Zahir Anwar as I Have Known Him  -  Peter Manuel

When I first met Zahir Anwar in 1974, he was a clerk in a hotel where I happened to be staying. It did not take us long to become friends, as I was greatly attracted and impressed by his warmth and sincerity, his social consciousness, his erudition in both Western and Urdu culture, and his voracious appetite for intellectual stimulation. For me, Anwar was a friend and companion, and a fascinating window into Calcutta's intellectual life, a heady bohemian world of cinema, drama, Urdu, Bengali, and English literature, and animated discussions in tea-houses, where the conversation ranged from Shakespeare to Satyajit Ray. Anwar embodied the best of this world, especially its fusion of intellectual inquisitiveness with a concern for social justice.

Anwar and I would certainly have remained friends, even if he had never amounted to more than just another frustrated intellectual, or a once inquisitive young man who subsequently settled into a life of conservatism and mediocrity. But of course, Anwar has become much more than that, and it has been a pleasure and an inspiration for me to watch Anwar develop into a brilliant and unique literary figure - a critic, a translator, teacher, and above all, a renowned dramatist and the author of three books of plays.

                  Although I have known Anwar more as a personal friend than as a public figure, it is clear that in the realm of public culture he is best known as a dramatist, and it is the theater that has been the primary focus of his creative energies. I am neither a drama critic nor an Urdu scholar, and am not qualified to make a professional, critical assessment of Anwar's place in contemporary Indian culture. Nevertheless, his plays have certainly made their impression on me, and I am happy to share my reactions to them. Max Raphael once wrote, "Paradoxically, the work of art closest to perfection is both most profoundly determined by its time and goes furthest beyond it into timelessness." And it is this quality about Anwar's work that impresses me most deeply. On one level, his plays are firmly rooted in his own surroundings, in the intensity, the vicissitudes and the tribulations of lower- and lower-middle-class life in Calcutta. There is no attempt at escapist fantasy, no flight into medieval folklore, nor any slavish imitation of Western models.

His plays seem to me like a set of vines and bushes, with leaves, thorns, and yes, flowers, that squeeze through cracks in Beck Bagan sidewalks, and in spite of the heat and dust, finally manage to establish themselves, triumphantly affirming the value of organic life in an otherwise harsh and brutal atmosphere.

Yet while Anwar's plays are so intimately bound to their Calcutta environment, at the same time, they have a universality, which makes them potentially meaningful to much broader audiences. This universality derives, on one level, from Anwar's ongoing engagement with Western literary culture, from Shakespeare and Marlowe to Brecht and Artaud. (And although it is my profession to be well-read, in the field of Western literature I could never match Anwar's erudition). Anwar's plays, especially his later ones like "Naqaara," combine his learning in Western culture with his command of Urdu literature, in an organic, coherent synthesis. But perhaps a more significant source of his work's universality is its engagement with humanistic concerns —

social justice, the role of the artist in an unappreciative society, and the individual's confrontation with the impersonal state and, ultimately, with death.

The one play of his which I have seen performed was his "Salim Sherwani ki Shadi," a delightful adaptation of Feydeau's "Marry-Go-Wrong," which he not only translated into Urdu but restaged so convincingly to a Bengali setting that it seemed impossible to imagine it set in any other time or place. "Salim Sherwani" showed Anwar's extraordinary gift for humour, for character delineation, and for synthesizing East and West in an organically unified art work. However, humour is perhaps less prominent in most of Anwar's plays. Rather, what tends to predominate is a darker, more tragic tone, perhaps rooted more in the ranj-o-gham of Urdu poetry, the fervent social realism of Bengali art film, and ultimately, Anwar's own personal struggles for the dignity and survival of himself, his family, and all the downtrodden of Calcutta and India. Much of Anwar's work is permeated with intense pathos, frustration, alienation, and suffering. However, I think it would be a mistake to regard these features as expressions of despair and cynicism, for they represent just the opposite, namely, a sense of commitment to justice, a belief in the essential dignity of the human soul, and the idea that life is not worth living unless one is actively engaged in a struggle for dignity. From such a perspective, it is escapist entertainment that expresses nihilism and cynicism, in the idea that life can never offer more than drudgery punctuated by occasional moments of respite via cinematic fantasies or the occasional bottle of whiskey. For me, Anwar's plays express a belief that in a world full of injustice and suffering, to be fully human means to be engaged in struggle against such conditions, and thereby to transcend them - spiritually, if not materially. This is not a philosophy of renunciation, escape, or cynical exploitation, but one based on the affirmation of value and meaning in human life. To commit oneself to such an uncompromising struggle, whether on the immediate personal level or on the abstract political level, means to condemn oneself to a life of perpetual frustration. Yet this is also a profoundly humanistic worldview, asserting that human dignity lies ultimately in such an engagement and the pain it ensues. As Ghalib wrote,