Sahir Ludhianvi - The People's Poet

Front Cover
HarperCollins, Dec 11, 2013 - Performing Arts - 340 pages

Sahir Ludhianvi is probably the only songwriter in Hindi films whose poetry was accepted in its purest form and incorporated as a film song. So great was his stature as an Urdu poet that he never had to mould his poetry to suit the demands of film songwriting; instead, producers and composers adapted their requirements to his poetry. His songs in films like Pyaasa, Naya Daur and Phir Subah Hogi have attained the status of classics. This exhaustive biography traces the poet's rich life, from his troubled childhood and his equally troubled love relationships, to his rise as one of the pre-eminent personalities of the Progressive Writers Movement and his journey as lyricist through the golden era of Hindi film music, the 1950s and 1960s.
 

Contents

Introduction
1700
Prologue
1706
A Bittersweet Inheritance
1707
Alma Martyr
1722
Of Poetry and Progressive Literature
1737
Partition Woes
1756
Bada Songwriter Banoonga
1769
The Lyrical Platinum Standard
1782
New Peaks New Associations
1866
On His Own Terms
1880
The Poet as a Peoples Conscience
1897
A Man of Contradictions
1923
A PoetLyricist Like No Other
1935
Epilogue
1947
Timeline
1949
List of Film Songs Select Bibliography
1951

Finding Love in the Shadow of Oedipus
1799
The Chopras Come Calling
1831
Good but Only Kabhi Kabhie
1852
Index of Poems and Film Songs
Acknowledgements
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Akshay Manwani's first book, Sahir Ludhianvi: The People's Poet, was critically acclaimed and has been a bestseller. He writes on Indian cinema and popular culture for a variety of publications such as the Caravan, The Indian Quarterly, Scroll.in, Mint, Business Standard and Mumbai Mirror.

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