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    Meena Kumari

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    Meena Kumari was a famous Bollywood actress who was also a poet. She wrote poems in Urdu about topics like love, loneliness, wishes, and dreams. A new book translates a selection of her poems into English to give fans insight into the poet within her. Her poetry revealed a more sensitive side of her personality compared to her film roles. It showed how she dealt with feelings of betrayal and exploitation through writing. The poems have an intimate quality that takes the reader in without effort. They range from personal subjects to more objective but still heartfelt themes. Her poetry allowed Kumari to distance herself from her public image and critique the film industry.

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    Meena Kumari

    Uploaded by

    j
    577 views1 page
    Meena Kumari was a famous Bollywood actress who was also a poet. She wrote poems in Urdu about topics like love, loneliness, wishes, and dreams. A new book translates a selection of her poems into English to give fans insight into the poet within her. Her poetry revealed a more sensitive side of her personality compared to her film roles. It showed how she dealt with feelings of betrayal and exploitation through writing. The poems have an intimate quality that takes the reader in without effort. They range from personal subjects to more objective but still heartfelt themes. Her poetry allowed Kumari to distance herself from her public image and critique the film industry.

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    Meena Kumari was a famous Bollywood actress who was also a poet. She wrote poems in Urdu about topics like love, loneliness, wishes, and dreams. A new book translates a selection of her poems into English to give fans insight into the poet within her. Her poetry revealed a more sensitive side of her personality compared to her film roles. It showed how she dealt with feelings of betrayal and exploitation through writing. The poems have an intimate quality that takes the reader in without effort. They range from personal subjects to more objective but still heartfelt themes. Her poetry allowed Kumari to distance herself from her public image and critique the film industry.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    577 views1 page

    Meena Kumari

    Uploaded by

    j
    Meena Kumari was a famous Bollywood actress who was also a poet. She wrote poems in Urdu about topics like love, loneliness, wishes, and dreams. A new book translates a selection of her poems into English to give fans insight into the poet within her. Her poetry revealed a more sensitive side of her personality compared to her film roles. It showed how she dealt with feelings of betrayal and exploitation through writing. The poems have an intimate quality that takes the reader in without effort. They range from personal subjects to more objective but still heartfelt themes. Her poetry allowed Kumari to distance herself from her public image and critique the film industry.

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    Meena Kumari

    Meena Kumaris flirtations with the pen are as seductive as her on-screen persona and now fans
    have an opportunity to know about the poet in her with a book containing a compelling selection
    of her poems in Urdu translated into English.
    Meera Kumari The Poet: A Life Beyond Cinema, translated by academician-writer Noorul
    Hasan and published by Roli Books, has poems in which the late actress talked about love,
    loneliness, wishes, illusion, a window of dreams, silence and innocence.
    According to legendary composer Naushad Ali, Kumaris poetry clearly reflected her angst.
    All her life she was exploited by people for their own ends, and was so frustrated that she took
    to drinking and writing poetry to fight her feeling of betrayal, he once
    said.
    Haunting, crystalline and precisely observed, Kumaris poetry reveals a side of her personality
    that was rarely on display in her films. It proves beyond any doubt that she was a much more
    sensitive and self-aware woman than her fans tend to realise.
    Hasan says not many know that Kumari had a way of her own with the pen as well.
    Soon after her death in 1972, Gulzar sahib arranged for Hind Pocket Books to publish a
    collection of her poems. I chanced upon this slim paperback volume at the Howrah Railway
    station the same year and have had the pleasure of dipping into that now more than moth-eaten
    prize paperback for over three decades, he says.
    What struck me most about the poems was their amazing immediacy, their power to take you in
    without any fuss and bother. Plain as conversation, Meena Kumaris poems strike an uncanny
    intimacy or rapport with the reader, he says.
    Her imagination hovers over a wide range of subjects from the very personal and idiosyncratic to
    the more objective though equally heartrending, as expressed in poems like The Dumb Child or
    Empty Shop.
    The sheer audacity of her statements is the raison detre of her poetry.
    In her poem, Aakhri Khwahish, translated as Last Wish, Kumari wrote, This night, this
    loneliness/ This sound of heartbeats this eerie silence/ This silent rendering of ghazals/ By
    sinking stars./ This solitude sleeping/ On the eyelashes of Time/ This last tremor/ Of the feeling
    of love/ This pervasive symphony of death -/ These are inviting you!/ Come for a moment/
    Decorate the dream of love/ In my closing eyes.
    In the introduction, historian-critic Philip Bounds and researcher Daisy Hasan writes, Poetry was
    the medium through which Kumari distanced herself from her public image and criticised the
    industry that had brought her to public attention in the first place. In that sense her poems tell us
    as much about Bollywood as they do about herself.
    If the main goal of her writings was to register the ebbs and flows of her own inner life.

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