A Wizard of Song - II

The second part of my Mirror column on Sahir:

Did the great lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, who would have turned 99 on 8 March, lead a life filled with inconsistencies? 

Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 99^th birth anniversary this column commemorated last week, appears at first glance to have been a bundle of contradictions. He was a great romantic, a man whose depth of feeling cannot be doubted if you listen to his poetry – and yet he remained a confirmed bachelor who did not seem able to sustain a long-term relationship. His love life was a series of brief encounters, a candle that (to adapt the words of poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox) may have burnt at both ends, but did not last the night. He was a Progressive Urdu poet with socialist leanings, but aspired to write lyrics for the highly commercial Hindi film industry. A great friend of Sahir's, Hameed Akhtar, remembered in later life that the young Sahir's repeatedly stated ambition was "Bada songwriter banoonga". He was notorious for disagreements with friends and collaborators that he then refused to climb down from – but he was also renowned for going all out for his friends, and his loyalty to particular people could last forever. 

But if one looks carefully at each of these aspects of Sahir’s life, one might evaluate them differently: not as contradictions inherent to Sahir, but as bearing true witness to the irreparably fractured world in which we live. It is true, for instance, that the young Sahir seems to have fallen in love quite a few times, and perhaps had a little more courage than other young men of his age, declaring his attachments to the objects of his affection – sometimes using the support of the poetic medium he had just begun to master, but sometimes actually managing real meetings with them. Real meetings between young lovers were, in the middle class milieu of late 1930s-early 1940s India, a necessarily clandestine affair, and the social stakes were high.

After one such secret assignation at his college in Ludhiana during the summer vacation, the girl in question was apparently expelled from the college, and Sahir seems to have left as well, though it seems that the college has no written record of expelling him. A poem he wrote in this period of his life encapsulates the frustration and real-world angst of trying to follow through on romance in the stultifying India of arranged marriage: “Jab tumhein mujh se zyada hai zamaane ka khayaal, Phir meri yaad mein yun ashk bahaati kyun ho, Tum mein himmat hai toh duniya se baghaavat kar do, Varna maa-baap jahan kehte hain shaadi kar lo.” Later in life, among other briefer affairs, Sahir conducted a long (and mostly long-distance) romance with Punjabi poetess Amrita Pritam. Amrita was already married when she met him, and stayed so – and unfulfilled longing, as all lovers know, is often the best way to keep romance alive.

On the question of his ego, it is clear from reading Akshay Manwani’s very useful account of his life that Sahir found it difficult to collaborate with people who had egos as big as his. So he worked with the industry’s most feted music directors, but not for long. As early as 1957, for instance, he ended a highly fruitful partnership with SD Burman, that had produced such astounding work as ‘Baazi’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘House No. 44, ‘Funtoosh’, ‘Devdas’ and ‘Pyaasa’. That same year, with both of them having produced the brilliant lilting soundtrack of ‘Naya Daur’, another fine music director, OP Nayyar, told BR Chopra that he did not want to work with Sahir any longer.

Sahir went on to work with competent and even good music directors, like N Datta and Ravi, but he continued to have clear ideas about who he could collaborate with. His partnership with the Chopras was lifelong, first with the socially conscious films of BR Chopra, and then the changing oeuvre of Yash Chopra, from such films as ‘Dhool Ka Phool’ and ‘Dharmaputra’ to the romances for which he is better known. Sahir needed to know he came first. When Yash Chopra made ‘Kabhi Kabhie’, for instance, Sahir and his poem came on board first, and Chopra was persuaded by him to drop the commercially more successful Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo in favour of Khaiyyam, whose literary sensibilities Sahir decided were needed for a film about a poet. Sahir’s behaviour throughout his lifetime was perhaps read as mere arrogance, but today it is hard not to see it, at least partially, as a response to an industry that did not value writers. A call made by Sahir to BV Keskar, it seems, may have been responsible for All India Radio’s announcers beginning to mention the lyricist’s name alongside the film and the singer.

The gravest charge of contradictoriness, of course, is that a poet should not want to write for films, and that the idealistic socialism of Sahir’s verse was muddied by being picturised on screen by stars and filmmakers who made a great deal of money. The purists can never be satisfied on this. But Sahir seems to have had no doubt that film songs were the best way to make Indians think as well as feel. The poet who wrote “Hum amn chahte hain, magar zulm ke khilaaf/ Garr jung laazmi hain toh, phir jung hee sahi” was not compromising when he subverted Iqbal’s grandiosity into the vividly sarcastic “Cheen o Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara/ Rehne ko ghar nahi hain, saara jahan hamara”, or crafted the undying call to humanism of “Tu Hindu banega na Musalmaan banega,/ Insaan ki aulaad hai, insaan banega.” He was communicating with his compatriots – in all their glorious and inglorious variety.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Mar 2020. (First part published on 8 Mar 2020)