Majrooh Sultanpuri

Asrar ul Hassan Khan was born on October 1, 1919, in Sultanpur, a district town in the United Provinces of British India. His father served as a sub-inspector in the police and held conservative views about modern schooling, so the boy's early education followed a traditional path: Quranic instruction, then madrasa training in Arabic and Persian rather than an English-medium classroom ^[1].

After completing the Dars-e-Nizami course of religious and classical learning, he moved to Lucknow to study Unani medicine at Takmil ut Tib College. He qualified as a hakim, a practitioner of the Greco-Arabic medical tradition, and briefly ran a practice in his home town ^[2]. Medicine, however, never held him. Poetry did. He had begun composing ghazals as a student, and a well-received recitation at a mushaira in Sultanpur convinced him that his future lay in verse rather than in prescriptions ^[1].

He adopted the takhallus, or pen name, Majrooh, an Urdu word meaning wounded, and attached the name of his birthplace to it. As Majrooh Sultanpuri he sought out Jigar Moradabadi, one of the most celebrated ghazal poets of the age, who accepted him as a disciple. Under Jigar's guidance he absorbed the discipline of the classical ghazal, its compressed imagery and strict metrical demands, a training that later gave his film songs their unusual polish ^[2].

The turning point in the Majrooh Sultanpuri biography came in 1945, when he travelled to Bombay to perform at a mushaira at the Saboo Siddique Institute. His recitation impressed the film producer and director A.R. Kardar, who was in the audience and asked the young poet to write for the screen ^[1]. Majrooh hesitated at first: many serious Urdu poets of the period regarded film work as beneath their craft. Jigar Moradabadi reportedly encouraged him to accept, pointing out that films would pay him what poetry alone never could ^[3].

Kardar arranged a test with the composer Naushad, who gave the newcomer a tune and asked him to fit words to it. The result satisfied everyone, and Majrooh was signed for the film Shahjehan, released in 1946. Its songs were performed by K.L. Saigal, the biggest singing star of the era, and numbers such as "Jab dil hi toot gaya" became so popular that Saigal is said to have wished the song played at his funeral ^[3].

Almost overnight the hakim from Sultanpur had become a sought-after film lyricist. He wrote for Mehboob Khan's Andaz in 1949, again with Naushad, confirming that his first success had been no accident ^[4]. At the same time he kept publishing serious ghazals, refusing to treat his film work and his literary work as the same enterprise. That double life, poet by conviction and lyricist by profession, defined the rest of his career.

Anyone asking who was Majrooh Sultanpuri beyond the film credits must reckon with his politics. He belonged to the Progressive Writers' Movement, the left-leaning literary association that reshaped Urdu and Hindi writing in the 1930s and 1940s, and he shared its conviction that poetry owed something to the struggles of ordinary people ^[5].

In 1949, during a labour gathering in Bombay, Majrooh recited a poem sharply critical of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, comparing him unfavourably to figures the left considered tools of capital. The Bombay government of Morarji Desai demanded an apology. Majrooh refused, and he was imprisoned, spending roughly two years in jail alongside other leftist writers and activists, including a period at Arthur Road prison ^[5].

The imprisonment cost him his income at the peak of his early fame, and his family faced real hardship. Film industry colleagues quietly helped; the actor and filmmaker Raj Kapoor, in a widely retold episode, paid Majrooh for a song lyric as a way of supporting the jailed poet without wounding his pride. The lines he wrote then, "Ek din bik jayega mati ke mol", eventually appeared on screen decades later in the 1975 film Dharam Karam ^[3]. Majrooh emerged from prison unbowed, his progressive convictions intact, and returned to a film industry that had not forgotten him.

Among Majrooh Sultanpuri achievements, sheer longevity ranks near the top: he remained an active, first-choice lyricist for more than five decades, a span almost no contemporary matched. Through the 1950s he formed one of Hindi cinema's most productive partnerships with the composer S.D. Burman, writing for films such as Paying Guest (1957), Nau Do Gyarah (1957) and Solva Saal (1958), many of them starring Dev Anand ^[4]. With O.P. Nayyar he wrote the songs of C.I.D. (1956), and with S.D. Burman's son R.D. Burman he supplied the exuberant lyrics of Teesri Manzil (1966), a soundtrack that helped announce a new rhythmic era in film music ^[4].

His range was unusual. He could produce a chaste classical ghazal, a comic romp like "Ek ladki bheegi bhaagi si" from Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (1958), and a tender film ballad within the same working year. In 1965 he received the Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist for "Chahunga main tujhe saanjh savere" from the film Dosti, the only Filmfare lyric award of his long career despite hundreds of popular songs ^[1].

When tastes shifted in the late 1980s, Majrooh shifted with them. His songs for Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), composed by Anand-Milind, powered one of the decade's biggest romantic hits and made him relevant to an audience born long after Shahjehan. He followed it with Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992) and continued writing into the late 1990s ^[6]. The crowning honour came in 1993, when the Government of India gave him the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the highest prize in Indian cinema. No lyricist had ever received it before ^[1].

Away from the studios Majrooh lived in Bombay with his wife, Firdaus Jahan, and their children; his son Andalib Sultanpuri later worked in the film industry ^[6]. Colleagues remembered him as plain-spoken, sometimes prickly about credit and craft, and openly scornful of what he considered slipshod writing. He held strong opinions about the decline of Urdu literacy among younger film professionals and said so without much diplomacy ^[6].

His standing in Urdu letters rested on a relatively slim but respected body of non-film poetry. His collected ghazals appeared under the simple title Ghazal, and critics placed him in the line of progressive poets who poured political conviction into classical forms rather than abandoning them ^[5]. One of his couplets, "Main akela hi chala tha janib-e-manzil magar, log saath aate gaye aur karwan banta gaya" (I set out alone toward the destination, but people kept joining and a caravan formed), passed into everyday Indian speech and is quoted by politicians and columnists to this day ^[2].

Literary honours accompanied the film awards. He received the Ghalib Award for his contribution to Urdu poetry in 1980, and the government of Madhya Pradesh honoured him with the Iqbal Samman ^[2]. For Majrooh these prizes mattered because they recognised the poet, not merely the songwriter.

Majrooh worked almost until the end. His lyrics appeared in hit films of the 1990s, and songs he wrote for One 2 Ka 4 reached audiences in 2001, after his death. He died in Mumbai on May 24, 2000, at the age of 80, following a lung ailment, and was mourned across both the film industry and the Urdu literary world ^[6].

His catalogue is a working map of Hindi film music itself: from Saigal's mournful ballads to Kishore Kumar's comedy, from the twist numbers of the 1960s to the campus romances of the 1990s. Few careers connect Naushad, S.D. Burman, O.P. Nayyar, R.D. Burman and Anand-Milind in a single filmography, and that continuity is the most striking of all Majrooh Sultanpuri facts ^[4].

Historians of the film song credit him with keeping literary Urdu alive inside a commercial medium, smuggling the ghazal's precision into three-minute songs heard by millions who never opened a diwan. His refusal to apologise for his political poetry, at real personal cost, also secured his reputation for integrity among progressive writers ^[5]. Two decades after his death his songs remain in circulation on radio, streaming platforms and cover versions, and his caravan couplet still opens speeches across South Asia. The wounded poet of Sultanpur turned out to be one of the most durable voices India's popular culture has produced.