Beyond words

Almost effortlessly, it appeared, the two solitary representatives of neighbouring Bhutan and Pakistan had stolen the show from under the nose of the literary heavyweights who lined the room. It had something to do, perhaps, with their early training: Both Gauhar and Kinga, in India ostensibly for their literary prowess, are at least as conversant with cinema. Together with Gulzar, also present at the conference, they symbolise the blurring of boundaries between literature and cinema, and the coming-of-age of a global audience.

Gauhar throws her head back and laughs throatily when you tell her you like her sense of humour. But it’s a practised laugh and somehow segues with her earlier statement: ‘‘I feel I am an empty shell in which lives many lives.’’

And it’s more than a feeling. Gauhar is at once an op-ed columnist on political and economic affairs for the Dawn group of newspapers in Pakistan, an actor, a teacher of film studies and a novelist with one book (The Scent of Wet Earth in August, Penguin, 2002) on The New York Times bestseller list and a second (No Place for Further Burials) in the works with the Delhi-based publishing company Kali for Women.

‘‘I’ve been writing for exactly half my life,’’ says Gauhar. ‘‘I studied at McGill University in Canada and came back to a Pakistan that was under the very repressive regime of Zia-ul-Haq. People had been robbed of their voice. I had to pick up the pen on their behalf.’’

Although she has continued the columns for 23 years, somewhere along the way, Gauhar realised that language was ‘‘very divisive’’; that’s where her training in film came in handy. It helped that the first television serial she acted in, Koh-e-Kan, had already established her as a star way back in 1984.

‘‘My preoccupation has always been the marginalised, whether on the basis of ethnicity, language or gender,’’ says Gauhar. Her most celebrated piece of cinema, Tibbi Gali, on Lahore’s famed red-light district Heera Mandi, was never screened publicly in Pakistan. Ironically, it was the film that led to the novel Scent of Wet Earth…. Though none of the unlettered real-life protagonists of Tibbi Gali could read the book, Gauhar says the film found acceptance with them.

A line that Bhutan’s Kinga picks up when he talks of his experiments with the medium. ‘‘Cinema is something that happened to me accidentally,’’ says Kinga. ‘‘I was a stage actor with literary training—I translated Romeo and Juliet and Antigone into Dzongkha (Bhutanese) and played small and big roles in their stage productions. Then Khyentse Norbu approached me to translate a film script from English into Dzongkha.’’

Norbu, by now, had captured the international imagination with his exuberant 1999 feature The Cup, a story of Tibetan monks desperate to watch the Football World Cup. And in the unassuming Kinga, he also found the perfect actor to play an itinerant monk who provides the allegorical twist in Travellers and Magicians (2003).

The film was the first ever all-Bhutanese celluloid project, an important landmark in a tiny country where education and entertainment have always been dominated by India. ‘‘Ninety per cent of the cinemas in Bhutan play Bollywood movies. And though a full-fledged film industry is a far cry, the success of Travellers and Magicians has encouraged our burgeoning video film industry to explore the folklore, legends and myths that are typically Bhutanese,’’ says Kinga.

Interestingly, Kinga decided to go back to his first love, words, after the success of the movie. Now a graduate student of Area Studies—a cross-disciplinary approach to a particular community, in his case, the Bhutanese—at Kyoto University, Kinga’s brush with cinema has only served to further his interest in the language of his people. He researches and resurrects the lozey, a narrative of the oral Buddhist tradition.

His decision would have the full support of Gulzar, mobbed and adulated by the high-brow crowd at the conference. ‘‘Cinema was accidental for me, literature is a passion,’’ says the lyricist-cum-director. ‘‘And though I may continue to make films, I will always go back to literature.’’

At 70, Gulzar possesses a clarity about his own future. Kinga is open to going wherever the road takes him. And Gauhar, who turned down Kirron Kher’s role in Khamosh Pani because of its Romanised Urdu script and recently helped set up the first department of film and television studies at the National College of Arts, Lahore, is still seeking ‘‘the one thing that will give me meaning’’. May their journeys never end.