After five years in Bollywood, the film Dangal fame actress  Zaira Wasim calls it quits.   The National Award-winning actor took retirement from acting.  The 18 year old actor’s instagram post read so :-   For a very long time now it has felt like I have struggled to become someone else. As I had just started to explore and make sense of things to which I dedicated my time , efforts and emotions and tried to grab hold of a new lifestyle, it was only for me to realize that though I may fit here perfectly , I do not belong here. This field indeed brought a lot of love , support , and applaud my way but what it also did was to lead me to a path of ignorance , as I silently and unconsciously transitioned out of imaan. While I continued to work in an environment that interferes with my imman , my relationship with my religion was threatened.

This is a very archaic act considering the reasons she has cited and reeks of  closed mindedness. Chosing her reason  as `Islam’  and `imaan’ makes it clear that the actor lacks imagination and does not have the soul of an `artist’. A real artist is the one that goes through the churning of the creative process where she captures the zone of conflict which may have its ups and downs but the winner is the art. The art and the artist become one .  The dance and the danseuse become one.  There are certain cusps that pose a challenge  of articulation , but the artists address those  cusps with  sensitivity.

Most organized religion is a `construct’ which tries to contain or stop the artist , the free woman who wants to soar high . When Zaira , an actor of 18 years expresses that the world of acting is where she fits but does not belong , we may ask , `Why?’..and get the answer from her, `Because it is against the tenets of Islam and offends her Imaan.’ To my mind certain constructs are to be broken and any contradictions that the Being and the Unity of it suffers are to be severed by inviting the body in the service of the soul.  This not so in terms of a narrow calling of the soul but in terms of seeing no contradiction between the body and the soul…for that makes for a fearless mind and the celebration of the body is no different. Ironically, the film Dangal in which she got the National Award flourished around the metaphor of the body.

In this context , an extract from `The Unified Dance’ (Prose on poetry, here of W.B Yeats) by Anne Stevenson is reproduced here:

Because, I suspect, poetry written for the ear speaks to the ear before it appeals to the mind or asks for an interpretation. The Ireland poem, as Richard Ellman affirms in The Identity of Yeats, reached Yeats himself aurally. “One night at Yeats’s home [in August 1929] Frank O’Connor read aloud an early fourteenth-century English lyric: ‘I am of Ireland.’ Yeats took fire at once from the words, snatched wildly for a piece of paper, and gasped, ‘write, write.'” The female speaker of the lyric was for Yeats, of course, not only of Ireland, but also the persona, Ireland, herself. Yet you don’t need to be Irish to feel stirred by this musical duel between voices that might equally represent the spirit calling to the body or a divided soul longing for an ideal state of primal innocence while at the same time skeptically mocking it. The mind of the poet encompassed multiple contradictions, and the task he set himself was to reconcile them, to realize some ultimate unity of being (the one entire chestnut tree) through the hard labor of versifying. Though Yeats was obsessed with philosophies and symbolic systems, he hated the dry, passionless language of the intellect alone and looked for images that would, in sensual cadences, physically dance out his ideas for him:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Thus Yeats expands the reach of his poetry to the universal.

Zaira’s path to ignorance, as she calls her Bollywood years, is rather a deep dip into an unhealthy self consciousness that concocts sin where there is none. This can have a very pukish multiplier effect on the psyche of young women in the country. This is most retrogressive.

Furthermore it is a commonly known fact that India is a secular State and there is no State religion. The State cannot patronize any religion. This also means that we are free not to follow or propagate  any religion . The Indian state is secular and so should its society be. Any mob-driven force to manipulate the fabric of the society and its mind against the true tenets of secularism is against the best interest of the society.

Thus Zaira’s quoting Islam as the reason for her quitting films is rather in a very conservative taste and belies the hope that the citizens also should be doing their bit in furthering the idea of India as a secular democratic state honouring the development of an individual to her fullest potential.  The said act is against any imagination of a sovereign mind. I still cannot believe whether this was her own decision .

This is also against the free spiritedness of women in the wake of the fact that Islam `in practice’ has many tenets that go against the freedom of women.

Written By Pratibha Chopra