THE SONG "JAANE TU YA JAANE NA " HAS ENTERED HEARTS IN NORTH AFRICA AND ARAB WORLD

 

"Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na": How a 1973 Kishore Kumar Ballad Became an Unlikely Anthem Across the Arab World and North Africa

"Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na": How a 1973 Kishore Kumar Ballad Became an Unlikely Anthem Across the Arab World and North Africa

Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koyi, 

Yoon hi nahi dil lubhaata koi..  

Jaane tu ya jaane na, 

Maane tu ya maane na.

My Algerian friend in Paris keeps humming this song when I visit  his shop. The Coiffure from Tunisia  plays it often in his shop. Ibrah , the gym instructor living in our neighbourhood does a slow step dance on the lillting beats  of this songs.

In a wedding hall in Algiers, a pianist in a Marrakech riad, a taxi rolling through the 18th arrondissement of Paris at 1 a.m., or a family gathering in Sharjah, the same melody often surfaces. It is not Umm Kulthum, not Fairouz, not Cheb Khaled. It is Kishore Kumar, singing “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” from the 1973 Shashi Kapoor–Sharmila Tagore film ,"Aa Gale Lag Jaa". 

Fifty-two years on, R.D. Burman’s composition has not faded. It has migrated. From Mumbai to Maghreb, from Cairo to the banlieues of Lyon, the song has taken root in Arab and North African cultural life with a tenacity that few non-Arabic songs can claim. This is the story of how it happened — and why it endures.

1. The Bollywood Bridge: 1970s to 1990s

The first conduit was cinema. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Hindi films were a staple on state television and in cinemas across Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the Gulf. Shashi Kapoor, with his urbane charm and expressive eyes, was especially beloved. Aa Gale Lag Jaa was dubbed into Arabic and French, broadcast repeatedly during Eid and summer holidays, and sold on VHS in every  video stall from Casablanca to Damascus.

For a generation, Kishore Kumar’s voice became as familiar as Abdel Halim Hafez’s. The song’s placement in the film : a moment of tender, fated love ,  aligned perfectly with Arab cinematic sensibilities. It was not item-number spectacle; it was Tarab, that Arabic concept of musical ecstasy rooted in longing. The groundwork was laid before satellite TV even existed.

2. Melodic Kinship: Why the Tune Feels Like Home

R.D. Burman’s arrangement is the quiet engine of the song’s crossover. The composition leans on a lilting 6/8 rhythm, soft guitar arpeggios, and a flute motif that mirrors the "Ney"  so central to Arab classical music. The melody moves in minor scales with gentle meend,  slides between notes  that recall Andalusi and malouf traditions.

Kishore Kumar’s delivery avoids ornamentation. He sings straight from the chest, with a conversational ache. To ears raised on Dahmane El Harrachi, Warda, or Sabah Fakhri, that restraint reads as sincerity. The song does not demand to be understood linguistically; it is understood musically. In British parlance: it doesn’t shout, it confides.

3. The Lyrics: Mektoub and Ghorba in Hindi

The lyric, penned by Sahir Ludhianvi, is the other pillar. “Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koyi” or  “You and I share some ancient bond”  translates directly into the Maghrebi and Arab concept of Mektoub: it is written, it is fated. “Yoon hi nahi dil lubhaata koyi” or  “Not just anyone can charm the heart like this”  speaks to a culture where love is rarely casual.

Then comes “Jaane tu ya jaane na, maane tu ya maane na” or  “Whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not”. In regions shaped by labour migration, student exile, and family separation, that line became a proxy for Ghorba,  the ache of distance. For an Algerian in Nanterre phoning home, or a Lebanese nurse in Dubai missing Beirut, the words fit without translation. The song proclaims universality of human emotions.

4. Weddings: The Song as Ritual

Walk into a wedding in Oran, Fez, Sfax, or Beirut, and you will likely hear it. Arab and North African weddings prize the slow dance,  the Zéffa,  the moment of hushed reverence. DJs from Paris to Doha keep “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na”_on the USB stick for precisely that moment. 

Why? Because it does three things at once: it is romantic without being suggestive, it is recognisable across generations, and it carries the weight of fate. The ,"Pehle ka naata" line gives couples  and their parents  a narrative: this is not just a match, it is destiny. In hotels from Gammarth to Agadir, resident pianists play it during dinner service for the same reason. It signals elegance, nostalgia, and cultural fluency.

5. The Diaspora Engine: France as Amplifier

France is where the song’s second life accelerated. With over six million citizens of Maghrebi origin, plus sizeable Lebanese, Egyptian and Syrian communities, France became the transmission belt. In the 1990s, children of immigrants discovered their parents’ Kishore Kumar cassettes. By the 2000s, those songs were being burned to CDs for 3ers ceremonies and fer7 parties.

YouTube and Dailymotion did the rest. A clip of Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore in the rain has 40M+ views, with top comments in French, Arabic, and darija: “La chanson de mariage de mes parents”, “Chaque fois que je l’écoute je pense au bled”. TikTok completed the cycle. Today, #jaanetu and #aagalelagjaa tag videos of Franco-Algerian couples in Saint-Denis, Moroccan henna nights in Marseille, and sunset drives along the Corniche in Ain Diab.

The diaspora did not merely preserve the song; it re-exported it. A trend in Lyon reaches Algiers in 48 hours. A wedding in Bobigny sets the playlist for a wedding in Tlemcen next month.

6. The Pan-Arab Effect: Beyond the Maghreb

While the Maghreb–France axis is the strongest, the song’s reach extends east. In Egypt, where Kishore Kumar is still referred to as “Kishore al-hindī”, the track is played on Nile FM’s Bollywood Hour and at Alexandrian weddings. In Lebanon, it surfaces in the piano bars of Hamra. In the Gulf, South Asian and Arab communities overlap. A Pakistani DJ in Dubai will drop it for an Emirati-Emirati couple because the bride’s mother grew up with it on Dubai TV’s Friday Hindi film slot.

The Arabic music tradition of Taqasim  improvisation within a melodic frame  means listeners are attuned to songs that breathe. “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” breathes. It leaves space. That quality makes it coverable. Oud players in Amman, Rai singers in Oran, and Khaleeji keyboardists in Kuwait have all recorded versions, often blending Hindi and Arabic verses.

7. Technology and Memory: Cassette to TikTok

The song’s journey tracks the technology of memory. 1970s: vinyl and cinema. 1980s: VHS and state TV reruns. 1990s: cassettes in the glovebox of a Peugeot 405. 2000s: burned CDs labelled “Mariage de Samira”. 2010s: YouTube compilations titled “Best of Kishore Kumar , Slowed and  Reverb”. 2020s: TikTok audios tagged “POV: you’re far from home”.

Each format shed listeners who didn’t connect and kept those who did. What remains is an audience that is self-selecting, emotionally invested, and geographically vast.

8. Why It Endures: Seven Core Reasons

1. Melodic Universality: The tune maps onto maqam Bayati and Kurd, scales common in Arab music. No ‘foreign’ notes jar the ear.  

2. Lyrical Fatalism: Mektoub is a shared philosophy. The song articulates it without preaching.  

3. Generational Inheritance: It is a song of parents and grandparents, lending it familial authority. A father who courted his wife to this song expects it at his daughter’s wedding.  

4. Diaspora Utility: It expresses  Ghorba and haneen, homesickness  better than most Arabic pop songs, because it is one step removed. It allows nostalgia without nationalism.  

5. Cinematic Memory: Shashi Kapoor’s softness, Sharmila Tagore’s Sari, the Mumbai rains , these images are coded as ‘romantic’ across the Arab world. The song summons the whole scene.  

6. Ritual Fit: At 3:48, mid-tempo, with a clear build, it is structurally perfect for wedding entrances, first dances, and hotel lobby sets.  

7. Non-Linguistic Emotion : You do not need Hindi to feel it. The Dard in Kishore’s voice, the sigh in the flute, the resolve in the final version in “jaane na” these are legible anywhere.

A Shared Inheritance

“Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” is no longer merely a Bollywood song. In Arab and North African contexts, it has become a piece of shared cultural furniture :  like mint tea, like the sound of the adhan at dusk, like a photo of a 1970s wedding. It belongs to the Algerian father in Drancy who played it on his wedding day in 1984, and to his French-born daughter who chose it for hers in 2026 

The line “Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koyi” turns out to be prophetic. There was some old bond , not between the characters in the film, but between a Bombay studio in 1973 and a living room in Constantine, a taxi in Cairo, a banquet hall in Dubai. Whether the listeners know the literal meaning or not, whether they "maane"  or  "maane na",  the song has already charmed the heart. 

( Avtar Mota )

PS

https://youtu.be/VwnA3HqGhWY?is=7dGeWby-3YzHrSAY

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.

BOOK REVIEW “KASHMIR CALLING” BY MOHAN KRISHEN DHAR

                                                                                   

BOOK REVIEW

 

“KASHMIR CALLING”

By

Mohan Krishen Dhar

 

Publishers: Sabre & Quill Publishers, New Delhi, India

Year of Publication:  May 2026

(Available on Amazon in India at ……….https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0H2YNF497?s=bazaar)

 

Some books come to us like a visitor from the old city, carrying in the folds of his Pheran not merely facts, dates and arguments, but also the fragrance of dried mint, the murmur of Vitasta, the distant sound of a Wanwun, and the memory of a courtyard where elders once spoke of kings, saints, invaders, poets and gardens with equal ease. Mohan Krishen Dhar’s Kashmir Calling is one such book. It does not pretend to be a tightly argued academic history, nor is it merely a nostalgic exercise written by a man looking back at a lost paradise. It is, instead, a cultural panorama: part history, part civilisational reflection, part travelogue, part literary remembrance, and part repository of folk memory.

The very dedication, to all lovers of Kashmir, its beauty, its songs, and to Somadeva, Lalleshwari and Habba Khatoon, announces the author’s inner geography. Dhar is not interested in Kashmir as a tourist brochure of snow and tulips. His Kashmir is a layered civilisational space: Neolithic settlements, Shaivite metaphysics, Buddhist manuscripts, Central Asian routes, Sanskrit literature, Persianised language, folk songs, Mughal gardens, Dogra rule, political wounds, and oral tales living stubbornly among ordinary people. The book’s strength lies in this large embrace.

The opening essay, tracing Kashmir from the Neolithic age, sets the foundation. Dhar moves from the legend of Satisar and Kashyap Rishi to the archaeological evidence of Burzahom. This is important because Kashmir is too often reduced either to paradise imagery or to contemporary politics. Dhar reminds us that the valley was inhabited, shaped, cultivated and imagined thousands of years before the modern nation-state entered the scene. The movement from myth to excavation is handled with affection. He does not discard legend as superstition, nor does he make archaeology dry. He allows both to stand together, as they often do in the Kashmiri mind.

The chapter on Trika Shaivism is perhaps the intellectual heart of the book. Dhar sees Kashmir Shaivism not as a sectarian possession but as a philosophical gift. He discusses Vasugupta, Somananda, Abhinavagupta, Pratyabhijna, Spanda and Agama traditions with evident reverence. More importantly, he sees Trika as a force that helped create Kashmir’s composite culture. His reading of Lalleshwari and Nund Rishi is deeply Kashmiri in spirit: Shiva is not imprisoned in one community, and inner recognition is greater than external identity. The quoted spirit of Lalla, ‘Do not differentiate between Hindu and Musalman; recognise your own self’, is not used as ornament but as the moral centre of the book.

 Dhar’s treatment of Buddhism adds another layer. He travels imaginatively and physically towards Gilgit-Baltistan, Nanga Parbat and the old corridors of movement between Kashmir, Central Asia, Tibet and China. The chapter is at its best when it shows Kashmir as a receiving and transmitting station of ideas. Buddhism comes, stays, debates, transforms, and is transformed. Dhar makes the valuable point that Kashmir did not merely host Buddhism; it contributed to Buddhist thought, manuscripts, monastic culture and transmission. The ‘Gilgit Manuscripts’ become, in his telling, not dead archival material but lamps discovered in a forgotten chamber.

 His chapter on Central Asian influences broadens the map further. Kashmir, in Dhar’s imagination, is not a closed valley. It breathes through the passes. It touches Tibet, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Ladakh, Gilgit and the great Silk Route memory. Crafts, food, language, religion, trade and political anxieties all move across these corridors. This is one of the book’s most useful reminders: Kashmir’s identity was never made by isolation. Its distinctiveness came from contact, absorption and refinement.

The essay on Nehru’s love affair with Kashmir is written with warmth and conviction. Dhar sees Nehru as a son of the soil in an emotional and ancestral sense. Some readers may find the tone admiring, perhaps even indulgent, but it reveals the author’s generation and sensibility. For Dhar, Nehru is not merely a political actor in the Kashmir dispute; he is a civilisationally attached Kashmiri Pandit, a modern Indian statesman, and a man burdened by history. Whether one agrees with all of Dhar’s conclusions or not, the essay has sincerity.

The chapter on Somadeva’s Katha-Sarit-Sagara is among the most charming sections. Dhar writes of Somadeva not as a remote Sanskrit author but as a Kashmiri genius nourished by Vitasta, climate, ritual, story and memory. Here, the book becomes almost lyrical. The river Vitasta is not just water; it is witness, inspiration and rhythm. Dhar understands that Kashmir’s contribution to literature cannot be measured only through royal chronicles or philosophical treatises. It also lives in stories of transformation, animals, Nagas, swan maidens, thieves, lovers, ascetics and clever women. In this sense, the later short stories included in the book do not feel like an appendix. They complete the author’s idea of Kashmir.

 The sections on Kashmiri and Urdu love lyrics, cultural syncretism, spoken languages and dialects are valuable because they move away from kings and doctrines towards voice. Kashmir has always sung its deepest truths. Habba Khatoon’s pain, Lalla’s Vakhs, Sufi utterance, folk ballads, marriage songs, boatmen’s songs and rural idiom carry history differently from official documents. Dhar knows this. He has the instinct of a collector who fears that modernity may flatten these delicate inheritances. His love for language is visible, though the book would have benefited from more systematic transliteration, translation and source notes in some places.

 The chapter on preserving heritage carries an urgency that feels personal. The author is aware that Kashmir’s temples, gardens, manuscripts, shrines, dialects, crafts, songs and oral tales are vulnerable not merely to neglect but to ideological simplification. Heritage here is not stone alone. It is memory, usage, pronunciation, ritual, seasonal rhythm and inherited courtesy. This is where Dhar’s work becomes a quiet act of resistance. He is saying, in effect: do not reduce Kashmir to violence; do not reduce it to politics; do not reduce it to one community’s grief alone; but also do not erase that grief.

 The photo gallery, as described in the preface, brings another dimension. In such books, photographs are not decorative. They function like windows suddenly opened in a long narrative room. A garden, a shrine, a mountain, a river bend, a ruin — each tells the reader that what is being discussed is not abstraction. Kashmir has a body. It has light. It has texture. It has wounds, visible and invisible.

 The stories at the end — “Saviour of Nishat”, “Bonds”, “Mahadev, the Thief”, “The Crow’s Daughter”, “The White Hen”, “How Parvati Condemned Her Five Attendants to Be Reborn on Earth”, and “Upakosa and Her Four Lovers” — bring the book close to the oral fireside tradition. “Mahadev, the Thief”, especially with its idea of excellence even in a morally dubious craft, carries the flavour of old storytelling where wit, audacity and human weakness mingle. “Saviour of Nishat” connects sacrifice with the beauty of a Mughal garden. These stories restore playfulness after the density of history and philosophy.

The greatest merit of Kashmir Calling is its refusal to let Kashmir be seen through a single window. Dhar gives us Burzahom and Lalla, Ashoka and Abhinavagupta, Nanga Parbat and Nishat, Nehru and Somadeva, Persian script and Sanskrit inheritance, folk tales and geopolitical routes. He writes as one who has read, travelled, remembered and suffered. One may challenge him on details, but one cannot doubt his attachment. This book is best read slowly, not as a textbook but as a conversation with an elderly Kashmiri scholar sitting under a Chinar, pointing now to a ruined temple, now to a forgotten manuscript, now to a song sung by village women, now to a road that once led to Central Asia. His voice may sometimes tremble with pain, sometimes rise in anger, and sometimes soften in wonder. But it remains anchored in love.

Mohan Krishen Dhar has been a distinguished Indian journalist and accomplished writer in both English and Hindi. He served as Bureau Chief and later Diplomatic Editor of The Hindustan Times and also contributed to leading international newspapers, including The New York Times and Le Monde. Widely travelled, he gained broad international experience through visits to many countries across Asia, Europe, Russia and the United States. Born in Kashmir, he was deeply inspired by its natural beauty, rich traditions and cultural heritage. His extensive study of Kashmir’s folklore, literature, festivals and legends resulted in several bestselling Hindi books admired for their lucid prose and vivid style, earning him numerous literary honours.

Dhar writes with the rare authority of a scholar, the sensitivity of a storyteller, and the observational depth of an accomplished journalist. In Kashmir Calling, he weaves history, philosophy, folklore, travel and memory into a richly textured narrative that captures the soul of Kashmir in all its civilisational complexity. His prose moves effortlessly from the lyrical to the erudite, illuminating ancient traditions and living cultures with equal grace. Dhar possesses an exceptional gift for transforming historical and cultural material into vivid, deeply humane storytelling. The result is a work of remarkable intellectual breadth and emotional resonance that lingers long after the final page.

Kashmir Calling is therefore a call not only to Kashmiris but to all who believe that cultures survive through remembrance. It asks us to listen before the songs fade, to read before manuscripts turn brittle, to visit before ruins collapse, and to recognise, in the true Pratyabhijna sense, the Self hidden beneath history’s dust. For lovers of Kashmir, this book is not merely informative; it is an act of remembrance, a recovery of civilisational memory, and a meditation on cultural continuity. Erudite yet deeply humane, it compels the reader to engage with Kashmir not as an abstraction of politics, but as a living reservoir of philosophy, art and historical consciousness. I would strongly and unreservedly recommend this work to scholars, students, and all serious readers seeking to encounter the deeper intellectual and spiritual heritage of Kashmir in its full historical resonance.

 

(Avtar Mota)

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.

A SMALL TRIBUTE TO BASHIR BADR

                                                                                      

A SMALL TRIBUTE TO BASHIR BADR

 Bashir Badr is no more. He was a poet who did not write poetry from the minarets of abstraction. He wrote it from the dust of courtyards, the ache of bus journeys, the quiet grief of waiting rooms, and the stubborn hope that survives unrequited love. The passing of Bashir Badr marks not merely the departure of a celebrated Urdu poet, but the quiet extinguishing of one of the gentlest lights in the literary consciousness of the Indian subcontinent. Some poets astonish through grandeur, through intellectual complexity, or through the sheer architecture of language. Bashir Badr achieved something far rarer. He entered the emotional bloodstream of ordinary people. His verses travelled without passports through drawing rooms, tea stalls, railway platforms, university corridors, and lonely midnight conversations. He was not a poet confined to anthologies or academic seminars; he was a living presence in memory and speech. His couplets became part of the emotional vocabulary of everyday life.

To speak of Bashir Badr is to speak of intimacy. His poetry never announced itself with the authority of doctrine. It arrived softly, like remembered rain upon an old courtyard, or like the scent of jasmine crossing a summer evening. Indeed, perhaps the most fitting metaphor for his literary presence is fragrance itself. Bashir Badr was a fragrance that wafted freely in the air for all to benefit from. One did not need specialised learning to appreciate him. His poetry belonged equally to the labourer returning home after dusk and to the scholar immersed in literary criticism. Like fragrance, his verse moved invisibly yet unmistakably, entering hearts without ceremony and remaining there long after the moment had passed.

What distinguished him from many contemporaries was his refusal to treat poetry as an exercise in obscurity. Urdu Ghazal tradition, shaped profoundly by Persian aesthetics, has often delighted in elaborate metaphor, ornate diction, and philosophical abstraction. Bashir Badr inherited that tradition yet consciously simplified its language without diminishing its emotional depth. In his hands, the Ghazal shed unnecessary embellishment and returned to human experience. Consider his celebrated line:

“koyi haath bhi na milayega jo gale milogay  tapaak se

Ye Naye Mizaj ka shahar hai zara faaslon se mila karo ”

 The diction is startlingly plain. There is no rhetorical flourish, no lexical extravagance. Yet within this simplicity lies an entire sociology of modern alienation. The couplet warns against excessive openness in a world increasingly governed by suspicion and emotional distance. Bashir Badr understood that the deepest truths often arrive unclothed. Like the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who sought poetry in “the real language of men”, Badr trusted simplicity as an instrument of profundity. Both poets recognised that emotional authenticity possesses greater permanence than decorative sophistication.

Poetry Rooted in Lived Experience

Bashir Badr’s greatness lies not merely in style but in witnessing. His poetry emerges from lived experience rather than literary performance. One senses throughout his work the presence of actual streets, actual separations, and actual evenings endured in silence. He transformed personal memory into collective recognition. When he wrote:

“Ujale apni yaadon ke hamaare saath rehne do,

na jaane kis gali mein zindagi ki shaam ho jaaye”

 He articulated not theatrical melancholy but existential vulnerability. The couplet carries the weariness of a man acquainted with uncertainty. Memories become a source of illumination against the approaching dusk of life. There is tenderness here, but also resignation. Bashir Badr never sentimentalised suffering; he dignified it. This quality invites comparison with Philip Larkin, another poet of urban solitude and quiet emotional fracture. Like Larkin, Bashir Badr possessed an extraordinary sensitivity to loneliness embedded within modern life. Yet where Larkin often descended into scepticism and emotional austerity, Badr preserved warmth. Even in disappointment, his poetry retained faith in tenderness. His verse recognised pain without surrendering to bitterness. One of his most haunting couplets captures the paradox of urban proximity and emotional estrangement:

“issi shahr mein kayi saal se meray kuchh kareebi azeez hain,

unhe meri koyi khabar nahi mujhe unka koyi pata nahin”

 In these lines, Bashir Badr distilled the metropolitan condition with astonishing economy. Human beings inhabit the same city, perhaps even the same neighbourhoods, yet remain existentially absent from one another’s lives. The tragedy of modern civilisation lies not in physical distance but in emotional disconnection. The couplet recalls the emotional landscapes of T. S. Eliot’s urban poetry, particularly the spiritual isolation depicted in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Yet where Eliot’s fragmentation is intellectually dense and symbolically layered, Bashir Badr achieves similar emotional resonance through conversational clarity.

His poetry carried the atmosphere of post-Partition India as well. Though rarely overtly political, his work bears the shadow of displacement, communal fracture, and civilisational anxiety. Bashir Badr belonged to that generation for whom memory itself became a homeland. Yet he refused polemic. Instead, he allowed human feeling to reveal historical wounds indirectly. In this restraint lay his moral strength.

 The Democratisation of the Ghazal

One of Bashir Badr’s most enduring contributions was the democratisation of the Urdu Ghazal. He brought the form closer to everyday speech without vulgarising it. He proved that refinement need not depend upon obscurity. His poetry restored accessibility to a literary tradition that sometimes risked becoming insulated within elite cultural circles. This is why his couplets are remembered orally rather than merely textually. People quote Bashir Badr not because they studied him, but because they lived through him. His verses accompany heartbreaks, departures, reconciliations, and solitary evenings. They survive because they are usable truths.

"Dushmani jam kar karo lekin ye gunjaish rahe,

 Jab kabhi hum dost ho jayein to sharminda na hon".

 In this remarkable couplet, Bashir Badr transforms a simple reflection on enmity into a profound meditation upon the ethical limits of human conduct. The verse suggests that conflict is an unavoidable condition of existence, yet true wisdom lies not in the intensity of opposition but in preserving the moral possibility of reconciliation. Beneath its conversational simplicity resides a deeply philosophical insight: human relationships are transient, mutable, and never wholly fixed within the categories of friend or foe. By urging restraint even in moments of bitterness, the poet affirms a civilisational ideal in which dignity, memory, and compassion outlast anger itself. The couplet, therefore, becomes not merely advice about social behaviour, but a subtle statement on the impermanence of human divisions and the enduring necessity of grace.

Similarly, moving is the couplet:

“Musafir hain hum bhi musafir ho tum bhi,

Kisi mod par phir mulaqat hogi”

 There is remarkable grace in these lines. Life becomes a journey marked by temporary separations and unforeseen reunions. The philosophy is simple yet humane. Bashir Badr’s poetry repeatedly returns to impermanence, but never with despair. Rather, he suggests that transience itself lends beauty to human encounters. In this regard, one might compare him with Thomas Hardy, whose poetry often meditates upon time, separation, and fragile human continuity. Yet Bashir Badr differs in temperament. Hardy’s universe is frequently governed by cosmic indifference, whereas Badr’s retains emotional reciprocity. His poetry whispers consolation even while acknowledging loss.

The Illusion of Proximity: Bashir Badr on Surface-Level Intimacy

The couplet,“Aankhon mein raha dil mein utar kar nahin dekha, Kashti ke musafir ne samandar nahin dekha”, “He remained in the eyes but never descended into the heart; the boat’s traveller never truly saw the ocean” functions as a philosophical indictment of superficial engagement in human relationships. Bashir Badr deploys the maritime metaphor with intellectual precision: the 'Kashti ka musafir',   though physically situated upon the' Samandar', mistakes mere contact for comprehension, content with the visible surface while remaining estranged from the oceanic depths. Psychologically, this mirrors the condition of modern intimacy, wherein individuals may inhabit each other’s immediate perceptual field, the "Aankhon", or eyes,  yet refuse the existential vulnerability required to 'Dil mein utarna', to descend into the heart’s uncharted interiors. The couplet thus exposes a central paradox of closeness: proximity without penetration, presence without perception. It suggests that true knowledge of another demands not spatial nearness but ontological immersion, a willingness to abandon the safety of the boat’s deck for the unfathomable abyss beneath. In this sense, Badr critiques the complacency of relational spectatorship, arguing that to love or understand without plumbing the other’s depth is to remain, philosophically and emotionally, a stranger to the very ocean one claims to traverse.

The Smile as Masquerade: Bashir Badr on the Ethics of Concealment

The couplet, “Ye hansi bhi koyi naqaab hai jahaan chaaha hum ne gira liya / Kabhi unka dard chhupa gaye kabhi apna dard chhupa liya” “This smile too is a kind of mask we wore wherever we pleased / Sometimes we hid their pain, sometimes we hid our own”  articulates a profound philosophical anthropology of emotional performance. Bashir Badr recasts the Hansi, or smile, not as a spontaneous expression of joy but as a deliberate Naqaab, a mask donned with agency and intentionality, thereby destabilising the assumed transparency of human affect. Intellectually, the couplet interrogates the social contract of appearances: the smile becomes an ethical instrument, deployed alternately in altruism and self-preservation. To 'Unka dard chhupa gaye'  reveals a compassionate deception, a Levinasian responsibility for the Other’s vulnerability wherein one’s countenance absorbs another’s sorrow to spare them exposure; conversely, 'Apna dard chhupa liya' exposes the existential burden of the self, where joy is performed to maintain social equilibrium or to evade the ontological weight of one’s own suffering. Thus, Badr situates the human subject within a theatre of affect, where the face is both stage and curtain. The philosophical implication is unsettling: authenticity itself becomes negotiable, and intersubjective life is mediated by calibrated concealments. In this economy of masks, the smile emerges as neither lie nor truth, but as a liminal gesture, a civilising veil that sustains community while quietly archiving the unspoken sorrows of both self and world.

When Worship Becomes a Moral Contradiction

Bashir Badr’s haunting couplet, “Yahaan ek bachche ke ḳhuun se jo likha hua hai usse paḍhein, tera keertan abhipaap hai abhi mera sajda haraam hai”, is not merely a lament over communal riots; it is a profound philosophical interrogation of religion itself. Badr asks us to read what has been written in the blood of a child, for there are moments in history when human suffering becomes a more authentic revelation than any sacred text. The image is deeply unsettling because it inverts the hierarchy upon which organised religion often rests. Instead of scripture judging humanity, humanity’s violated innocence judges scripture and its adherents. The murdered child becomes the ultimate moral philosopher, exposing the abyss between religious profession and ethical conduct.

Badr’s insight resonates with a timeless philosophical truth: no act of worship can compensate for the destruction of human life. Ritual belongs to the realm of symbols; a child’s life belongs to the realm of reality. When symbols are preserved at the cost of reality, religion descends into idolatry of its own forms. In declaring kirtan to be paap and sajda to be haram, the poet is not attacking Hinduism or Islam; rather, he is defending the very essence of both. He reminds us that God cannot be approached through ceremonies stained by indifference to suffering. The ethical claim of the innocent precedes every theological claim. Before one becomes a Hindu or a Muslim, one is confronted by the face of another human being whose vulnerability imposes a moral obligation. The couplet also exposes the tragic paradox of communal violence. Men kill in the name of God and then seek absolution from the very God in whose name they have killed. Such worship is self-contradictory. It assumes that the Divine can be honoured through devotion, even as His creation is desecrated. Yet if God is the source of all life, then every drop of innocent blood constitutes a metaphysical rebellion against Him. The poet, therefore, shifts the locus of the sacred from temple and mosque to the violated body of a child. The true blasphemy is not the neglect of ritual but the abandonment of compassion.

At its deepest level, the couplet articulates a philosophy of moral primacy. Ethics is not a branch of religion; it is the condition that makes religion meaningful. Whenever worship ceases to deepen our humanity, it loses its spiritual legitimacy. The blood of a child becomes the final court of appeal before which all doctrines, identities and rituals must stand trial. In that tribunal, no community can claim innocence, no creed can seek refuge in dogma, and no prayer can escape judgement. The poet’s message is stark and universal: when innocence is sacrificed, religion loses its voice, and silence becomes holier than prayer.

The Permanence of Simplicity

What ultimately makes Bashir Badr unforgettable is his understanding that poetry need not shout to endure. He recognised that whispers often outlive thunder. In an age increasingly attracted to spectacle and linguistic exhibitionism, he chose quietness. His art rested upon emotional precision rather than intellectual display. He trusted the reader’s heart. This trust explains his extraordinary popularity across generations. Young lovers discovered themselves in him. Elderly readers found companionship in his melancholy. Even those unfamiliar with the technicalities of Urdu prosody recognised the humanity within his lines.  Badr restored dignity to ordinary feelings. He taught that poetry’s highest task is not to impress but to illuminate.

Like Wordsworth, he found profundity in common speech. Like Larkin, he chronicled modern loneliness. Like Hardy, he understood the ache of transience. Yet despite these comparisons, Bashir Badr remains uniquely himself. His poetry carries the fragrance of Indian evenings, of fading letters, of conversations interrupted by silence, of resilience quietly maintained against despair.

He leaves behind no elaborate philosophical system, no difficult intellectual manifesto. Instead, he leaves mirrors. In those mirrors we encounter ourselves: bruised yet hopeful, wounded yet capable of tenderness, lonely yet still searching for connection. Few poets achieve such intimacy with their readers. Fewer still sustain it across decades.

Bashir Badr gave language back to the streets and gave the streets a claim to eternity. He reminded us that literature is not merely an academic enterprise but an emotional inheritance shared by humanity. His couplets will continue to drift through gatherings, classrooms, radio programmes, and solitary recollections long after literary fashions have altered. They will endure because they arise from truths that do not age. The finest poets do not merely write about life; they enlarge our capacity to feel it. Bashir Badr did precisely that. He was a fragrance in the cultural air, gentle, pervasive, restorative, asking for nothing, belonging to everyone. And like all true fragrances, his presence will linger even after the flower itself has disappeared from sight.

Bashir Badr, born in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, on 15 February 1935, was celebrated for his unparalleled command of Urdu literature, especially the Ghazal, through which he captured the delicacy of love, separation, memory, and the quiet sorrows of human existence with remarkable grace. Equally at ease in Hindi and English, he stood as a luminous representative of the subcontinent's shared literary and cultural heritage. His poetry possessed the rare ability to transform ordinary emotions into timeless philosophical reflections, touching hearts across generations and boundaries. Though the poet has departed from this world, his verses continue to breathe in the silence of lonely evenings, in the tenderness of remembrance, and in the unspoken emotions of countless.

 

( Avtar Mota )

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
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BOOK REVIEW: “AWTAR KAUL: THE (IN)COMPLETE STORY" (RESURRECTING A LOST VISIONARY OF INDIAN CINEMA)

BOOK REVIEW: “AWTAR KAUL: THE (IN)COMPLETE STORY"

(RESURRECTING A LOST VISIONARY OF INDIAN CINEMA)

 BY VINOD KAUL 

 Publishers: Publication Division, GOI.

Price: Rs329/-

Year of Publication: May 2026

Available at: Publication Division Sales Centres at New Delhi, Pune, Kolkata, Chennai, Lucknow, Patna, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Thiruvanathapuram

The book is also available at 

 https://www.mystore.in/en/product/awtar-kaul-english-?view_site=1

 Some books merely narrate a life, and some books perform the far more difficult task of rescuing a life from oblivion. Awtar Kaul: ‘The (In)Complete Story’ belongs decisively to the latter category. Written with remarkable tenderness, intellectual sincerity, and archival devotion by Vinod Kaul, this volume is not simply a biography of the gifted filmmaker Awtar Krishna Kaul; it is an act of cultural reclamation. Spread across 284 pages, the book is thoughtfully divided into two parts. Part I comprises 14 engaging chapters that trace the filmmaker’s journey through birth, childhood, education, struggles, and professional training, while also offering insightful accounts of 27 Down and Anne Kaul, the American wife of Awtar Krishna Kaul. Part II brings together a collection of essays penned by individuals who were closely associated with the filmmaker and witnessed his creative journey at close quarters. Rich in detail and emotion, the volume emerges not merely as a biographical work but as an expansive archive of memories, reflections, and cinematic history. In every sense, the book is a monumental compilation, a labour of profound love, commitment, and dedication. In recovering Awtar Kaul from the margins of public memory, the author simultaneously restores a fragment of Indian cinematic history that ought never to have been forgotten.

Awtar Kaul’s ‘27 Down’  received national and international recognition, including the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi and recognition at Locarno, yet its maker slipped into a silence that Indian cinema should have never allowed. This book tries to correct that silence. It brings Awtar out from dusty family trunks, old photographs, newspaper cuttings, memories of relatives, recollections of collaborators, and the shadows of a film that continued to travel even after its creator was gone in a tragic accident at a very young age.

Some artists vanish not because their work lacked brilliance, but because history itself is careless. Awtar Kaul remains one of the most tragic examples of this neglect. His singular masterpiece, 27 Down, stands today as one of the most lyrical and psychologically acute films to emerge from the Indian New Wave movement of the 1970s. Yet the premature death of its creator at the age of thirty-five condemned him to an undeserved obscurity. Vinod Kaul’s book is therefore more than a familial tribute; it is an intervention against amnesia. What distinguishes this work immediately is the author’s prose style. Vinod Kaul writes with a rare emotional intelligence, restrained yet deeply affecting, elegiac without descending into sentimentality. His narrative voice possesses the quiet patience of remembrance itself. The book moves not with the mechanical rhythm of a conventional biography, but with the layered texture of memory: recollections unfolding through photographs, conversations, silences, family anecdotes, letters, fragments of place, and the lingering afterlife of cinema. One senses throughout that the author is engaged not merely in writing, but in searching.

Particularly admirable is the manner in which the book restores Awtar Kaul first as a human being before approaching him as a filmmaker. The early chapters set in Srinagar are among the finest sections of the work. The early chapter on “Gash-Bab and Taat’s Unbound Affection” is among the most touching portions of the book. Through the figures of Vidya Dhar and Rajrani, the author recreates not only Awtar’s childhood but also an entire Kashmiri social world. The details are small but fragrant: the wooth, the Thokur Kuth, walnut-wood chairs, a grandmother hiding an extra piece of meat in rice for her beloved grandson. These are not decorative details. They are emotional evidence. They tell us where Awtar’s inner tenderness may have been born. Through vivid depictions of Nawakadal, the Jhelum, the Matamaal, family rituals, Kashmiri domestic spaces, and the affectionate figures of grandparents and relatives, Vinod Kaul reconstructs an entire civilisational atmosphere. These passages possess anthropological richness as well as emotional warmth. The details: walnut-wood furniture, kitchen rituals, Kashmiri idiom, hidden gestures of affection, function not as decorative nostalgia but as cultural memory preserved in prose.

The duskier chapters dealing with Delhi are rendered with equal honesty. Vinod Kaul deserves enormous credit for refusing hagiography. He does not conceal the instability, domestic violence, emotional deprivation, and hardship that marked Awtar’s formative years. The portrait that emerges is therefore not mythic but profoundly human: a wounded, sensitive young man attempting to survive humiliation without surrendering his inwardness. The image of the adolescent Awtar spending a night on a railway platform before finding work at a tea stall is devastating precisely because it is narrated without melodramatic excess.

These experiences illuminate, in retrospect, the emotional architecture of 27 Down. The film’s silences, alienation, restraint, and muted despair begin to appear not merely aesthetic choices but existential truths. Vinod Kaul perceptively suggests that Awtar transformed private suffering into a cinematic atmosphere. Rather than converting pain into rhetorical drama, he distilled it into mood, rhythm, and visual solitude. This insight alone makes the book indispensable for serious students of Indian cinema.

The sections concerning Awtar’s years in New York are equally compelling. Here, the book acquires the texture of an immigrant artist’s Bildungsroman. A Class IV employee in the Ministry of External Affairs abandons security for artistic uncertainty, studies filmmaking abroad, drives taxis, works odd jobs, reads voraciously, and slowly fashions himself into a filmmaker of uncommon sensitivity. These chapters reveal the immense discipline that underlay Awtar’s artistry. Talent, the book reminds us, is often less a gift than an endurance.

One of the most moving aspects of the volume is its treatment of Anne Kaul.  Anne Sulzer, Awtar’s American wife, could easily have remained a footnote in a male artist’s story. Vinod Kaul refuses that injustice. He gives her space, dignity, and affection. He presents her as the unseen companion who supported Awtar’s dream and made possible, in emotional terms, the making of 27 Down. The book is dedicated to her, and rightly so.  Anne Kaul emerges as a figure of emotional strength, loyalty, and quiet sacrifice. The dignity with which the author reconstructs her life, widowhood, and enduring attachment to the Kaul family gives the book one of its deepest emotional resonances. The dedication to Anne feels not ceremonial but morally earned.

The book also gives necessary attention to Raakhee’s character and the film’s presentation of the urban working woman. This matters because 27 Down was not merely a male journey of alienation. It also carried a woman who had steel, intelligence, and emotional complexity. In mainstream Hindi cinema of that time, women were often trapped inside synthetic images. 27 Down gave its female character a more lived reality. That is one reason the film has not aged like many films of its period. It still feels observant. It still feels modern.

For scholars and enthusiasts of cinema, the chapters on the making of 27 Down are immensely valuable. Vinod Kaul carefully situates the film within the broader movement of Indian parallel cinema while also preserving the intensely collaborative nature of filmmaking itself. The book places the film in the context of the Indian New Wave and the Film Finance Corporation, but it does not reduce it to a textbook entry. It shows the living network around the film: Ramesh Bakshi’s literary source, A.K. Bir’s cinematography, Raakhee’s presence, M.K. Raina, railway spaces, Bombay’s working life, and the visual grammar that gave the film its distinction. This is an elegant critical insight and one of the book’s most memorable formulations.

The chapter on July 20, 1974, is painful to read. Awtar, worried about arranging travel to Locarno after the selection of ‘27 Down’, attends a gathering, goes near the sea, and then tragedy enters. The tragedy of Awtar Kaul’s death in 1974 is narrated with admirable restraint. Vinod Kaul avoids the temptation of myth-making. He presents conflicting accounts, uncertainties, and archival traces with sobriety, allowing the pathos of the event to emerge organically. Such discipline enhances the credibility of the work. The result is not legend, but tragedy in its classical sense: a gifted life interrupted precisely at the threshold of recognition.

The inclusion of essays by critics, scholars, and filmmakers in the latter half of the volume broadens the book’s intellectual scope considerably. These contributions ensure that the work does not remain confined to familial remembrance alone. Instead, they position Awtar Kaul within the evolving discourse of Indian film history, aesthetics, pedagogy, and archival recovery. The intergenerational nature of these reflections is particularly significant, for artistic legacies survive only when they continue to provoke younger minds.

Ultimately, the enduring power of ‘Awtar Kaul: The (In)Complete Story’ lies in its moral seriousness. Vinod Kaul has written this book with love, but not blind love. He has opened painful family rooms. He has searched the archives. He has spoken to people. He has restored Anne. He has placed 27 Down back on the tracks. Above all, he has reminded us that neglect is also a kind of death, and remembrance is a kind of justice.  And Vinod Kaul understands that remembrance itself is an ethical act. He writes not only to honour an uncle, but to resist the cultural negligence that so often buries gifted artists beneath the noise of commercial history. He has restored to us a filmmaker of rare sensitivity, a Kashmiri intellectual world now fading into memory, and a story of artistic struggle marked equally by fragility and grace. And as a recovery mission, the book  succeeds. It succeeds because after reading it, Awtar Kaul is no longer only “the director of 27 Down.” He becomes a boy of Srinagar, a wounded son, a student in New York, a husband loved by Anne, a demanding filmmaker, a brother, a nephew’s obsession, and finally a symbol of what Indian cinema lost too early.

Some lives remain unfinished; yet their incompleteness becomes part of their radiance. This book gathers that scattered radiance with extraordinary care. It deserves to be read widely, preserved seriously, and recognised as one of the most important acts of cinematic remembrance in recent years.

 

( Avtar Mota )

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.

ALBERT CAMUS: VOCATION AND LIVELIHOOD

                                        

                ( Albert  Camus in his Paris Office ) 

 

Albert Camus: Literature As Vocation, Journalism and Publishing as Livelihood

For Camus, writing was never incidental. From his early twenties he kept the Carnets ( notebooks) , drafted plays like Caligula by 1938, and conceived the “cycles” of the Absurd, Revolt and Love that would structure L’Étranger, Le Mythe de Sisyphe_, La Peste and L’Homme révolté. He organised his days to write each morning and called himself a writer long before the public did. The impression that literature was “part-time” comes only from the fact that, until his mid-30s, he needed paid employment to survive. The jobs were the support structure; the books were the purpose.

Engagements and Primary Income Sources: Period Wise

1938–1940: Algiers

He worked as a journalist at  Alger républicain and Soir républicain . Wrote 1,000+ articles, court reports, and editorials. This was his salary.Evenings he devoted to writing the manuscripts of L’Étranger and  Caligula.

1940–1942: Occupied France

He did private tutoring, proofreading, and odd jobs. It was a period of struggle. However, during this period he finished  L’Étranger and  Le Mythe de Sisyphe. He lived partly on his wife Francine’s teaching income.

1943–1947: Paris 

He became editor-in-chief of the newspaper Combat. Joined this clandestine Resistance paper in 1943, ran it after Liberation. Wrote 165+ editorials. This made him a public figure and he met his expenses from this income.

1943–1960: Paris

He joined Éditions Gallimard.  He was hired as a manuscript reader in late 1943. In 1945 became director of the “Espoir” collection and a member of the reading committee. Kept an office at Rue Sébastien-Bottin until his death. At Gallimard, he was paid per manuscript or a small retainer. In 1944 that equalled 2,000–3,000 old francs per month , roughly €300–€450 in today’s money, a schoolteacher’s wage, barely enough in war-time Paris. At this point ,Combat was his real income. Over the next 13 years, as he became a senior editor, his Gallimard pay rose. By 1957, France-Observateur reports that senior Gallimard editors earned 120,000 francs/month, and Camus was at that level  roughly €3,000–€3,500/month in 2026 terms.

Combat was also a proper salaried post.Estimates from Olivier Todd and Herbert Lottman put it at 50,000 old francs/month in 1947, rising to 100,000–120,000 old francs/month by 1955. In 2026 terms: €1,800–€2,200/month in 1947, €3,000–€3,500/month by 1955.

Author Royalties: 1942–1960

In 1942, L’Étranger brought reputation but modest money. La Peste  in 1947 sold 100,000 copies in months and made him financially secure.

Theatre: 1940–1950

Adapted, directed and staged  Caligula, Les Justes, L’État de siège. Box-office and performance rights added to his income.

Nobel Prize: 1957–1960

 

He earned 175,000 Swedish kronor ≈ 13 million old francs, about $33,600 USD in 1957. That’s roughly €350,000–€400,000 in 2026 terms. He bought the house in Lourmarin and invested the rest.

He was middle-class, not rich. He and Francine shared a two-room flat and worried about heating bills. After La Peste, L’Étranger had sold 250,000+ copies by 1950. At a standard 10% royalty, Camus earned 5 million old francs from it alone  equivalent to 4–5 years of his Gallimard salary. From this point, book royalties dwarfed his editor’s pay.

Camus refused university chairs and ministry posts. The Gallimard position was ideal: intellectual work, contact with writers, afternoons free, and no political compromise. He told Jean Grenier that the salary was “sufficient and it leaves me free.” Mornings were for his own manuscripts; 2 p.m.–6 p.m. at Gallimard. The Nobel Prize in 1957 made him independently wealthy. Yet he stayed at Gallimard until the car crash in January 1960. The job was identity, not necessity.

Literature was Camus’s vocation from the start, but journalism and publishing were his livelihood until La Peste made him self-sufficient at 34. His Gallimard salary of roughly €3,000/month in today’s terms was a solid bourgeois income in 1950s Paris, but by then, it was  a fraction of what his novels earned. He kept the post for discipline and independence, not for money. As he wrote in 1951: “I have no taste for what is called a career. I have a taste for writing.” The salary kept the lights on; the books made the light.

Financial Support to His Mother

Camus supported his mother financially throughout his adult life. Once he began working, first as a clerk, then journalist , he sent money home. Biographer Olivier Todd notes Camus “struggled all his life with irreconcilable conflicts between his loyalty to family and his passionate nature.” His Carnets and letters show he was conscious of his mother’s situation. He said he wrote in plain, simple language “because of his mother… He wanted to write in a language that would not feel like a stranger to the silent, illiterate woman waiting in the Belcourt apartment.”

When the Nobel was announced, his first thought was of two people: his teacher Louis Germain and his mother. In his Nov 19, 1957 letter to Germain he wrote: “But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was  .....none of all this would have happened.” 

His mother remained dependent on him. She was still living in Algiers. Camus died in a car crash Jan 4, 1960; his mother died of natural causes in Algiers in September 1960. He was her main support until the end. He regularly sent money to his mother from the time he started earning, and the prize gave him financial security that allowed him to keep supporting her.

( Avtar Mota )

Sources

1. Olivier Todd: Albert Camus: A Life 

2. Herbert R. Lottman: Albert Camus: A Biography_ 

3. Camus Carnets : Three posthumously published notebooks covering 1935–1959. In English: Notebooks 1935-1942, Notebooks 1942-1951, Notebooks 1951-1959.  

4. Correspondence with teacher/philosopher Jean Grenier and publisher friend Michel Gallimard.

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.