*** Welcome to piglix ***

Qamar Jalalabadi


Qamar Jalalabadi, also known as Qamar Jalabadi (1919 – 9 January 2003), was an Indian poet and lyricist of songs of Hindi movies.

He was born as Om Prakash Bhandari in a Punjabi family in 1917 in the Jalalabad town near Amritsar. Right from the age of seven he starting writing poetry in Urdu. There was no encouragement from home, but a wandering minstrel poet named Amar met him in his hometown and encouraged him to write, recognising his immense talent and potential. He also gave him the penname of Qamar which means moon, and Jalalabadi was added for his native town. It was the general trend in those days for writers to name themselves after the towns they hailed from. After completing his matriculation from Amritsar, he embarked on his journalistic career journey by writing for Lahore based newspapers like Daily Milap, Daily Pratap, Nirala, Star Sahakar.

Attracted by the promise of a career in the film industry, Qamar Jalalabadi came to Pune in the early 1940s. In 1942, he wrote lyrics for his first film Zamindar which was a Pancholi Pictures production and the songs of this film were very well received, especially the song sung by Shamshad Begum "Duniya me garibonko aaraam nahi milta", which also had a line or two written by writer and poet Behzad Lucknawi.

Subsequently, Jalalabadi relocated to Bombay, and worked there as a lyricist for nearly 4 decades. His songs were sung by many notable singers including Shiv Dayal Batish, Noor Jehan, G. M. Durrani, Zeenat Begum, Manju, Amirbai Karnataki, Mohammad Rafi, Talat Mahmood, Geeta Roy, Suraiya, Mukesh, Manna Dey, Asha Bhonsle, Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar. He worked with many popular composers including Sachin Dev Burman and Sardar Malik.


...
Wikipedia

...