Sahir Ludhianviਸਾਹਿਰ ਲੁਧਿਆਣਵੀ

Sahir Ludhianvi was born Abdul Hayee on 8 March 1921 in Karimpura, a locality of Ludhiana in Punjab, into a Punjabi-speaking Gujjar family. The second half of his pen name is simply his home city: Ludhianvi, the man from Ludhiana. Few Indian poets have carried their birthplace in their name so openly, and fewer still have made a whole city's name travel wherever their songs are sung.

His childhood was marked by a broken home. His mother, Sardar Begum, left her husband and gave up any claim to the family's wealth rather than stay in the marriage. When Sahir was thirteen, his father remarried and went to court to win custody of the boy, and lost. The poet Ahmad Rahi, his friend of many years, summed the life up in one line: in his whole life Sahir loved once and hated once; he loved his mother and he hated his father. The household lived with little money and, at times, under threat, and that early insecurity runs through much of his later writing.

A Ludhiana childhood

Sahir studied at Khalsa High School in Ludhiana and then at Government College, Ludhiana, where the auditorium is named after him today. As a student he was already known for his ghazals and nazms and for fiery speeches. The pen name came early: Sahir, meaning magician, taken from a couplet of Iqbal, with Ludhianvi added so that no one forgot where the magic came from. His birthplace in Karimpura is still marked with a small plaque on the building's arched entrance.

Lahore years and a warrant

In 1943 Sahir moved to Lahore, then the literary capital of Punjab. He completed his first collection of Urdu poetry, Talkhiyaan (Bitterness), published in 1945, and threw himself into the city's magazine world, editing Adab-e-Lateef, Shahkaar, Prithlari and Savera. He joined the Progressive Writers' Association, the movement that believed literature should speak for the poor and the left-behind, and the All India Students Federation.

His outspoken writing brought trouble. After Partition, the Government of Pakistan issued a warrant for his arrest over statements it saw as promoting communism. In 1949 Sahir fled Lahore for Delhi, and after eight weeks moved on to Bombay, the city where he would spend the rest of his life. He settled in Andheri, where his neighbours included the poet Gulzar and the writer Krishan Chander, fellow travellers from the same progressive circle.

Bombay and the Guru Dutt partnership

Film work gave Sahir the financial security that poetry alone never had. His debut, four songs for Azadi Ki Raah Par (1949), went unnoticed, but Naujawan (1951), with music by S. D. Burman, brought recognition, and Baazi (1951) made his name. He became part of Guru Dutt's team, and the partnership peaked with Pyaasa (1957), where his lyrics gave the film its conscience: songs that asked what a society that worships wealth and discards its poets is really worth. Pyaasa was the last film he made with Burman; the two parted over artistic and contractual differences.

Sahir went on to work with composers Ravi, Roshan, Khayyam, N. Datta and Laxmikant-Pyarelal, and for three decades he was a fixture of the Chopra camp, writing for B. R. Chopra from about 1950 until his death and for Yash Chopra in film after film. With Khayyam he made Phir Subah Hogi (1958), for which Sahir insisted on a composer who knew Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the novel behind the film. Its song Woh Subah Kabhi Toh Aayegi, that morning will surely come one day, became an anthem of hope for a generation.

Why did Sahir insist the words came first?

Sahir was famously temperamental, and most of his demands were about the dignity of the written word. He insisted that the tune be composed to fit his lyrics, not the other way round, at a time when lyricists were expected to fit words to ready-made melodies. He insisted on being paid one rupee more than Lata Mangeshkar, the industry's biggest singing star, a demand that caused a lasting rift between them but made his point: the writer was not the junior partner. He also pushed All India Radio to credit lyricists by name in its broadcasts, something listeners now take for granted.

The later classics

The honours caught up with the reputation. He won the Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist for Taj Mahal (1963) and again for Kabhie Kabhie (1976), the Yash Chopra romance built around his poem about a poet who trades verse for domestic life; its title song remains one of the most loved in Hindi cinema. He received the Padma Shri in 1971 and the Soviet Land Nehru Award in 1973. On 8 March 2013, his ninety-second birth anniversary, India Post issued a commemorative stamp in his honour.

In his personal life, Sahir never married. He was romantically involved with the Punjabi writer Amrita Pritam, whom he had met at a mushaira in Lahore in 1944, and later with the singer Sudha Malhotra, whose career he promoted. The Amrita and Sahir story, two of Punjab's greatest writers bound by an unspoken attachment, has passed into the region's literary folklore.

Death and legacy

Sahir died suddenly of cardiac arrest on 25 October 1980 in Bombay, aged fifty-nine, and was buried in the Juhu Muslim cemetery; his tomb was demolished in 2010 to make room for new burials. What survives is the work: hundreds of film songs and a body of Urdu poetry, from Talkhiyaan to the later collections, that carried the progressive movement's anger and tenderness into the mainstream. For Ludhiana, he remains the city's most famous literary son, the boy from Karimpura who signed his home town into every song he wrote.