Sahirsaab made his presence felt as much in films as in literature. Anyone who read or listened to Urdu poetry or mushairas in those days would know who Sahir Ludhianvi was. He was a tall, fair, handsome man with small pock marks on his face and a distinct style of speaking. Always very humble, never boastful — because poets sometimes can be very boastful about what they’ve read and what they write — but he was a modest man.
I remember that he was never allowed to leave the stage without reciting his famous poem on the Taj Mahal — ‘Meri mehboob kahi aur mila kar mujhse’ — it was very, very popular with the people. Progressive writers and poets would often argue that it wasn’t fair to look at the Taj Mahal from the lens of the rich against the poor. But Sahirsaab was a committed communist poet and part of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) like Shailendra and (Ali) Sardar Jafri.
It was a movement that I became involved with later, also. I hadn’t joined films then. I used to work in a motor garage, and attend PWA meetings. But I was lucky to be living in the outhouse of the bungalow where Sahirsaab lived on the first floor. It was called the Coover Lodge at Seven Bungalows, Andheri. On the ground floor lived the famous Urdu writer Krishan Chander, who too, was a legend in his own time. And in the outhouses of that bungalow, three or four strugglers like Ratan Bhattacharya and myself, lived. The compound still exists, although a building has come up now.
When Sahirsaab joined films, he had his own style of using Urdu words that we had never heard of before. For example, the song ‘Yeh raat yeh chandni phir kahaan’ from the movie Jaal. The kind of imagery in phrases like ‘Aur thodi der mein thak ke laut jaayegi’ was very rare at the time. Or take ‘Chalo ek baar phir se ajnabi ban jayein hum dono’ from Gumrah. No other poet until then had expressed separation in a manner that continues to linger in you when you hear it today, just like it did when it was written back then. One could clearly see the individuality in his expressions.
But this modest and humble man also had his own ego and arrogance. He would ask for the same price as the music director of a film. It’s not that he wanted to work with only big names. He’d say, ‘if you can’t afford it then give me a smaller music director, I don’t mind’. That’s how music directors like N Dutta and Ravi went on to compose for him. Sahirsaab was very confident of his poetry.
He is ‘the’ person who called for a strike by writers asking them to not give songs to Vividh Bharti unless they mentioned the name of the writer on their shows. Otherwise, traditionally Vividh Bharti would announce only the names of the singer and composer of a song. Sahirsaab was the man to protest against this and the strike eventually came to an end after Vividh Bharti agreed.
Other than his writing, this was the hallmark of his contributions towards the prestige and identity of writers and poets in the film industry. It has relevance till this date and a cause that Javedsaab (Akhtar) still pursues in his battle for copyright, something that Sahir Ludhianvi did in his time. Javedsaab is someone who he loved very much because his father Jan Nisar Akhtar was a very close friend of Sahir Ludhianvi’s and Javed almost grew up in his house.
He was also the first lyricist I ever saw, who had a car. He was like a nawab! In fact, he was the son of a nawab. The only other persons who lived with him in that house were his mother (Sardar Begum) and Ram Prakash Ashq, a very close friend of his who came with him from Pakistan. His mother was a strict lady. Always dressed in white Lucknowi embroidered salwar-kurta she would love him and rebuke him like a child… Bahut daat-ti thi, poore bungaley mein unki awaaz sunai deti thi!
(As told to Mohua Das)