Book review: 'Habib Tanvir Memoirs'

Book: Habib Tanvir Memoirs
Translated by Mahmood Farooqui
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Pages: 400
Price: Rs500

Habib Ahmed Khan — Tanvir was his takhallus — started writing his autobiography when he was past 80, and hoped to write three volumes.  This was a perfectly valid ambition for a man who achieved so much, lived a rich life and had a prodigious memory.

Unfortunately, the reader gets just the first volume that ends in 1954, before his rise to eminence in theatre.

With a pipe clamped between his teeth, and a thoughtful expression, Tanvir was as good a raconteur as he was a theatre director, actor, poet, composer and leader (with wife Moneeka and later daughter Nageen) of the Naya Theatre troupe. This last role was the most challenging and befitting of his many talents.

Mahmood Farooqui has the agreeable task of translating the memoirs, and he has done a fine task by keeping Tanvir’s light, anecdotal tone intact. He has retained some untranslatable Urdu words and also Indianised phrases like ‘One day it happened like this’  (the original must have been Ek din yoon hua) or ‘How did you come?’ (Kaise aana hua?).

Even though the book covers just a small segment of his life, even less about his theatre, and meanders all over the place, often without purpose, the reader gets a sense of sitting in front of a grandfatherly man, listening to kissas of the past.  It doesn’t matter that the person or incident being narrated is of no consequence to the listener (or reader), the telling of the tale is witty, sharply observant and so redolent of the time and place, that it becomes a documentation of a way of life, rather than the story of just one man.

What was life like in the small towns of India? How did people live and relate to each other? Tanvir recalls the open-heartedness, the easy hospitality, the preparation and serving of food and the enduring friendships of the time. Tanvir seems to have a blessed life, with hardly any brushes with evil. That allows for the lack of bitterness or cynicism in his telling. There are anecdotes about a seemingly endless battalion of relatives, friends, teachers, servants, the likes of which would be found in the saga of every family of that period.

Tanvir’s stories are interesting because the reader is always conscious of his great work in the theatre, and looks for hints of what might have led him to his life’s work with Chhattisgarhi group of folk performers and his Naya Theatre.

The book, studded with poetry, is a breezy read, but the touch of an editor’s hand was needed. When reading about a person or incident, Tanvir goes off into something totally off-track and irrelevant. People enter and exit randomly and not all of them are interesting to read about.  And one would like to know more about some — like his poet, actor, politician friends.

The chapters devoted to Mulk Rak Anand, Manto or Romesh Thapar or the Progressive Writers’ Association, Indian People’s Theatre Association and Partition needed more insights, but there is quite a needless chapter on Mussolini’s death.  There are nostalgia-inducing mentions of the bioscope, Big Top cinemas and an almost forgotten actor called Noor Mohammed Charlie.

Then again, a throwaway line might give a glimpse of what made his theatre so powerful and complete. Like how he used paintings to get his actors to improvise.  Or how the memory of the fakirs who came around his home at Ramzan time found their way into his iconic production .

Women outside of the family circle get the gossipy treatment. In the name of honesty and truth, the women he, or his friends, had affairs with are written about in a disrespectful, occasionally indecent manner. Dina Pathak in particular, has had her dignity shredded, and personal details revealed, which she might not have wanted the world to read about.

Those who knew him, the many whose lives he touched, or minds he fired with imagination and the possibility of uncompromising creativity, would like to know about the past that made the man.  For them,  in Farooqui’s loving translation are a worthy addition to the bookshelf.