by ARUP K. CHATTERJEE
Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in October 1921, English poet and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot remembered John Donne thus: “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think, but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.”
Eliot’s assessment of Donne was true of some others too whom Samuel Johnson had in the eighteenth century called the the-extinct “race” of metaphysical poets. Not incidentally, however, the crown of thinking-as-experience is also befitting for Indian poet, lyricist, author, and filmmaker, the Sahitya, Oscar and Jnanpith awardee, Sampooran Singh Kalra, better known by his takhallus (pen name), ‘Gulzar‘.
Renowned Indian poet and novelist Padma Sachdev once called Gulzar saab the Pablo Neruda of Urdu poetry. But it would be as precise to call him the John Donne of ‘Indian popular culture’. And I use this composite phrase instead of ‘Hindi cinema’ or ‘Bollywood’ because a bulk of Gulzar saab’s unexplored philosophical insights far exceed his filmography, poetry, and writings. What is often missed in his language and poetics are his metaphors from quantum mechanics.
A ‘Phenomenological’ Poet
Born in 1934 in Deena, now in the Jhelum district of present-day Pakistan, Gulzar saab’s early life and his harrowing journey to India before the Partition of 1947 – memories that found lauded expressions in Shyam Benegal’s 1994 classic, Mammo – would make for a fertile backdrop for many a biographer. But not many may pay attention to the cosmic and quantum-like figures of speech that decorate his perceptions of reality. “NASA is my favourite website,” Gulzar once acknowledged. “The universe with its abstract nature attracts me. The abstract element in my poetry comes from there.”
Had Gulzar saab’s modesty allowed him, instead of calling his poetry “abstract,” he might have called it “phenomenological”. The word ‘phenomenology’ means the study of experience, along with studying the nuances ‘qualia’, that is, the way fundamental units of reality are experienced. Gulzar saab’s poetry often represents reality in minuscule slices. “Qatra qatra milti hai” (“droplets and droplets appear to us”; Ijaazat, 1987), or “jale qatra qatra, gale qatra qatra” (“the kindling of slivers, the melting of slivers”; Saathiya, 2002).
In certain other cases-as in “main chaand nigal gayi, daiyya re” (“I swallowed the moon, my gosh!”; Omkara, 2006)-Gulzar saab appears to swap the microscopic reality for the cosmic, where swallowing the moon signifies the quest of a mythical oscillatory body, or, in worldly terms, a lover in heat who swallowed the moon to soothe herself. However, his deeper aesthetic sense resurfaces in moon-related metaphors elsewhere, as in “dhaage tod laao chandni se noor ke” (“pluck slivers of moonlight from the cosmic ray”; Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, 2007). The metaphor reminds one of that famous ‘double slit’ science experiment, where photons split to reveal wave-particle duality. Gulzar saab’s words are nowhere ‘abstract’. In a liminal way, they escort the listener into a scientific world.
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