by JAWED NAQVI
Saif Ali Khan with his late father Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi and mother Sharmila Tagore PHOTO/Saif Ali Khan Online
If Saif Ali Khan is serious in his belief, which he shouldn’t be, that people inherit talents such as movie acting through their bloodline, he needs to see his paternal lineage from Bhopal and also perhaps look at his Bengali heritage from the mother’s side. He will find that the cultural motifs he apparently sees as family heirloom are a product of an evolving social experience driven by new technologies and a perpetually shifting political fulcrum.
The mother’s family links up with the Hindu reformist Brahmo Samaj and the father’s side joins him to the puritan Muslim Ahle Hadith sect, going back to its 19th-century founder Siddiq Hasan Khan. The latter was inspired by ideologues that later fired the imagination of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Does Saif still want to talk about genetics, which he erroneously called eugenics?
While the father’s maternal side connects with a narrow interpretation of Islam, Saif’s Bengali forebears embraced a liberating perspective of Hindu society, and were in turn shunned by the orthodoxy. The Brahmo Samaj, however, was not born without a context, which was to challenge the Brahminical orthodoxy. Nor did its members see themselves as heirs to any perpetual habit to modernise.
Rabindranath Tagore’s towering genius directly and indirectly influenced Saif’s maternal forebears. But, just as Saif’s father’s and grandfather’s cricketing flourish could not have preceded W.G. Grace, the reformist impulse of the Brahmo Samaj flowed from a blend of two mega events in history — the fall of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the East India Company. Those two events determined new land relations in Bengal, as elsewhere in India, replete with new cultural preferences that came with changing social hierarchies. Without the blending of the old (Mughal or pre-Mughal) with the new (European) thought in a new symphony, it would be difficult to conceive of Tagore’s poetic or reformist prowess, or his enormous musical talents.
What would Sharmila Tagore’s genes be nudging her to do had Europe not given the technology to make movies?
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When cinema came, Dilip Kumar, decades older to Sharmila Tagore in the acting profession and whose father was a fruit merchant, had to hide from his family his joining the sacrilegious world of movies. Before the newly gifted Brahmin girls started singing thumri and khayal, public singing was the preserve of mirasis and tawaifs like Gauharjan, and dancing the realm of Devdasis. As for Gauharjan, the famous singer of Calcutta, Gandhiji considered her so unacceptable that he wouldn’t let her join the Congress.
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