Rahi Masoom Raza

Sixteen films, from Nikaah and Mili to Disco Dancer - and then the Mahabharata on television. · 1927–1992

Sixteen films here, and the range of them is the point.

Mili and Alaap and Jurmana and Gol Maal, which are Hrishikesh Mukherjee's. Karz and Bemisal. Nikaah in 1982, about a Muslim woman divorced by the triple utterance, which was the most argued-about Hindi film of its year. And Disco Dancer, in the same year, which is about a street musician who becomes a star and is not argued about by anybody.

He was an Urdu poet and novelist first. Aadha Gaon, his novel about a Shia village in the years around Partition, is the work he is read for, and it got him attacked from several directions at once for writing village Muslims as they actually spoke.

Then he wrote the dialogue for the Mahabharata on television, which ran for ninety-four episodes from 1988 and which, by common account, emptied the streets of India on Sunday mornings. A poet who had been accused of offending Muslim sentiment was hired to put words in the mouths of Hindu gods, and the result is the thing he is most widely remembered for.

On Gol Maal he wrote dialogue to Sachin Bhowmick's screenplay, which is the ordinary division of labour in this cinema and one the credits here now keep separate.

Dates and credits from Wikidata.