Filmmaker Muzaffar Ali worked with Khayyam on films like Umrao Jaan and Anjuman
As told to Rachana Dubey (BOMBAY TIMES; August 21, 2019)

Khayyam saab’s music is larger than life and his demise has created a vacuum that can only be filled by his greatness and creativity, which he has left behind as a legacy in abundance. Khayyam saab and I worked together on three projects. Umrao Jaan was a long, intense journey. We went through the throes of creating the characters and the lyrics because that film was poetry. Ek ek lamha was musically and poetically crafted. The time we invested in composing the songs is not something that often happens. Two years is a long time; we took long gaps between creating our songs so that each one sounds distinct and has the right mix of emotions.

Khayyam saab's process was long drawn out. Khayyam saab and I shared that beautiful journey called Umrao Jaan. It was a creative part of our lives that we shared with people at large, and no one can ever get it out of their mind. Creating that kind of music needs people who are rare to find like Khayyam saab. He was always ahead of his time and had the patience to nurture tunes.

The film Anjuman was a naayab project where I could make him sing. He sang a ghazal by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Shabana Azmi sang her own songs, too, for that film. It was a dilchasp raasta where we explored the new and revolutionary phase of Lucknow, ek bilkul naye tareeqe se. It was an intense and interesting journey.

The third film we worked together for was titled Zooni, which was set in Kashmir. It was a dream which remained unfulfilled, although I want it to be fulfilled some day. I have preserved the songs that Khayyam saab had created for it, and for the sake of those, I want that film to see the light of day. The songs he created for this film deserve to reach their final destination -- the hearts of the listeners.

Unka yun guzar jaana ek bahut bada haadsa hai. It's a loss to the fraternity, because with him, we have lost a generation and a school of music. Some of us are fortunate to have worked with him and a lot of us are fortunate to have grown up on the songs he created.

Khayyam with wife Jagjit Kaur at an event in 2017

Veteran composer Khayyam breathed his last in a Mumbai hospital around 9.30 pm on Monday
Khalid Mohamed (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 20, 2019)

He always had a furrowed brow, as if he was waiting to reach an errant melody he couldn’t quite perfect. When he did, his face would soften, he would dart a rare smile and get on to the next one, which perhaps would be recorded or stay with him.

There are scores of songs which did not reach us, and perhaps never will. His repertoire of unheard compositions have departed with Mohammed Zahoor Khayyam, who passed away on Monday night. The departure, I could see was coming, at the suburban hospital where he struggled to open his eyes at least for a flicker of a moment during a month-long stay at the Tulip cabin of the ICU unit. Yeh kya jageh hai doston, Hindi cinema could have well asked, but then I’m getting maudlin here.

The end is endemic as the last stanzas of the songs Khayyam saab had created, without ever caring for the A-listers of the geetmalas from the 1950s on to the turn of another century. To be sure, because of our limited memories, the 92-year-old icon—never called one during his lifetime will be associated most of all with the ever-resonating soundtrack of Umrao Jaan.

If he was bitter to a degree, I suspect, about the Umrao experience it was because he had topped it with the songs composed for its director Muzaffar Ali’s Kashmir-set love story Zooni. The film was left incomplete, but its songs are somewhere out there on tapes mouldering in the vaults somewhere.

Khayyam was not prolific by choice. If Yash Chopra called upon him to do Noorie, Nakhuda, Trishul and Kabhi Kabhie, it was obviously because the chartbusting music directors couldn’t have touched the composer who insisted on doing it his own way and wouldn’t be subjected to prolonged sessions at ‘sitting rooms’ as they are called. The Kabhi Kabhie score especially had that extraordinary poetic quality.

When Khayyam was no longer in the Yash Chopra ‘camp’ so to speak, he kept silent. In show business, one has to move on. When I had asked him to comment on this, he had shushed me up instaneously with a have-you-come-to-talk-about-my-work-or-gossip?

His music had the USP of pauses (check out Ae-Dil-e-Naadan from Razia Sultan). The orchestra comes to a standstill, when Lata Mangeshkar’s voice returns, it’s pure magic. Incidentally, stalwart writer Javed Siddiqui points that it was Khayaam who made the completion of Pakeezah possible. “Do you know he and his wife (Jagjit Kaur) kept trying to make peace between Kamal Amrohi and Meena Kumari. And they succeeded. The film was restarted only because of them.”

Right from Footpath and Phir Subah Hogi to Shagoon and Aakhri Khat, Khayyam’s track record is classic. He would agree to a TV serial occasionally but had stopped accepting film projects which would make him compromise with his signature style – soft, gentle, romantic and from the heart.

Khayyam saab has left the ICU unit. He can never leave us, ever, because without him will never be another subah, another song of such love and longing.

Muzaffar Ali explains why he is making a comeback after three decades with a debutant heroine and a Pakistani actor
Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 2, 2015)

Thirty-three years after Aagaman (1982), Muzaffar Ali returns as a director with Jaanisaar. The film is set in 1877 and follows the journey of an Anglicised youth who discovers the ethos of being Indian. It's Ali's attempt to bring back the essence of freedom and a culture that has been lost to us.

"My Lucknow suffered the effects of the divide-and-rule policy of the colonial powers, the revolt of 1857 and the nationalist movement of 1947. The soul of the city has slowly changed beyond recognition. Having inherited the British disdain for anything Indian, we have no respect for our past or our aesthetics. We've lost the delicacy and finesse of the visual Indian experience which I'm hoping to bring back on screen," asserts the filmmaker remembered for the stark Gaman, the opulent Umrao Jaan and the issue-based Aagaman which Satish Gujral described as the most beautiful film he had seen. "He literally saw just the images because he had lost his sense of hearing," Ali says.

Point out that the last period film, Anurag Kashyap's Bombay Velvet, tanked, and this could make distributors and exhibitors shy away and he retorts, "That's a stupid way of looking at things. I don't like the film industry but I guess I'll have to face the harsh reality soon. I just hope that they also remember me as the man who made Umrao Jaan."

Wouldn't it have been easier had he made the film with an established star rather than launch fashion designer Pernia Qureshi in the lead? "Pernia has a lot of potential as an actress and she's a very good dancer who has worked with maestros Birju Maharaj and Kumudini Lakhia in my film," argues 70-year-old Ali who plays the role of a revolutionist himself, one who's always on horseback. "It was tough but I pulled it off."

He goes on to sigh that today's larger-than-life stars have a coterie of six favourite directors who are trying to get time from them for a film that revolves around them. "Why would they entertain someone like me who looks at life and his career so differently?" he asks. "Earlier, I lived in Mumbai, rubbed shoulders with them. But after my father's death in 1990, I moved to Kothwara in UP and no longer cosy up to the stars. The media is my star. I'll promote my film well and hope for an audience."

His film's hero is Pakistani actor Imran Abbas Naqvi. "There's no boy as good-looking as him in India or Pakistan," Ali raves. But isn't he leaving himself open to controversy by casting an actor from across the border? "Today, every home is tuned into Zindagi channel which airs Pakistani serials," he chuckles. "I'm a philosopher and my mission is to promote oneness of the human race, the brotherhood of man. These man-made boundaries don't bother me."

In 1988, he launched Zooni, a film on Habba Khatoon, the queen poetess of Kashmir, with the blessing of the then chief minister, Farooq Abdullah and cast the ethereal Dimple Kapadia in the title role. In '91, he had to abandon the film halfway through because of insurgency in the Valley. He waited a few years, hoping to complete the film, but then got involved with the crafts of Lucknow, moved on to making documentaries, shorts, TV series and serials like Woodcraft of Saharanpur, Vedakath: A Thervad in Kerala, Kali Mohini, Wah, Jaan-e-Alam and Vapas Chalo. He has also acted in a couple of serials.

Prod him on the chances of reviving Zooni and he admits that it will remain an unfulfilled dream because the Valley is no longer a Utopian place of peace and poetry but of suffering and death. "I shoot a film organically. I fall in love with the place and it becomes a part of my life. No one knew I was shooting Jaanisaar. I can't do that in Kashmir. Today, it pains me to go there. It a troubled zone now for films like Mission: Kashmir and Haider but not for a mystical journey like Zooni," he mourns.

However, he promises that the next break will not be so long. "I'm thinking of making a film on my father, Syed Sajid Husain Ali, the Raja of Kothwara," he reveals. "He fought the first elections in 1937 as an independent candidate against the Muslim League and won. His principles were humanism and secularism. He was vehemently opposed to the formation of Pakistan. The film will be set in the '30s and filmed in Lucknow, as well as Scotland and Ireland where he lived too."