A poet who strayed into cinema, Kaifi Azmi’s words were so true to life, they seemed not to be poetry at all.
“Waqt ne kiya kya haseen sitam / tum rahe na tum hum rahe na hum….” The poet who wrote these brilliant lines on life’s capricious tricks, re-wrote the rules of the film lyrics. Kaifi Azmi’s lyrics for Hindi cinema endowed depth and beauty to a medium which had been progressively trifled and trivialized by pedestrian motivations.
Of course, Azmi had a creative, social and political life far beyond cinema. Born circa 1919, Kaifi Saab was born into a feudal family in the Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh in a village called Mijwan. His original name was Akhtar Husain Rizvi. He was educated in Allahabad and Lucknow. As a child he was sent by his parents to become a priest. But young Akhtar had other plans for his life.
At the age of 11, young Kaifi recited his first ghazal at a poetry session. In 1942, he joined the Quit India Movement against British India and became a full-fledged Marxist. He came to Mumbai in 1945, where he joined the Progressive Writers’ Association.
Shabana, who fondly thought of her father as “the handsomest man in the world,” remembers a stream of well-known intellectuals, poets and musicians staying at her father’s house.
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Film writing seemed more like a means of survival rather than a creative strategy in Kaifi Azmi’s career. His film lyrics, especially for the cinema of Guru Dutt and Chetan Anand, were incomparably lucid, proving that space could be made for true poetry in a vocation as populist as mainstream Hindi cinema. Lyrics like Dekhi zamanein ki yaari bichde sabhi baari-baari and Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai in Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool and Pyaasa, respectively, or the nationalist Kar chalen hum fida jaan-o-tan saathiyon in Chetan Anand’s war epic Haqeeqat are so timeless as to represent the finest and most cherishable aspects of popular art.
Apart from writing some of the best words heard in film songs, Kaifi Azmi also wrote the script, dialogue and lyrics for M.S. Sathyu’s highly acclaimed Garam Hawa. In 1995, Kaifi Azmi made his acting debut in Saeed Mirza’s Naseem, where Azmi played a grandfather watching the demolition of the Babri Masjid from his bed.
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