As soon as one enters the corridors of Government College, Ludhiana, one encounters the most celebrated alumnus of the college, Sahir Ludhianvi: A group picture featuring him adorns the wall, his not-so-creditable mark-sheets are preserved in old magazines, there’s a copy of his admission form, duly signed by him. One also finds there an auditorium and a botanical garden, Gulistaan-e-Sahir, dedicated to the poet who wrote not for art’s sake but for all of humanity, for life’s sake.
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Of his three famous books — Talkhiaan, Parchhaayeean and Aao Ke Koyee Khwaab Bunne —the first is considered to be the one that best represents Sahir’s vicissitudes in life, in which he interweaves the themes of struggles waged in an oppressive society with the sighs and sorrows of unrequited lovers. Romanticism and revolution run cheek-by-jowl in his poetry. That Sahir was an iconoclast is evident from his poem, “Taj Mahal”:
“Ek shehanshah ne daulat kaa sahara le kar
Ham gareebon kee mohabbat kaa urhaayaa hai mazaak”
(An emperor has lampooned poor people’s love by exhibiting his wealth)
Sahir’s Marxist leanings surface multiple times and his poetry almost becomes a manifesto of the people. He displayed a rare sensitivity to the plight of the dispossessed and the downtrodden. Taking on the high and mighty, he attempted to raze their false pretensions to the ground, smashing their ego into smithereens and envisioning an ideal society where the “have-nots” would walk proudly with the “haves”.
His socialistic streak springs forth in the following lines:
“Zameen ne kyaa issee kaaran anaaj uglaa thaa
Ke Nassl-e-Aadamo-Hawaa bilak bilak ke marre?”
(Should the earth sprout grains only so that the human race dies in dire straits?)
As Sahir’s forte was sarcasm, he wrote sympathetically of prostitutes while castigating their rich clients and also pronounced that the East is not, in any way, better than or superior to the West:
“Yeh kuche, yeh neelaam ghar dilkashee ke,
Yeh loot te huye caravan zindagee ke,
Kahaan hein, kahan hein, muhaafiz khudee ke,
Sanaa-khwan-e-taqdeese mashrik kahaan hai?”
(These are the amorous streets and exhibitions
where caravans of life are being robbed.
Where are the custodians of self-esteem? How can the east be termed as an embodiment of purity?)
In his poetry, Sahir shredded the pride and prejudices attached to caste, colour, race and religion rampant in our unequal society. These lines exhibit Sahir’s deep-seated scorn for the so-called custodians of religion:
“Quran na ho jisme who mandir nahee tera
Gita naa ho jisime, woh haram nahi tera.
Tu hindu banegaa, naa mussalmaan banegaa
Insaan kee aulaad hai, insaan banegaa”
(That temple is not yours if it does not embellish the Quran; that cannot be your sanctuary if it does not adorn the Gita; You will not become either a Hindu or a Muslim, You will become a human being as you are the offspring of human beings)
Again, in his unparalleled articulation, Sahir pronounces his avowed belief in universal brotherhood:
“Kaabe mein raho ya kaashi mein
Nisbat to ussi ki zaat se hai
Tum Ram kaho ya Rahim kaho, matlab to ussi ki baat se hai”
(You might live in the holiest place of Islam or in the holiest place of Hinduism; it is all related to its Being: you might sing of Ram or Rahim, the crux lies only in their teachings”)
In the lyrics Sahir penned for films like Pyaasa, he laid bare the ills plaguing our society by challenging the establishment:
“Yeh daulat ke bhhokhe rivaajon kee dunia
Yeh dunia agar mil jaaye bhi to kiyaa hai?”
(This world is teeming with those who hunger for riches. Even if we acquire this world, it would mean nothing)
A single man throughout his chequered career, Sahir stepped into love with Amrita Pritam – the relationship that did not mature into fruition and made him pensive and morose. Amrita Pritam’s autobiography, Raseedi Ticket, translated by Khushwant Singh as “Revenue Stamp”, is an open confession of love to Sahir. She describes how she and Sahir would sit silently for hours together, without exchanging a single word and after his departure, she would smoke the cigarette butts he left behind in the ashtray. She also mentions her son’s innocent assertion that he looks like “Sahir uncle” and also that she should tell Sahir not to speak on the neighbour’s radio as that neighbour’s child is not on speaking terms with him.
After Sahir’s death, Amrita nurtured a fervent hope that the air mixed with the smoke from the cigarette butts would travel to the other world and meet him! So obsessed was she with Sahir that she once wrote:
“There was a grief I smoked
In silence, like a cigarette
Only a few poems fell
out of the ash I flicked from it.”
In his book, Haseen Chehre (Pretty Faces), Balwant Gargi, a noted Punjabi playwright, has narrated an anecdote about Sahir and Khayaam, the music director. Once Khayaam boasted of getting sixty thousand rupees for directing the music for a Nadiawala film and added that he would have given even one lakh had Khayaam demanded so.” Sahir cryptically remarked, “Khan Sahib, if you were bent upon begging, then you could beg for the throne also!”
Sahir’s much-discussed liaison with Sudha Malhotra not only points to his inadequacy in fructifying his relationships but also denotes his Oedipus complex, his mother-fixation.
In a prefatory note to his book, Sahir: A Literary Portrait, Surinder Deol calls Sahir “a mystery wrapped in an enigma”. Quoting Sahir’s friend from Lahore (Ahmed Rahi), Deol wrote that “Sahir only loved one woman, his mother, and had only one hate, his father”.
Even Khushwant Singh corroborates this view, “She (Sahir’s mother) was the only real love in his life. Because of his doting on her, he developed a distrust for other women (gynephobia) and fear of marrying (gamophobia)”.
Sahir was a very touchy person as Akshay Manwani expressed in his biography of Sahir, Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet: “He was not a vanilla character … He was a man of contradictions. If he was quick to insult, he would apologise as quickly”.
Khushwant Singh also observed that Sahir was prone to mood swings when the former met him for the first time at the party hosted by Rafiq Zakaria in honour of Firaq Gorakhpuri and attended by Akhrtarul Imam and Krishan Chander, the novelist. Sahir was beside himself with rage when a Gujarati businessman, Mota Chudasama, made an inane remark. “Sahir exploded in bad temper: ‘Who invited you here? If you know nothing, you should keep your mouth shut.’”
Sahir was a painter-poet. Replete as his poetry was with themes like despair, agony, human relationships, and existential crises, Sahir excelled in writing romantic songs, filling them with the fauna and flora of nature, drawing a parallel with the experiences of the love-lorn.
Sahir exuded a spirit of generosity in his lyrics and his innate humaneness was mirrored in them. One is carried away by the sweep of Sahir’s imagination and how he dovetailed the abstract and the concrete, the masculine and the feminine, in the following stanza:
“Maine khaabon mein barson tarashaa tha jisko
Tum wohee sangemarmar kee tasveer ho
Tum naa samjho ke tumharaa muqaddar hoon mein
Mein samjhataa hoon ke tum meri taqdeer ho”
(You are the same statue of marble whom I chiselled in my dreams for years together; You may not consider me as your fate but I reckon you to be my destiny)
The abstraction in the word “khaabon” (dreams) is concretised in the word “sangemarmar” (marble) whereas “muqaddar” (fate) and “taqdeer” (destiny) are emblematic of the masculine and the feminine wrought with a subtle spin of expression.
The following couplet by Sahir is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream where the Bard refers to the “poet’s eye” giving to “airy nothing a local habitation and a name”:
“Le de ke apne paas faqat ikk nazar to hai
Kyon dekhein zindagi ko kisi kee nazar se hum”
(All said and done, I possess an insight alone; why should I visualise life from anybody else’s perspective?)
A recipient of the Padma Shri in 1971, Sahir was born as Abdul Hayee on March 8, 1921 in Ludhiana of undivided Punjab. His mother, Sardar Begum, was the eleventh of twelve wives and her husband’s wanton ways and illicit relations forced her to leave him. Sahir was separated from his father and lived with his single mother, who faced the trials and tribulations of life alone but with strength.
Sahir’s soul was lacerated by deep scars; his pent-up grief found a cathartic outlet in his writings as he enunciated in the opening verse of Talkhiaan:
“Duniya ne tajarbaat-o-havaadas ki shakal mein jo kuchh mujhe diya hai,
woh lauta rahaa hoon mein.”
(I am reciprocating only that what I have received from the world in the shape of experiences and disasters).
Pallan is a Canada-based writer