The pursuit of sadness: The tragedy queen of Hindi cinema

Asked by a local daily to pen her likes and dislikes, she wrote, "I like death." Born Mah Jabin but known as Meena Kumari, this tragedy queen of Hindi cinema was evidently suffering from a form of depression that the Victorians had dubbed melancholia.

Her penchant for tragic roles, her preference for all-white ensembles, her partiality for the company of poets, her propensity towards alcohol, the quaver in her voice and tears that never seemed far from her liquid eyes-in fact her entire persona, removed from the colourful vivacity of a film star, showed a predisposition towards melancholy.

While her life awaits a full-fledged biography that might reveal whether it was a medical condition or life-long exploitation by her loved ones that caused this morbid self-absorption, a new book opens a window into her inner world.

Meena Kumari the Poet: A Life Beyond Cinema contains translations of some of her Urdu nazms and ghazals as well as critical and biographical essays that locate her in the continuum of popular cinema.    

In an essay, 'Poetry versus Cinema: Meena Kumari as a Critic of Popular Culture', Philip Bounds and Daisy Hasan write, "Condemned in her work as an actress to go along with the industry's crude stereotypes of female virtue, Kumari strove in her poetry to evoke the multi-layered realities of what she regarded as her authentic self." In poem after poem she reveals the dualities of her daily lived life: her iconic onscreen characters and the tugs and pulls of her inner life.

In a nazm called 'The Empty Shop', she writes:

A handsome dream of loveWhich can cool my inflamed eyesA moment of perfect intimacyWhich can soothe my restless soulI came looking for nothing but theseAnd the shop of TimeSupplies none of these things.

In her poems, she gives voice to a haunting emptiness in her-despite the fame and wealth, not to say the adoration from the viewing public, that came her way in ample measure in her short but intense life.

The titles are evocative of the desolation that limns her poetic sensibility: 'The Light is Gone', 'Love Was a Dream', 'Death and Love'. In 'Far, Far Away', she seems to be predicting her early death:

Away to a place without shadows,

Where my whole existence, now a mere echo,

Embraces the void and fades

Forever.

Meena Kumari's voice, with that distinct catch, speaks to us from beyond the grave.

Some of us have heard her recite her poetry in a pirated tape that did the rounds decades ago.

Now, this collection makes her poetry accessible to a new generation of readers: the English translations face the originals written in Roman alphabet, enhancing the reading pleasure for those who can follow some Urdu.

The translations are elegant and redolent with the fragrance of Meena Kumari's chaste Urdu.

The modern reader would do well to revisit a world of yaadon ke jugnu (glow-worms of memories) and nashili lorian (intoxicating lullabies), a sombre world that is lit by iridescent shafts of a poet's imagination.

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