“Har zor zulm ki takkar mein, sangharsh hamara naara hai”, the clarion call of protesters from the 1960s, and especially in the turbulent 1970s, was from a poem he wrote.īorn in Rawalpindi to a family that had migrated there from Bihar’s Arrah for a livelihood, and then moved to Mathura after Partition, Shailendra came to the attention of Raj Kapoor with his poem “Jalta Punjab” at a mushaira in 1948. Yet, despite his expressions of tenderness, Shailendra, who started his workin life as an engineering apprentice in the Indian Railways, remained a committed revolutionary at heart. Songs like “Pyar hua ikraar hua”, “Ajeeb daastaan hai yeh”, “Sajan re jhooth mat bolo”, “Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai”, “Yeh raat bhigi bhigi”, “O sajna, barkha bahar aai”, “Ruk ja raat, thahr ja re chanda” and “Mere sajan hai us paar” and many more are abiding testimonies to the craft of Shailendra, who was adroit in combining vignettes and emotions - sadness, solitude, pain, love, memory, and so on. His oeuvre may not even add up to four figures in a career cut short by his untimely death, but in the span of a decade and half, his richness of thought entwined with an endearing simplicity of expression made him the torchbearer of poetry in Hindi film songs.Īnd he did more than anyone else to bridge the Hindu-Urdu dichotomy as well as get rustic variants of Hindi into the mainstream. One of Hindi cinema’s most inspired, capable yet self-effacing wordsmiths, acknowledged duly by his peers - Raj Kapoor called him his “Pushkin” - and seen as inspiration by a later generation of lyricists, especially Gulzar, Shailendra, born Shankardas Kesarilal on this day (August 30) in 1923, left an indelible impact on film songs. Raj Kapoor’s naive innocence, as seen in “Mera joota hai Japani” to “Sab kuch seekha hamne”, Dilip Kumar’s restrained sorrow in “Toote hue khwabon” or “Yeh mera diwanapan hai”, Shammi Kapoor’s exuberant ebullience in “Chahe koi mujhe jungli kahe”, or Dev Anand’s cheerful jauntiness in “Khoya khoya chand” to “Gaata rahe mera dil” - all owe their origin to one man.

Shailendra poetry jalta punjab