"There are things that aren’t around any more, but the workings of the world are such that things come and go. ...there’s a certain advantage to being outside of a situation in order to write about it, and so in that way a particular period passes and you come out of it."
So said Naiyer Masud - Urdu and Persian scholar, professor, and short-story writer - to Sagaree Sengupta in the course of an April 1996 interview.
Shahi AJ's documentary also treads a delightfully reclusive path rooted in the same detachment that seemed dear to Masud as a writer who defied the sticky conventions of story-telling.
Letters Unwritten to Naiyer Masud is Shahi's cinematic tribute, an outsider's view of the historic city in which Masud lived all his life. Losing himself in the bustling bylanes of the squalid city, once the epicenter of Nawabi thought and action, Shahi gladly disowns the baggage of expectations that an exploratory voyage carries by default.
Instead, he seeks to join the dots of Masud's life and times, only as he has imagined them, through an introspective collage of purposeful animation, evocative charcoal illustrations, multiple voice overs, text bytes, and a 'bits and pieces' footage of what remains of the city today, led by the haunting clues and cues intersperered in Masud's fiction.
How much of it resonates with the discerning viewer is a matter of subjective opinion which ideally demands a freewheeling discussion outside the scope of a largely over-obliging Q & A session.
Clearly, Bharat Murthy's splendid art work is one of the most striking features of Shahi's documentary, a visual peek into the thinking mind of Masud. Writer Ayesha Siddiqui succintly unfolds the essence and significance of Masud's literary world, while Samir Kher is a tailormade travel guide for Shahi's cause. The way Kher demystifies Lucknow for our benefit, both of the past and present, is in many ways a circituous tribute to Masud.
In the environs of FTII, Shahi had no dearth of 'safe' choices for a debut film, but he followed his dream despite the inherent challenges attached to it including the pandemic-dictated travel restrictions, Kollam-Lucknow logisitical issues, motley group of interviewees - all senior citizens, and no knowledge of Urdu and Persian.
For me, the wonderful takeaway of Shahi's work is the earthy desire to read Masud, after having discovered him, thanks only to Shahi and his team!
One of Masud's quotes is enough to make one positively intrigued and curious to know more about him and his muse:
मुझको नज़र के धोके अस्ली मंज़रों से ज़्यादा अस्ली और वहम हक़ीक़तों से बड़ी हक़ीक़त मालूम होते हैं। (To me, sleights appear more real than actual scenes, and illusions more real than facts)
Kudos to the India Foundation for the Arts and Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company for backing this offbeat project.
PS: My only reservation about the post-screening discussion was the rather needless exercise of attempting to draw simplistic parallels with Satyajit Ray's epic work "Shatranj Ke Khiladi".
Sadly, the sweeping 'post mortem' on the film made no mention of Munshi Premchand, Ray's inspiration for the film, who sketched an astute parallel between British aspirations and the legendary game, as also the picture of an 1856 Lucknow drugged in the celebration of art and culture in the short-lived regime of Wajid Ali Shah, the tranquil percolating to the lowest echelons of society. Ray retained the paradox in a cinematic flavour – equally focused on the royal checkmate of Wajid Ali Shah, following a significant span of uneasy calm while he was tottering in the fake support of the East India Company.