Ismail Merchant - interview with Indian movie producer Ismail Merchant - The Star is India - Interview

Ismail Merchant disproves Rudyard Kipling's prognosis that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." The twain meet in Merchant's voice, the seductive honey tone of an Indian educated in good schools, and in his princely bearing. He invites interviewers not only to opulent meals but into his thoughts and politics. Literate in Indian and European languages, he has written Indian and Italian cookbooks, been compared to Lorenzo de, Medici and Machiavelli, and produced innumerable films in his celebrated collaboration with James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Now he has directed his first full-length feature, In Custody.

Based on Anita Desai's novel, the movie is a rumination on the fading of Muslim courtly life and the art of writing in Urdu, as embodied in Nur (Shashi Kapoor), a drunken old poet too bloated with the success of his youth to struggle into the future; his admirer Deven (Om Puri), a poet forced to support himself by teaching Hindi in a small college, wages a one-man battle to rescue Nur's work from obscurity. The movie features the Urdu poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose work, beloved in the subcontinent, is used in everything from popular Hindi film songs and ads to classical ghazah and qawwalis.

AMEENA MEER: In Custody isn't the first film you've directed, is it?

ISMAIL MERCHANT: No. The very first film I directed was a half-hour short called Mahatma and the Mad Boy [1973]. It was a fictional film about a young boy, a monkey wallah, and his relationship with the Mahatma Gandhi statue on the beach. Politicians have all these high-flown ideas--they love to mouth the slogans of the great people, but in practice, they don't do anything, which is what the great people have taught us. For the soundtrack, l took the Vivaldi concerto "Winter" and turned it into an Indian raga.

Then I did Courtesans of Bombay [1985], about the courtesans who are skilled in poetry, music, dance, and manners and perform for their clients at weddings and births. It was based on a number of women whom I came to know as a young boy. Then I went to this congress house in Bombay. Some of the women there were so talented, but nobody wanted to hear their songs; everyone wanted the Bombay hootchy-kootchy dances, so these classically trained women became pop dancers. The film has a poignancy about these lost arts.

AM: Why did you decide to direct In Custody?

IM: I always wanted to do a film about the Urdu language, which is disappearing. It's the most gracious and expressive language and the poetry is so sublime, the thoughts are so great, that it is impossible to supplant it. When I read Anita Desai's novel six years ago, l thought that I would be able to say so much through the character of Nur, the dying Urdu poet, so I immediately bought the rights to it. It has taken six years since Anita wrote the first draft of the screenplay to get the film made. Some of it I ended up improvising, like the character of the old woman, who sits there and curses and smokes a hookah!

AM: Why did you set it in Bhopal rather than in Delhi?

IM: We'd seen Delhi in movies many times--we [Merchant-Ivory] did our first film, The Householder [1963], there. Also, Delhi is too crowded. We wanted space and serenity and visual beauty. People only know Bhopal as the tragedy of Union Carbide [the 1984 industrial disaster], but when they see the film, they are struck by the beauty of the place.

AM: The Muslim-Hindu situation in India is particularly volatile right now, but you don't deal with politics head-on in the film.

IM: The film is a statement of what politicians are doing, for example, when the haveli [mansion] is demolished and the contractor says, "A businessman from Delhi has bought it." The Delhi businessman is not a businessman but a political person--and it is politicians and political parties who are destroying our culture. But what is important is what people want to share. Whether you are a Hindu or a Muslim, the Urdu language has penetrated all our minds, and the togetherness it has brought is much more than the politicians would ever think. The language the politicians want to remove from the curricula of the schools and colleges still has a power and beauty. Identifying Urdu with the Muslims alone is a fallacy, because there are as many Hindu poets as there are Muslim.

AM: I keep thinking of a time when I had to take some college students visiting from Bombay around Jama Masjid, the main mosque in Delhi. They said: "Oh, we won't go there. That's the Muslim area. It's very dangerous and we'll be robbed or murdered." There's so much antagonism and fear between the people now.

IM: In the 1947 partition, India was divided into Muslims and Hindus. It has taken fifty years for the wounds to heal. I have lived in India and never found anything to be different. But in the past few years, since the BJP [a Hindu fundamentalist party] and other reactionary groups started springing up, it's they who have increased this division.