Memories of a master : Indeevar 
By Screen Weekly, March 6, 2007 - 09:42 IST
His pen-name means the rare ‘Neel Kamal’ or Blue Lotus. Which Indeevar, real name Shyamlal, undoubtedly was to Hindi film lyrics.
Unlike the poets from the Urdu school who were very savvy about publicity, Indeevar, a product of the Hindi school, never knew or cared about how to propagate himself. A simple man who had lost his parents at a very tender age, Indeevar wrote poetry on the Quit India Movement and was jailed at Jhansi near hometown Baruanagar when he refused to apologize for doing so. “Why should I?” he asked the authorities. “I will write more!” He came to Mumbai in the early 1940s after being released, but not before he shared much more than just the jail cell with one of the biggest names in Hindi literature - Maithili Sharan Gupt.
Though he got his first break in Justice Choudhury (1946) - he did another film of that name in 1983 - he did not get credit for the song, because by prior arrangement it went to top name Dinanath Madhok. Later he wrote songs like ‘Kaise koi jiye’ (Baghban) and ‘Aanewale kal ki tum tasveer ho’ (Chhote Babu), but recognition came only with Roshan’s and Mukesh’s Malhar with brilliant songs like ‘Tara toote duniya dekhe’, ‘Bade armaanon se rakkha hai’, ‘Ek baar agar tu keh de’ and ‘Hota rahaa yun hi gar anjaam wafaa ka’. This also helped him being established as a regular lyricist as till then it was only assumed that he could excel in patriotic songs.
The learned lyricist however hit big-time only after his association with Kalyanji-Anandji began around the early ‘60s. But from then on Indeevar never looked back all the way till his death in 1997, tuning with composers from Roshan in the ‘40s to Viju Shah, Aadesh Shrivastava, Anand Raaj Anand and Jatin-Lalit in the ‘90s. ‘The only composer with whom I never worked somehow was S.D.Burman. I even recorded a song with Naushad for B.R.Chopra’s Chanakya Aur Chandragupta, because Sahir Ludhianvi insisted that I do the film!’ said the poet. And this honour came to Indeevar because Sahir had called upon him to check the ‘Hindu veracity’ of the former’s lyrics in Chitralekha. “I told Sahir that they were perfect!” recalled Indeevar.
Indeevar’s deshbhakti genre did not find much representation in Hindi cinema. Songs like ‘Dulhan chali’ and ‘Hai preet jahaan ki reet sadaa’ were used - with necessary modifications over 20 years after he penned them as poems - in Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim. But there were two kinds of songs that he was best associated with - the intensely passionate passages on beauty and the songs that were loaded with truisms on life. There was a third kind too - the ‘chaalu’ stuff that he did mainly for Bappi Lahiri’s southern films in the ‘80s, but Indeevar was very clear about them as well. ‘These songs were naughty, not cheap or vulgar. Often the way they were filmed made them seem that way. What shocked most people was that Indeevar could write such stuff. But a good lyricist must be an all-rounder. And I was getting good money to be one!’
His study was crammed with texts in almost a dozen languages. ‘A poet must keep reinventing himself and reading a lot to keep writing good poetry!’ he would say. ‘That’s how he can get inspiration and yet write something original and with an identifiable stamp.’ And Indeevar remains the only one of three lyricists in Hindi films (the other two being Anand Bakshi and Gulzar) whose combination of thought and language cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s.
Indeevar-ji would approach a song in multiple ways, some of them abstract. But Kalyanjibhai and I would tell him that the lyrics should themselves be visual. Our way of making songs together was informal and unorthodox, with no set parameters. This was also because Indeevar-ji was like a family member. He was an orphan from early childhood and our family was family to him, and he would feel at home here. Our wives and children would often tease him about his quirks, whereas he would refer to my brother and I as anpadh baniyaas!
“Yes, Indeevar-ji had his idiosyncrasies and over a period of years we learnt how to use them well! For example, he tended to be a bit slow at work, so we wanted a title-song for Safar quickly we goaded him by saying that since he took a month to write a good song we had told the director to get someone else. He was immediately uptight and demanded to know the situation. We told him that it was about how no one understood the meaning of life, and that the mukhda had to include the word ‘Safar’ or journey, because it was the title of that film. Within 30 minutes, the lyrics and tune of ‘Zindagi ka safar hai yeh kaisa safar’ was ready and approved!
“He had his humorous, child-like side too. He wanted to go with us once to London, and we told him that it was pointless for him because he could not even tolerate hill-tation climates. But so determined was he that he installed an airconditioner in his home in the intervening weeks. When he came to the airport in humid July he was already wearing an overcoat and a wig, because someone had also told him that being bald would not look good in Britain! In the flight he kept laughing loudly and when asked why, he stated that according to Freud one must laugh when one is scared!
“As a writer, he was completely true to a song situation and his scholarly aptitude made his work exemplary. For a situation for Johar Mehmood In Kashmir he wrote a song that was completely in Urdu and reflected Islamic philosophy - ‘Begunaahon ka lahoo to rang laayega.’ For Mukesh-ji’s songs, he would work hard on words that had a bindi so that Mukesh’s nasal tones would augment the phonetics of the songs, like ‘Chandan sa badan’.
Lyricists tend to have favourite words and phrases and Indeevar-ji’s favourite word was ‘kya’, but he used this word with innumerable variations, as in ‘Kasme vaade pyar wafa sab baatein hain baaton ka kya’, ‘Kya khoob lagti ho’, ‘Ek tu na mila saari duniya mili bhi to kya hai’ and many others.
Screen India
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Singer Neha Bhasin’s legal notice to Anand Raj Anand
