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

75 years since China annexed Tibet Generation of the world's 2.5 million Tibetans are marking the 75th anniversary of the day in 1949 when Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army marched into Tibet and annexed the territory.

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.

At its core is a liberal imagination — receptive rather than programmatic — drawing without anxiety from Vedantic reflection, Sufi inwardness, Persian lyricism, Hindi kavita and everyday idiom. These do not merely accumulate; they circulate. Each register enters, alters, and is altered in turn. What emerges is not collage but continuity; a language aware of its own crossings.