Gulzar: The Bengali connection

Why not? After all, 68-year-old Gulzar, whose real name is Sampooran Singh, spent his formative years as a school and college student reading the translations of Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Jibananda Das and Subhash Mukhopadhyay.

The writings of the Bangla literary stalwarts left an indelible mark on the young and evolving mind and sensitivity of Gulzar, born in an area now in Pakistan, whose fondness for Bengali literature also inspired him to learn the language. The poet in Gulzar blossomed and his first collection of poems in Urdu came out in 1962.

When Gulzar began his film career in the 1960s, he was again in the company of eminent Bangalis in the cinema world. He began as an assistant to renowned director Bimal Roy and later worked with legends like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Hemanta Mukhopadhyay and Kishore Kumar. Gulzar's association with them contributed to his achievements later.

Gulzar's career as a film director in 1969 too began with Mere Apne (starring Meena Kumari, Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha), the Hindi re-make of Bengali feature film Aapanjan by Tapan Sinha.

Gulzar's career as a lyricist also started with Bimal Roy's famous movie Bandini in 1963 and who can forget the song he had penned Mora Goraa Ang Layee Le.

Left to himself, Gulzar says he would love to make movies based on the writings of Tagore. 'Tagore fascinates me. It will be a real challenge for me to reproduce his works on the screen,' said Gulzar. The film director was in Delhi last week to announce state-owned broadcaster Doordarshan's decision to show films directed by him based on the novels and short stories by leading Hindi writer Munshi Premchand.

'In fact, I had told Prasar Bharati (which controls Doordarshan) CEO K S Sharma that I wanted to work on Tagore's works but he laughingly dismissed it saying I should leave Tagore for some Bengali film-maker,' Gulzar told reporters here.

To this, Gulzar replied by saying that it would be interesting to seek how a non-Bengali interprets Tagore's works.

It has been quite some years that film buffs have not had a film from Gulzar. His previous two films were national award-winning Maachis adjudged the best feature film in 1996 and Hu Tu Tu. So when Doordarshan announced that Gulzar would be recreating Premchand's works on the small screen, it could not but be happy news for lovers of literature as well as good cinema alike. Gulzar's association with cinema has earned him national awards seven times, including best director for Mausam (starring Sanjeev Kumar and Sharmila Tagore in double role) in 1976, best screenplay for Kowshish (starring Sanjeev Kumar and Jaya Bhaduri) in 1972, best lyricist for Ijajat in 1988 and Lekin in 1991.