The great music composer Khayyam did his career’s best score for Sagar Sarhadi’s Bazaar. This immortal motionpicture soundtrack, one of the 25 great albums of Hindi cinema , contains Lataji’s majestic Ghazal Dikhayee diye yun ke bekhud kiya, followed by her dulcet duet Phir chidi raat with Talat Aziz.
Moving away from professional lyricists , Sarhadi used traditional poetry of classical poets. Jagjit Kaur’s heartbreaking Dekh lo aaj humko jee bhar ke was from a 200-year-old book Zehre-E-Ishq by Mirza Shauq. Lataji’s Dikhaye diye yun was written by Mir Taqi Mir and Phir chiddhi raat was penned by Marxist poet Makhdoom.
Bazaar is one of my favourite films of the 1980s. In it, the theme of innocent love represented by Farooque Shaikh and Supriya Pathak as opposed to manipulative match-making, resonated across the country although the film was made under tremendous constraints.Smita Patil who played one of the main leads refused to dub for the film as she thought she had been given a raw deal. Later she relented.
A noted Urdu shortstory writer, Sagar Saab started his writing career in films with the dialogues of Basu Bhattacharya’s Anubhav which were so real, they seemed to have been thought up by the protagonists played by Tanuja and Sanjeev Kumar. Stardom of a kind, came to Sagar Sarhadi when Yash Chopra invited him to write for him.For Yashraj Films Sagar Sarhadi wrote the memorable Kabhi Kabhie, Doosra Aadmi, Silsila, Faasle, Chandni .
After Bazaar , Sagar also directed Agla Mausam and Chausar(the latter featuring Nawazuddin Siddiqui) which never got properly released.
Besides his romantic temperament that was so magnificently manifested in his cinema Sagar Sarhadi was a fiercely committed activist.He was one of the great supporters of the slum-dwellers’rights association the Nivara Haq . Sagar travelled only by train. He never bought a car because he always felt he connected with the common man by travelling with them. He was a freebird. He never wanted to get trapped in marriage or any kind of relationships. The only focus of his life was writing.
To close friends ,Sagar Sarhadi confessed his disgust with mainstream cinema and talked of making films he believed in .Until age caught up with him Sagar walked from Sion where he lived to Juhu where he had his office.
His home in Sion was filled with shelves of books in every room. An erudite literate brutally honest artiste,a misfit in commercial cinema, Sagar Sarhadi like Sahir Ludhianvi , K A Abbas and Kaifi Azmi brought a literary bent to Hindi cinema. For this Hindi cinema should be indebted to Sagar Sarhadi.
