The many tongues of a single story

Mahmood Farooqui’s Dastan-e-Guru Dutt combines anecdote and Hindi film history for a reinterpretation of the legendary auteur’s life

- Rajeev Srivastava

On this day in history, Oct 24, 1951, the representatives of the Tibetan government signed the Seventeen Point Agreement, after the Tibetan army was defeated in Chamdo by the PLA. It was the first time in history that a Tibetan delegation signed a document that recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Above: The cover of the British magazine Picture Post from November 1950, showing a Tibetan mother and child. The cover story was titled 'The Menace to Tibet'. Inside, the magazine reported on the Chinese invasion of Tibet. 'The Chinese are already in Tibet,' the magazine reported. 'The Dalai Lama is a boy of 15. The Chinese are already in Tibet.'

Mahmood Farooqui’s Dastan-e-Guru Dutt, now published in Hindi by Rajkamal Prakashan, is a significant addition to writing on Guru Dutt — perhaps the first substantial work on the filmmaker in the linguistic register his cinema itself inhabited.

In his introduction, Farooqui acknowledges earlier chroniclers, and yet his own telling feels less like a late arrival than a patient settling-in. I watched a performance at the India Habitat Centre: conceived in two parts, it ran close to three hours, its ambition matching its length.

On the page, the experience turns inward. Hindi readers are already attuned to Urdu’s cadence. They read Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Mir Taqi Mir, Jaun Elia in Devanagari; they have long inhabited the blended idiom of Munshi Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Krishan Chander. Farooqui writes from within this inheritance — accessible yet edged, fluid yet carrying Manto’s tensile sharpness.