The abiding politics of poetry and Pyaasa

Dutt’s commentary—through the words of his writer Abrar Alvi and Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics—on the community’s inimical approach to the arts and the artiste segues in with the critique of societal ills. The state of the nation gets addressed through the state of the poet. His personal frustrations run parallel with the political grievances. For Vijay, and Dutt in turn, personal is political and political is personal. So, “art for art’s sake” doesn’t hold meaning for Vijay, nor was it a dictum for Dutt. His films had to make sense of the times they were set in. The hunger and unemployment that Vijay is scorned for writing about run like a thread through Dutt’s work. From the idle Madan (Dev Anand) who takes to gambling in Baazi (1951) to the ace cartoonist Preetam (Dutt)—a brilliant artist, like Vijay—whose shoes have worn out in search of a job in Mr and Mrs ’55 (1955). Through the character of a doctor in this romantic comedy, Dutt talks about how the twin illnesses of hunger and unemployment are forcing the young to seek out sookha kuaan (dry well) or gehraa taalaab (deep pond) (implying death by suicide).When asked about whether he does any work, Vijay replies that he works towards searching for work. Unemployment has turned him so weary that he too talks about suicide—abandoning the world due to sheer helplessness in a song that voices his interminable struggles: “Tang aa chuke hain kashmakash-e-zindagi se hum”. Preetam and Vijay foreshadow the personal and professional despair, disillusionment and decline of another artiste, albeit a privileged one—filmmaker Suresh Sinha in Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959). Dutt’s cinema is seminal for being a perfect meeting ground for both the craft and content. In Pyaasa, the song and dance, the play of light and shade, the camera, the tracking shots, the closeups, the eye contact between the characters, their gazes at each other—each deserves an essay of its own. But most so its depiction of the reality of the newly independent India. It is about cinema trying to document, and understand its times, raising profound questions, not providing instant, readymade solutions.



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