Urdu and Bollywood

The tackler of tongue-twisters

Whatever you do, don’t say jara instead of zara. Meet the man trying to clean up Bollywood’s Urdu

Mohammed Wajihuddin




Mumbai, November 14: IF THERE’S one thing that gets on Ibrahim Durwesh’s nerves, it’s actors who mispronounce their lines.

‘‘They pronounce zara as jara and ghazal as gajal,’’ complains the bearded 64-year-old. ‘‘They are hopelessly bad when it comes to delivering Urdu dialogue.’’

It’s not just a pet hate. Durwesh is a phonologist—someone who who studies ‘‘the relationships in speech sounds’’—and a connoisseur of Urdu poetry. For him, slips of the tongue are acts of violence.

‘‘Mispronouncing the words is like denuding the language,’’ he fumes.

So Durwesh has made it his mission to get Indians to speak Urdu properly, starting with the arch tongue-twister: Bollywood.

Last year, Kishore Namit Kapoor, Bollywood’s big daddy for wannabe stars in acting, dance and diction, approached Durwesh for help.

‘‘Teaching students the correct pronunciation was Kishore’s biggest headache,’’ smiles Durwesh, who says he can teach ‘workable’ Urdu in just 12 two-hour sessions.

‘‘I have trained over 500 students,’’ he says. They include playback singers like Mahendra Kapoor, Roopkumar Rathod and Anup Jalota, actor Divya Khosla (she is in Anil Sharma’s Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Sathiyo) and model Reshmi Ghoshal.

At a time when Urdu has disappeared from even some noted Urdu scholars’ homes, Durwesh propagates the language with a missionary zeal.

‘‘I don’t have the bio-data to claim my academic excellence. Mine is a silent job,’’ smiles Durwesh, handing over a visiting card which carries a verse from the Quran: ‘‘Allah taught man intelligent speech.’’

The Quran is his inspiration. As a child in Daman in the 1940s, then under Portuguese rule, Durwesh would often listen to qaaris—speakers trained in reciting the Quran. Migrating to Mumbai in the 1950s, he lived in Memon Mohallah in Central Mumbai where ‘‘Quran recitations became a routine.’’

‘‘I found that seven sounds in Arabic—aerial, guttural, lingual, palatal, dental, labial and nasal—helped in understanding Urdu too,’’ explains Durwesh, who has written several booklets on phonology and has a compilation of Begum Akhtar’s ghazals to his credit.

‘‘I have explained the correct phonetics of ghazals,’’ he says.

Darwesh has long lobbied the state government to include phonetics in college curriculi. ‘‘I have written to several chief ministers and secretaries in the department of education. Nobody even acknowledged my letters,’’ he moans.

But despite his vigorous defence of Urdu, Durwesh remains largely unknown. ‘‘His work is rare and he deserves recognition,’’ says Urdu poet Abdul Ahad Saaz.

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