Gulzar

Gulzar was born Sampooran Singh Kalra on August 19, 1933, in Dina, a small town in the Jhelum district of undivided Punjab, then part of British India and now in Pakistan ^[1]. His family belonged to a Sikh trading household, and his father ran a modest business. The Partition of 1947 uprooted the family, as it did millions of others across Punjab. The Kalras left Dina and moved east, and the young Sampooran Singh eventually reached Delhi, where he finished his schooling amid the dislocation of refugee life ^[2].

Memories of that severed homeland never left him. Decades later his poems and short stories returned again and again to Partition, to trains crossing a new border, and to friendships cut in half by a line on a map. His Urdu short story collection Raavi Paar takes its title from the river that came to separate the two Punjabs ^[3].

As a young man he moved to Bombay in search of work and took a job at a motor garage, where he touched up damaged cars and mixed paint shades by day while reading and writing verse by night ^[2]. He adopted the pen name Gulzar, meaning a garden of flowers, signing early work as Gulzar Deenvi in a nod to his birthplace before shortening it. His association with the Progressive Writers' Association drew him into Bombay's literary circles and, through them, toward the film industry ^[1].

The filmmaker Bimal Roy gave Gulzar his opening. Through the writer Shailendra's introduction, Roy asked the garage worker to attempt a song for his film Bandini, and the result, "Mora Gora Ang Lai Le," sung by Lata Mangeshkar to S. D. Burman's tune, appeared in 1963 as Gulzar's first film lyric ^[4]. Roy, reportedly unhappy that a writer of such promise was painting cars, took him on as an assistant, and Gulzar remained devoted to his mentor's humanist school of cinema for the rest of his career ^[2].

Through the 1960s he wrote lyrics, dialogue and screenplays for other directors, including work with Hrishikesh Mukherjee on films such as Anand, for which he wrote dialogue that is still quoted by Hindi film audiences ^[1]. His verses stood apart from routine film songwriting: he favoured unexpected images, conversational phrasing and a melancholy that felt earned rather than decorative.

In 1971 he directed his first feature, Mere Apne, a drama about aimless urban youth caught between rival street gangs, with Meena Kumari in one of her final roles ^[4]. The film announced a director with a distinct sensibility, more interested in silences and fractured relationships than in spectacle.

Anyone asking who was Gulzar behind the camera finds a run of films in the 1970s and 1980s that critics still rank among the finest of middle cinema. Koshish (1972) followed a deaf couple building a life together and won a National Film Award for its screenplay. Aandhi (1975), starring Suchitra Sen as an ambitious politician, drew controversy over perceived parallels with Indira Gandhi and faced restrictions during the Emergency ^[4]. Mausam (1975), Angoor (1982), a comedy drawn from Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, and Ijaazat (1987), an intimate chamber piece about a marriage undone by memory, rounded out a body of work marked by literary care. He returned to directing with Maachis (1996), on the Punjab insurgency, and Hu Tu Tu (1999) ^[1].

His television serial Mirza Ghalib (1988), with Naseeruddin Shah as the nineteenth century poet, brought Ghalib's verse to a mass audience and is still treated as a benchmark of Indian television ^[2]. For younger viewers he wrote the Hindi title song of the animated Jungle Book series, a playground standard for a generation of Indian children.

The awards followed in quantity. Gulzar has won multiple National Film Awards and more than twenty Filmfare Awards across lyrics, dialogue and direction ^[1]. The song "Mera Kuchh Saamaan" from Ijaazat earned him a National Film Award for best lyrics. In 2009 his words for "Jai Ho", composed by A. R. Rahman for the film Slumdog Millionaire, won the Academy Award for best original song, and the same track brought him a Grammy Award in 2010 ^[5]. India conferred the Padma Bhushan on him in 2004, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002 for his Urdu story collection Dhuan, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award (the country's highest film honour) for 2013, and the Jnanpith Award, India's premier literary prize, announced in 2024 for his contribution to Urdu literature ^[6]. Any list of Gulzar achievements must also count his invention of the triveni, a compact three line poetic form he introduced and popularised in Urdu and Hindi verse ^[3].

In 1973 Gulzar married the actress Raakhee, one of the leading Hindi film stars of the period. The couple separated within a few years but never divorced, and both have spoken of a continuing mutual regard ^[2]. Their daughter, Meghna Gulzar, born in 1973 and nicknamed Bosky, became a film director in her own right, known for Talvar and Raazi, and wrote an affectionate biography of her father titled Because He Is ^[7].

Gulzar's private habits are famously spare. He dresses almost always in a white kurta, keeps disciplined morning hours for writing, plays tennis regularly even in old age, and has lived for decades in the same Mumbai home, named Boskyana after his daughter ^[2]. He writes primarily in Urdu, composing in the script he learned as a schoolboy, and his verse moves easily between Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi registers.

Rather than retiring, Gulzar redirected his energies as he aged. From the 1990s onward he formed one of Hindi cinema's most productive songwriting partnerships with the composer A. R. Rahman and also worked extensively with Vishal Bhardwaj, writing lyrics such as "Chaiyya Chaiyya" for Dil Se (1998), "Kajra Re" for Bunty Aur Babli (2005) and "Beedi" for Omkara (2006), songs that kept his idiom current for new listeners ^[1].

His literary output grew alongside the film work. He published poetry collections, short stories and children's books, translated Rabindranath Tagore's verse into Hindustani, and compiled a large anthology of Indian poetry on Partition and its aftermath ^[3]. In 2021 he brought out Actually... I Met Them, a memoir of the writers, singers and filmmakers he had known, from Bimal Roy to Kishore Kumar ^[3].

Into his nineties he continued to publish and to accept honours, receiving the Jnanpith in a ceremony held in 2024, and remained a familiar presence at literature festivals across India, where audiences queue to hear him read ^[6].

The plainest Gulzar facts sketch the scale of the legacy: a songwriting career running from 1963 into the 2020s, roughly twenty films directed or written, an Oscar, a Grammy, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and the Jnanpith ^[5][6]. Yet the numbers explain less than the language does. Gulzar loosened the conventions of the Hindi film lyric, letting in odd, tactile images (a humid eye, a borrowed moon, luggage left behind after a love affair) that other lyricists then felt free to attempt ^[4].

His films gave Hindi cinema a durable model for small, character driven storytelling, and directors of the multiplex era, including his own daughter, work in a space his generation cleared. As a bridge between the Urdu literary tradition and mass entertainment, he has few equals; readers who might never open a poetry collection know his triveni and his couplets from memory because melody carried them there ^[3].

Any Gulzar biography finally circles back to Dina, the town he left as a boy of fourteen. When he revisited Pakistan in 2013 for a conference, the trip made front page news in both countries, a reminder that his writing had long served as shared property across a hard border ^[2]. The garden implied by his pen name turned out to be exactly that: something planted on both sides of a line.