Memoirs
Author: Habib Tanvir
Publisher: Penguin, Rs 399
Memoirs is not a run-of-the-mill autobiography going chronologically from birth to age but a sampler, a taste if you like, of the people who gave zest to Tanvir’s life. Indeed, we are told it began with the editor of Nadeem, a well-known Bhopal Urdu magazine, Habi Ahmed Sahib, who asked him to write an article on the poet, Sardar Jafri, who had just passed away. Once Tanvir had chatted about this man, he found he had a lot of memories about so-and-so too. Thus the book goes on and as you read about each person’s idiosyncrasies and lovable (or otherwise) characteristics you find you are deeply immersed in a very Muslim world of family and relationships (at least for me, not being of that lineage) rather like reading a long Russian novel.
In the process, you are learning a lot about Tanvir too. How he dressed, the girls he fell in love with when his life was still counted in single figures, the food he always relished especially when cooked by girls and women he had a fond spot for. The bazaars he trotted along to with his father, or this or that mamu, nearly all to Muslim shops, until I began to wonder if people from any other community lived in Raipur, for instance, in those days!
Then you learn about his experiences of Parsi theatre, music concerts, all-night village performances, his school, his college in Nagpur — all in his inimitable rambling style as if he were speaking the articles rather than writing them. It was in his rather aimlessly looking for a job after college and chasing after Tarabai, a beautiful singer and also lady of the night, that he finally made his way to Bombay.
Bombay: Zulfiqar Shah Bukhari, then Station Director of All India Radio, Sardar Jafri, Aubrey Menon, Benjamin Horniman of the Bombay Chronicle, the Illustrated Weekly editor Shaun Mandy, Vilayat Khan, Jaishankar Sundari, Gujarati theatre luminary. The list brings memories of my father, Suresh Vaidya, journalist and freedom fighter, an ideologue of the Naval Mutiny, as well as friends of Gopal and me to mind, which bring me to more familiar territory.
Here the gossip is as fascinating as Tanvir’s progression through Urdu shairi, journalism, bit parts in film, radio work, IPTA, Progressive Writers Association with Ramesh and Raj Thapar, palatial Malabar Hill communists, Shanti Burdhan and the little Ballet Troupe and once more to AIR Bukhari (in whose barsaati he lived), the inveterate party-goer and giver, and all the women who thronged those parties. Bukhari, who groomed Tanvir into the natty dresser which he remained till the end, but who shocked his friends by eventually revealing in his book his deep anti Hindu sentiments.
Readers expecting a serious dissertation on Tanvir’s work with Chhattisgarhi folk performers will be disappointed in Memoirs. Of course there are mentions and photographs of the actors without whom he could not produce the plays he wanted to, and who, in their turn, influenced his style to grow from their distinctive folk idiom. But there is not much exploration of that experience which made him the theatre director he so famously grew into with Charandas Chor, above all.
He produced 30 plays, we are told but it was his love affair with Dina Gandhi, later Dina Pathak (mother of Naseeruddin Shah’s wife Ratna), who keeps you glued to the page. His sad relationship with the English girl, Jill, mother of the beautiful ballad singer Anna Tanvir, who lives in France, and his turbulent ‘conjugal’ relationship with his wife, Moneeka, who died just three years earlier than him and who shared the most theatrically important part of his work, his daughter Nageen, are what seemed to have concerned him when he wrote the Memoirs in the last years of his life.
As a theatre person myself I am most taken by the keen observation of all the people who stroll through his pages. It is the necessary sharp eye for detail of the actor and theatre director which you see. It is his theatre worker’s mind you meet in the Memoirs — how people look, how they speak, what makes them tick, what breaks their heart. This is indeed a book about theatre. How the art flowers in the mind of the artist of theatre. It is not about social commitment or politics, or being morally correct or good, or even about being a Muslim. It’s about being this type of an artist. An honest artist.
The reviewer is one of the founder-directors of Akshara Theatre, Delhi