where did the process start? Where will it end?/What is time?

It is a long poem leaving the question unanswered.

The thread is very long/But/Somewhere the thread will have an end./Now mankind is confused/Because it was born in this cage of time./It was brought up and raised here./But now man has discovered/That outside the cage of time/There lies another part of space./So he thinks,/He asks,/What is time?

Javed Akhtar is lucky in having found a translator in David Mathews. He has done a splendid job. What Victor Kiernan did for Faiz, he has done for Akhtar. There are quite a few living poets including his own father-in-law Kaifi Azmi who deserve translators like Kiernan or Mathews to bring the richness of modern Urdu poetry to the world.