"Somewhere Else"

There’s a remarkable song in Gazal that goes like this:

The Taj [Mahal] may be
a monument of love for you
you may love this
beautiful monument

O my beloved, meet
me somewhere else
O my beloved, meet
me somewhere else

O my beloved
several people like us
have loved in this world
several people like us
have loved in this world

Who says their emotions
were not true
but they have no way they
can express their emotions
because even those people,
like us, were poor
because even those people,
like us, were poor.

O my beloved
This garden, the flowing river, this monument
this garden, the flowing river, this monument
these beautifully painted
walls, this décor—
a king, with the help of his wealth
has made fun of
the love of us poor people

O my beloved
O my beloved, meet
me somewhere else
O my beloved
meet me somewhere else.

I love the way this skews the ideas usually cued by the Taj—Mughal power, imperial serenity, conjugal love, Indian national glory—and spins them leftward. It leaves the conventional associations in tact (nowhere does the song suggest the Taj isn’t beautiful or grand or serene), but adds a new layer of meaning that reveals the contradictions implicit in the monument, and in the nation for which it stands as metonym.

Love—which in Bollywood, like in so much of pop culture, operates as the great leveler, its pleasures and headaches available to rich and poor, famous and obscure alike—gets tagged with a class position. Rich people who love aren’t like poor people who love at all, because the rich have the luxury of expressing their emotions, through buildings like the Taj and, by implication, through words, literacy: the preserve of the educated.

By using the Taj as an example of what divides society rather than an emblem of its unity, the song manages to insinuate other divisions as well: Hindu vs. Muslim, colonizer vs. colonized, Third World vs. First. At the same time, it collapses other possible fractures—most notably, caste and gender—into the “us and them” binary of rich/poor. Love is still the constant, but instead of using it to trump social conflicts, the song makes passion a media access issue: who gets the money to express themselves through art? In the end, it hasn’t razed the Taj as a symbol so much as moved it “somewhere else.”

The words are by Sahir Ludianvi, whose life isn’t so unlike that of the character in the film who sings them: a Muslim-born atheist who joined the leftist Progressive Writers Association in the ‘40s, Ludhianvi shuttled between nations—Pakistan and India—after Partition, until his politics forced him to flee to Bombay. There, he found himself an Urdu poet writing hits for the Hindi film world (a position few Hindi poets were willing to stoop to at the time). Ludhianvi also penned the stunning “Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par Who Kahaan Hai“ from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957), which uses prostitution as an image for India’s moral failing in the wake of Independence. The lyrics are adapted from his poem “Chakle” (Brothels), which you can read here.