A SENIOR POET PRESENTS HIS JUNIOR WITH HIS FATE

By Ali Peter John

Shailendra was a worker in the Central Railway workshop at Matunga, but was very popular as a union leader who fought for the rights and the wages of his fellow workers. He was also a very good poet who was associated with the Bombay Youth Choir and was also involved with the IPTA theatre group. It was during one of the kavi sammelans held under the Central Railway Welfare Association that the veteran actor Prithviraj Kapoor who was the chief guest was impressed by his poetry which had a very strong leftist leaning and in whose poetry, the thespian saw the voice of the people and their protest against the injustices meted out to them. Prithviraj Kapoor met him and besides asking him to write for IPTA, he asked Shailendra to get in touch with his young actor-son Raj Kapoor who was making his debut as a director at the age of only twenty-three. The director and the poet got along very well and Raj Kapoor formed a team of his own lyricists which consisted of Shailendra and another poet who had worked in theatre, Hasrat Jaipuri and found two young men, Shankar from Andhra Pradesh and Jaikishan Panchal from Gujarat and formed what was going to be a legendary team of the two lyricists and the two music composers. Shailendra wrote the songs of every film of Raj Kapoor till he died, but he also wrote for filmmakers like Bimal Roy and Dev Anand among many others. One of the biggest mistakes according to him he made was when he decided to produce a film called“Teesri Kasam”starring his friends, Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman. The film turned out to be a big disaster and is said to have led to his ultimate and untimely death. There are many stories about Shailendra which have now after so many years come out as a biography, but this is one of my favourite stories told to me by Gulzar when we were very good friends and met every week till he showed me his true colours when I had given up working in‘Screen’and had the launch of one of my books at which he volunteered to release my book and royally ditched me at the last minute and made me bitterly cry in the washroom till my friend Subhash Ghai came to my rescue. Anyway, that memory has been so painful that I as a simple human being who had all the respect for him cannot hold him in the same respect any longer and the story of that evening keeps creeping in whenever I have to talk about him…..
Back to the story of Shailendra and Gulzar who was Sampurnanand Singh Kalra who came to India from Bina in pre-partition India. He had aspirations to be a poet and was certainly not interested or inclined towards writing lyrics for films and had taken up a job as a car spray painter in one of the suburbs of Bombay.
Shailendra had formed a formidable team with the music director, S.D Burman and they had come up with some of the most outstanding songs. But somewhere in the sixties they seemed to have a serious ego clash and Dada Burman said he would not work with Shailendra. Bimal Roy who was making“Bandini”with Ashok Kumar, Nutan and a struggling Dharmendra in key roles. Bimalda needed a song to be picturerised on Nutan urgently and he had a problem because Dada Burman did not want to work with Shailendra…..

Debu Sen, one of Bimalda’s many assistants knew Gulzar who had now taken the name‘Gulzar’as his pen name which was to be his name for all time. Debu asked Gulzar to try his luck with Dada Burman and the result was an immortal song called‘mora gora rang lai le,tohra shyam rang dai de’.
It looked like Dada Burman and Gulzar had struck the right chord and would continue working together. But Dada Burman forgot his differences with Shailendra and continued to work with him…..
Gulzar was not disheartened because he had still not made up his mind to make a career as a lyricist. But he became a very close disciple of Shailendra. There was a vacancy for an assistant director to work with Bimalda. Gulzar was not interested, but it was Shailendra who pushed him into accepting the job and Gulzar joined Bimalda and was quick in learning what direction was all about and within a matter of years, he was good enough to direct a film like“Mere Apne”and the rest as they say is history….
But Gulzar has not forgotten the contribution Shailendra made to his life and career and even today says,“Shailendra gave me the order and the ticket to enter the industry and in many ways he ended over my fate to me”.
Gulzar has always considered Shailendra to be his mentor and guide and remembers how Shailendra mingled with poetry with the voice of the people and his own ideology. The best times he remembers he spent with Shailendra was the time when Shailendra had taken a small room in a bungalow called‘Bapu Nivas’in Santacruz where he wanted to sit in solitude and write, but never had the opportunity to be alone because as Gulzar remembers the room had been turned into an‘adda’where a group of Communist writers and poets lived and spent long evenings of drinking illicit liquor from the famous Pascal’s bar in Khar Danda and other places. Gulzar still looks for inspiration in the songs and more than the songs his literary poetry for inspiration. Shailendra was a gift to all his directors, but one cannot think of Raj Kapoor or Bimal Roy or Dev Anand and Vijay Anand without the lyrics of Shailendra.
In fact, at a recent function arranged by the‘Screen’Writers Association where Shailendra (together with K.A Abbas and Dr Rahi Masoom Raza) was honoured, Gulzar said it was Shailendra who made the films of Raj Kapoor popular in Russia. And at the same function Randhir Kapoor who was very emotional said he often wondered if the success of his father would be the same without Shailendra in a moving last line Randhir said with folded hands,“Shailendraji ne mere pita aur R.K Films ko diya hai, uska hum aaj bhi khaate hai”.