His tinctured & unrequited love

Gurupdesh Singh

Sahir's poetry is all about love, yet it is not. He is romantic in diction yet sounds anti-romantic in content and stance. He is sentimental, melodramatic yet reads like a realist, direct and in your face. In real life too, he loved women, aroused passions yet never reached to the point of full commitment. Sahir's love is divided, tinctured with social constraints and, above all, ideologically committed to the economic and political crises of his time. 

Remember that famous song 'kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayal aata hai'. It is an ode to intimate love but is actually a takeoff on his original nazm 'kabhi kabhi' where he counts, in the first half, the imaginative bliss that he could have in her beloved's beauty, her supple body, her lips, her tresses, and in the second, regrets that he can't have any of this as the worldly concerns have completely dissipated his desire and left him directionless.

Love ceases to be a physical or a mystical entity and turns a political accessory under the influence of Marxism. Sahir's emotional and intellectual conflicts reflect much better in his famous long poem Parchhaiyan, where he dramatises a lover's discourse in the background of ongoing world war and political exploitation.

In real life, he could not bring himself to love the woman he loved or those who loved him. Anwar Ali, the famous Pakistani cartoonist, his contemporary at Ludhiana College, recalls that of the many budding poet students who would woo girls, Sahir was most sought after and his poem "marghat ki raakh se' on the death of a girl student made him even more popular. 

Ishar Kaur, Prem Chaudhary, Amrita Pritam, Sudha Malhotra were among the many women who have been associated with him. Sahir reportedly agreed to marry the famous story writer Hazra Masroor, but the proposal fell through. Nobody knows the reason why, but the guess is that it could be social taboos, religious differences or self-restraint. Some even speculate oedipal fixation. Sahir earned his real accolades when he entered the Bombay film industry despite his baggage of progressive ideas. Although he wrote scores of highly romantic songs, he did not relent on his anti-romantic streak. His social consciousness blended perfectly with the musical requirements of Hindi romantic cinema. 

Sahir may be remembered today for his highly charged socially motivated songs. Yet the most iconic of his songs that states his spiritual and material world-view is 'man re tu kahe na dheer dhare' from the film Chitralekha. Life goes on its pace, unmindful of us. Time, beauty, relationships change. Why do we try to control things? Stay in peace and stop agitating.

If the world had understood this in his time, he would probably have had more time to love than to regret it.