Gulzar gets Jnanpith Award 2023: Why Gulzar's writing still resonates across generations

Gulzar getting the Padma Bhushan in 2004; and holding up the Dada Saheb Phalke Award in 2013. Gulzar is now also the recipient of the 2023 Jnanpith Award, India's top literary prize. (Images via Wikimedia Commons)

On Saturday, the Urdu poet, lyricist and filmmaker Sampooran Singh Kalra, better known as Gulzar, was announced as one of the winners of the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour. Gulzar, 89, is one of the country’s most recognizable writers, with his poetry collections and short fiction being popular in Urdu, Punjabi and English, his Partition-related stories especially so. His career as a director includes era-defining movies like Mausam (1975), Angoor (1982) and Maachis (1996). His regular musical collaborations with A-list Bollywood composers such as R.D. Burman, A.R. Rahman and Vishal Bhardwaj have earned him a legion of fans, not to mention a long list of awards and honours, including a Grammy and an Oscar for the song ‘Jai Ho’ from the film Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

The country's highest literary honour, the Jnanpith Award for 2023, is being conferred upon famous Urdu lyricist Gulzar Saahab.

Along with his long film journey, Gulzar has been setting new milestones in the field of literature. pic.twitter.com/xfbdnfGaoJ

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— Gulzar (@gulzaar_poetry) February 17, 2024

What makes Gulzar simultaneously a critical darling and widely accessible to audiences from several different regions and successive generations? There are at least three key reasons behind this. Number one, he is very good at incorporating several different languages, dialects and idioms from different parts of the country—and beyond. The very first movie song he wrote, 'Mora Gora Ang Layle' from the Bimal Roy classic Bandini (1963), is mostly in Awadhi. ‘Jai Ho’ uses Punjabi and even smatterings of Spanish in between the ‘lead’ paras. Another factor is his preternatural facility for love-poems—few lyricists or poets in India have created as many distinctive, even idiosyncratic expressions of love (and not just romantic love, but also the love between a parent and a child, or the patriotic love of a statesman or a soldier). And finally, Gulzar is well-known for reinterpreting famous folk songs and/or well-known ghazals, providing a vital, accessible window to the classics for the lay reader. Amir Khusrau, Mirza Ghalib, Baba Bulleh Shah—these are just some of the giants whose lines Gulzar has rendered afresh or ‘sampled’ in his original poems. Think of this as Bob Dylan borrowing from Woodie Guthrie in order to create something new.

These qualities are readily on display in Gulzar’s recent career anthology Baal-O-Par: Collected Poems, translated into English by Rakhshanda Jalil published by HarperCollins India. A massive, nearly 1,400-page project in the works for several years, Baal-O-Par brings together all six of his poetry collections across the last 40-odd years—Chand Pukhraaj Ka, Raat Pashminey Ki, Pandrah Paanch Pachhattar, Kuchh Aur Nazmein, Pluto and Triveni. The original and translated versions of the poems are printed adjacently.

“It (translating Gulzar) was very different from any other translation experience for me,” said Jalil during a telephonic interview. “I learned from Gulzar saab how a poet thinks. A poet is wired very differently from a writer of prose. We worked on the collection during the pandemic-induced lockdown years. Every weekday from 3 to 5 we would be on video call (him in Bombay, me in Delhi), discussing every word, every comma, every full stop.”

It's somewhat facile to think of Gulzar as a ‘magic realist’, although there’s (plenty of) both magic and hard-knuckles realism in his work. In his poems, dreamers confront both the past and the future with a certain equanimity. Old lovers look back at broken relationships with something approaching fondness, children look up at the skies with perpetual wonder, birds and animals are just as important to the emotional logic as their human counterparts.

“There are so many kinds of magic,” Jalil pointed out. “The everyday magic of Gulzar’s words is something that appeals to a wide cross-section of readers. When he’s talking about love, for example, it can be something as unique as a drop of water on an electric wire, sliding along, trying to reach another drop, you know? The pursuit ends with the collapse of both these drops, sliding right off the wire. Also, so many of his poems have astronomical imagery, which is extremely charming and highly unusual for Urdu poetry.”

This same nimble-footedness with poetry from several different languages is evident in Gulzar’s translations as well—one of the things that inspired him to write poetry in his youth was reading a translated volume of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems. Later, he created his own Tagore translations as well.  He has also translated Sukrita Paul Kumar’s poems, in a bilingual volume called Poems Come Home (2011), where the Hindustani and English renditions are printed side-by-side—just like they are in Baal-O-Par.

“When Poems Come Home was published,” Kumar recalled during a telephonic interview, “I got a lot of messages from friends saying, ‘Oh you’ve finally translated Gulzar’, and they’d be surprised when I’d point out that it’s the other way round!” Kumar first met Gulzar in the mid-'90s, while she was compiling a series of video interviews (for IGNOU) with writers of Partition stories—Kamleshwar, Bhisham Sahani and so on. Her own father, the beloved Urdu writer Joginder Paul (1925-2016), is also considered a major part of the ‘Partition canon’. When Gulzar first met Kumar, the latter was immediately impressed by his humility and his kindness—acknowledging her father’s contributions to literature, he said, “Main toh unka mureed hoon.” (I am but a student of Mr Paul’s work).

Both Jalil and Kumar spoke about Gulzar’s innovative, flexible approach to translations, regardless of whether he’s translating or being translated. “He’d say, ‘Yeh lafz udaa ke dekhte hain, kaisa lagtaa hai’ (Let’s lose this phrase and see how it sounds),” Jalil recalled. “I would say, “Lekin kaise? Yeh lafz to hai wahaan pe! (But how? The phrase is right there in the poem!) He has a great ear for the way words sound, across several languages.”

Echoing this sentiment, Kumar said, “Rhyming, onomatopoeia, he is extremely alert to all of these things. He is a master craftsman precisely because of the close attention he gives to the phonetic aspect of language.” Kumar gave the example of one of her poems called ‘Ageing in America’, which Gulzar translated into English in Poems Come Home.

In this poem there’s a segment that goes: “The yellow teeth twittering / Her black wrinkled skin / loosening from her face” Gulzar added onomatopoeia (words/phrases derived from the sounds associated with them, like “cuckoo” or “tick-tock”) and alliteration to these lines, coming up with “kat-kat bajte peele daant / aur syaah chehre se jhoolti jhurriaan”

It’s heartening to see this master wordsmith finally receiving the highest literary honour of the land. His words have touched so many lives around the world, and it’s safe to say that his poetry will be remembered long, long after he’s gone.