Muzaffar Ali, the director of films such as Gaman, Umrao Jaan and Anjuman tells us why he chose to make 18 short films on Indian craft forms, one of which was screened at Village Square’s Chitrashaala short film festival.
Filmmaker and fashion designer Muzaffar Ali is famous for films like Umrao Jaan (1981), Gaman (1978) and Anjuman (1986). These are works with a cult following and his fans may have often wondered how Ali made the transition to being a designer and purveyor of the crafts after being a director in Bollywood. To that Ali has an answer. “It was films that led me to the world of craft,” he told Village Square during a candid interview before the screening of one of his craft-based films, Dastaan-e-Dastkari-Moradabad, at Village Square’s recently-concluded Chitrashaala short film festival.
The film tells the tale of Moradabad’s metalware industry as seen through the eyes of two design students, Nida and Neeta. This is one of the 18 short films, all about 15 minutes long, that Ali has made on Indian crafts, the others showcasing the artisans practising Lucknow chikankari, Kutch emroidery, Banarasi weaving, pashmina, Bidriware, and Saharanpur wood craft, among others.
“All my films led me to craft,” Ali told Village Square. “My first film Gaman dealt with the theme of employment of craftspeople. This is something I witnessed first-hand after my father passed away, and I had to move to the village of Kotwara. I wanted to provide employment at the doorstep to the locals who were migrating. I introduced the local women to chikankari and they took to it like a duck takes to water,” he added.
“Even Umrao Jaan was all about craft and light,” reminisced Ali, who had the daunting challenge of recreating a different era for the film, something that required enormous research and precision in set design. “There was an intense application to ideas related to people doing things with their hands… I have used craft intensely and in great detail,” said the senior filmmaker.
Ali points out that even kathak (in Umrao Jaan) is a craft in motion. Other than that one can observe the finest specimens of jamawar, zardozi, bidri and also Muradabadi vessels in some of his films.
For the unreleased film Zooni, his team was required to recreate 16th-century Kashmir. “I had graduates from the National Institute of Design working with me, given the importance of design and craft in the storyline,” said Ali.
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A self-confessed painter before anything else, he likes to sketch every aspect of his work in great detail before implementing the idea, be it the frames of a film, the belts he recently took to designing, or just the world around him. In fact he takes a diary and pencil along with him while on the go so that he can interpret ideas visually and graphically at any time.
As films were an organic extension into craft for Ali, the 18 short films he has made on craft gave him a language of doing things.
“All crafts are internalised into a culture. There are some lifestyles you take from culture and some you create anew,” he said.
Filming the 18 projects was a fulfilling experience for him.
“Each of the places we covered in these films was lovely. Every craft, I realised, flourishes by a river. I tried connecting craft with the culture of a place. This was an education for me and all involved,” said Ali.
For instance, sand-casting in Moradabad gives the metals produced here a particular quality because of the sand being used from the banks of the Ram Ganga river. They say that the sand used from any other part of the country wouldn’t work as well. This is how metal casting, for example, has become synonymous with Moradabad.
While Ali is optimistic about the prospects of our country’s rural artisans, given the resurgence of crafts among the people, he feels some issues need to be addressed.
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“The design aspect and marketing knowledge need to be looked into by experts. Unless these two elements are in place, it’s difficult to market a craft,” he stated.
“There should be a strong corporate social responsibility mandate for these communities of craftspeople. We also need to have research and development in place for them, and give the industry a thrust,” he added, on how to uplift the rural artisan, the lifeline of the crafts that Ali, and so many connoisseurs, adore.
Village Square’s Chitrashaala short film festival focused on stories from rural India.
Date: August 3, 2024
Venue: Alliance Francaise, Lodhi Road, New Delhi
The lead image on top shows a still from the film Dastaan-e-Dastkari-Moradabad made by eminent filmmaker Muzaffar Ali.
Smriti Mukerji is a Delhi-based freelance journalist.
