Poetic side of tragedy queen

Legendary actress Meera Kumari was a goddess of the silver screen, but the woman behind the star was haunted by the pain of unrequited love, the sting of loneliness, the hollowness at the heart of fame and success, the looming shadow of death. And these found expression in her poems.

In a career spanning 30 years, from childhood to her death, she starred in more than 90 films. But throughout her life, Kumari had a love-hate relationship with movies, and besides being an actress, she had a way of her own with the pen. She was a poet, and recorded a disc of her Urdu poems, I write, I recite with music by music composer Khayyam.

Noorul Hasan, a former professor of English who had earlier edited the poems of Firaz Gorakhpuri, has brought together several of Meena Kumari’s verses in Urdu and published an English translation for the first time.

“I have been reading Meena Kumari’s poetry for over two decades. It wasn’t a conscious decision to translate her verses into English, a language she would have thought so far removed from her field of light. At some point in time, her words started translating themselves into English in my mind. Some of them were published by eminent poet Jayanta Mahapatra in his journal Chandrabhaga, which received a warm response from readers. That encouraged me to translate several more which constitute the volume just published,” says Hasan, who wanted to present a composite image of an enigmatic actor of the 20th century.

Her poetry is rather more ‘semantic’ and evocative than overtly thematic, believes the professor. “It nevertheless encompasses such themes as love, largely unrequited, suffering, her troubled marital relationship with Kamal Amrohi, loneliness, womanhood, death and the flip side of affluence and worldly success. Through this volume, I wanted to convey another image of Meena Kumari which deserves as universal an acknowledgment as her image as a Bollywood legend,” he elaborates.

Hasan’s English translations are accompanied by Roman transliteration allowing even an Urdu-challenged reader access to her actual words,
Lamhe urte hain kabhi ya to titlion ki tarah/ya kabhi khushbuon ki manind cheekh uthte hain; Simat’te-phailte sanche mein waqt ke dhal kar/Ajeeb shakl ke ban kar ‘Zamana’ rakhte hain na’am (Moments flutter like butterflies at times/ Or on occasions scream like fragrances/ Cast in the plastic moulds of time/ Transformed into a strange shape/ Come to be called “Time”.)

Apart from her poems, the book has a section that includes essays on her verses and several appendices with archival interviews, excerpts ranging from the star-struck journalist’s first meeting with the glamorous diva (by Afsar Jamshed) to music director Naushad Ali’s short biography describing the actress’ journey from the cradle to the grave.

She was a true music connoisseur and was very fond of listening to songs composed for her films. In one of the excerpts, Naushad Ali cites, “Whenever we met, she would discuss poetry and poetics. She had a fine sensibility and wrote good poetry. She was extremely co-operative and gentle. She never failed to encourage new entrants and provide them guidance. All her life she was exploited by people for their own ends, and was so frustrated that she took to drinking and writing poetry to fight her feeling of betrayal. Her poems clearly reflect her angst.”

As a poet, she resembles her screen persona, coming across as a disarming beauty, sensuous, sacrificial kind of woman. “Her poetry is the fullest and finest expression of her solitary self which obviously is not the image she was compelled to project on  screen in accordance with the exigencies and requirements of the films she has done,” says Hasan.

Interestingly, writer-lyricist Gulzar, who first made public the poems of Meena Kumari in the early 1970s, in a poem exclusively written for the book sums up, “Meena closed her eyes and went to sleep/ Bidding life adieu! Never once did she breathe Thereafter/ After a trying life full of struggle and strife,/ Wasn’t it a remarkably stark and easy death!”