Saeed Mirza’s journey: ‘Naseem is my most personal film, an epitaph for the idea of India’

Saeed Mirza is one of the Grand Old Men of Indian art cinema. As a leading light of the Indian New Wave, Mirza has illuminated the concerns of Mumbai’s working class and minority communities through the movies he made between the 1970s and 1990s – Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro.

Mirza continued to explore the interplay of idea, form and progressive politics in his television shows, notably Nukkad (1986), and his documentaries. He is now 82 years old, keener on literature than cinema. In recent years, Mirza has written several books: Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother, I Know the Psychology of Rats and Memory in the Age of Amnesia.

Mirza is the subject of a retrospective at the International Film Festival of Kerala (December 12-December 19). Three of his five features will be screened– Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro and Naseem.

Mirza also made Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho! in 1984. Another movie from 2009, Ek Tho Chance, which starred Ali Fazal in one of his earliest roles, was never released.

Mirza and his brother, the director Aziz Mirza, are second-generation filmmakers. Their father, Akhtar Mirza, was a leading screenwriter in such Hindi film hits as Naya Daur (1957), Waqt (1960) and Dhund (1973).

Saeed Mirza didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps initially, choosing instead to make commercials before eventually joining the direction course at the Film and Television Institute of India in the 1970s. In 1978, Mirza made Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan, about an industrialist’s son who confronts his privilege with mixed results.

In an interview, Mirza revisited his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the influences on his filmmaking. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

What are among your earliest memories of cinema?

I don’t know how old I was, but I do remember films being screened on a projector at home. We would watch 16mm prints of classics from around the world.

At some point in the 1950s, I remember seeing Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. I used to live in Mahim in those days. I would also watch films at nearby theatres like Paradise, Shree, Kohinoor and Aurora.

I was infatuated with the images. I watched Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin at home – it shook me. What blew me away was that here was a cinema of ideas. It wasn’t about a story, but the idea behind it. You weren’t just saying, “Kahaani kya hai?” (What is the plot?) or “Kirdar kaun hai?” (Who are the characters?). There was a conscious structure, form and discipline to the cinema.

I remember my father telling me years later, what you are seeing is only one kind of cinema. Keep in mind that this tamasha [show] is not the raison d’etre for cinema.

When did your father, Akhtar Mirza, move to Mumbai? What can you tell us about him?

He came to Bombay around 1936 or 1937, seeking a future in writing. He tried to be an entrepreneur. He had an astute wheeler-dealer friend who had a business in locks. He also sold coal.

He was erudite and read a hell of a lot. He introduced me to Spanish and Russian literature. We spoke Urdu and Hindustani at home, but were sent to an English medium school, so it was all mixed.

He had a problem with Marxists and Leftists. His wisecrack about Marxists was that they think they have God on their side – they can never be wrong. But he also had a deep respect for lefties. His argument was that Marxism was too noble an idea for mortals. The sacrifices required were too much.

He was open-minded, a genuine liberal, a great fan of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Abraham Lincoln and Bhagat Singh too, in a strange way.

What conversations did you have with your father about the films he wrote and the ones you wanted to make?

I told him about what I felt were the limitations of the dramatic narrative structure – it engaged the audience, but it was also incredibly undemocratic. Cinema has to be democratic. The only way is to be democratic with the audience so that all of you are seeing the film together.

Of his films, I like Naya Daur. I like the sweep of Waqt. One of his scripts I liked very much – it was like a Greek epic about a great sculptor who happens to be an incredibly arrogant man. He has sculpted statues of gods and goddesses.

He is engrossed in a new major project when a woman comes into his life. She becomes his passion. He is cursed by the gods for loving a human more than them to never die. The woman keeps coming back into his life at different points and he keeps losing her.

The script was never filmed. I did think of making it myself, but it would have required too much money and special effects. I can’t handle money, it irritates me.

Akhtar Mirza wrote films in the 1950s, which is regarded as a golden decade for cinema. Many films were socially conscious while also being conventionally entertaining. How do you look back on this decade?

The decade achieved what it had to – it gave the nation a generosity of spirit. I love the films of Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt. I love the sweep of Mughal-e-Azam, Mehboob Khan’s epic Mother India.

The filmmakers were concerned with the world they were inheriting. They had expansive views, and I liked that part of it. But at some point, that transformed, became a kind of monster and gave us what we have today.

This wasn’t just in cinema. A general social upheaval has brought us to the present. We have reached the point where the idea of poetry is over. That’s what I said in Naseem in 1996 – poetry is over, and we have now ended up with hate.

When you put good ideas into the hands of filmmakers who can’t see the sweep, the film becomes more about the actors and the narrative. Something is lost. Ideas are more important than anything else. My films are fundamentally essays.

In the mid-1970s, you chucked a career in advertising to enrol in the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. What was that like?

The Pune film school changed my life. My batch mates included K Hariharan, Ashok Ahuja, Subhankar Ghosh, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Ravi Ojha. Dreamers, anarchists, poets, charlatans, atheists, Marxists, right-wingers, scientists – they were all there, and they were creating work. It was a great celebration of ideas.

This was an exuberant time. There was hope and the strong possibility of change. There were state interventions in art, there were revolutionary movements all across the world.

I was already aware of things, I had read an incredible amount of fiction and non-fiction, most of it progressive in nature. Plus, I was an older student. And I drank Old Monk.

When you enter the space of the film school, something happens. You find your path. You are given a feast. You watch cinema from all around the world. There are so many ghosts wandering around the institute – Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Sergei Eisenstein.

Ghatak taught my batch. He was an incredible performer and a bad teacher, in one sense. But Ghatak gave you something that no teacher ever could.

Kundan Shah once asked him, what are the traits needed to be a good filmmaker? Ghatak said, keep your childhood in one pocket and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

Which of your own films do you like the most? Do you re-watch them?

I duck. Arvind Desai is the one I find the most tolerable. Others see masterpieces, but I can only see the blunders that I have made.

I wish I had contained the idea at times. When I see Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, I feel that I screwed it up.

You have to be honest with yourself. I disrespect any person who is pompous.

Naseem (1996) is set in 1992, and follows the build-up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The film stars Mayuri Kango as a school student and the renowned poet and lyricist Kaifi Azmi as her grandfather. Is it your most enduring film?

I think it’s my most personal film. I didn’t want to make films after that. I did make Ek Tho Chance, but it wasn’t released.

Naseem is an epitaph for the idea of India. I was in Bombay when the Babri Masjid was demolished. I saw the slaughter and the mayhem. Just below the surface, there was bestiality. I was not entirely surprised – I could see it building up. Jennifer [his wife] and my kids were in Delhi during the anti-Sikh riots.

I took a couple of years to write Naseem. I was very angry. I didn’t want a magnum opus but a private, closed-circuit story of an age that has gone.

How did Kaifi Azmi come to play the grandfather in his only film role?

I actually had Dilip Kumar in mind for the role. He is one of the greatest performers we have ever had. I would have controlled him. I would have said, don’t act, you don’t need to. You are history. Be history.

He said it was a lovely idea, but he couldn’t do the film. I didn’t ask why.

My friend, the illustrator and painter Mickey Patel, suggested Kaifi saab. When I told Kaifi saab I wanted him to act in my film, he called his wife, Shaukat Azmi. He had recently had a stroke. He told her, see, I am alive. He was a lovely man.

I originally had Nandita Das in mind for the role played by Mayuri Kango. I had known Nandita as a young girl in Delhi. Her father said, I don’t want her to be a part of this world. Little did he know.

We were rehearsing a scene with a school teacher. She said, my daughter is waiting outside. When the girl, Mayuri Kango, came in, I said, she is it.

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