Getting into Ghalib’s mind

Manpriya Singh

Pull over an average Joe ambling down the street and ask him about Mirza Ghalib. The name first and foremost brings to the mind some great couplets, followed by wine and women and then life’s lessons, and timeless philosophy. There's something beyond that image that documentary filmmaker Beenu Rajpoot wants to build onto, through her latest film Kaa'ba-e-Hindostan, which happens to be Ghalib's ode to the city of Banaras Charagh-E-Dair. The fact that he was secular, he had a vision for everything that touched his life.

“Even hardcore Ghalib fans didn’t know that he was in love with the city of Banaras. Of all the cities we’ve screened this documentary at, 90 per cent of the people didn’t know that he has penned as many as 108 poems in the Charagh-E-Dair masnavi. The masnavi was originally penned down in Persian and revealed his true feelings about the city of Banaras,” she shares, having just finished screening her documentary in the city, courtesy Chandigarh Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Ghalib as she discovered

Coming back to the number 108, the number of poems that is, that too was kept in mind after the sacred belief to do with the number of beads found in a string used for prayer. With an intention to educate a little and entertain a little, and after a year of research, the documentary came into being. “It also brings to the fore Ghalib’s philosophical and intellectual vision about Banaras.”

Rather than she choosing the subjects for her documentaries, it’s the subjects that choose her. “While I was making a documentary on Shovana Narayan, it was her performance on Charagh-E-Dair that put me on the quest for Ghalib.” She adds, “But it has to be something that people don’t know about and something that people might be interested in.”

Popularising parallel medium

Howsoever informative, documentaries continue to be a parallel media rather than mainstream. She acknowledges the fact that it has limited reach, so much so that, “It is discouraging also sometimes. We need to have a specific 24-hour national channel for documentaries and short films. That will change things considerably. Other than literature, documentaries are the only way of preserving history.”

Coming up are two more docu-dramas, with the first being Main Hindi Hoon, the journey of Hindi and the second being a biography of Sufi singer Gurmeet Bawa.