Zia Sarhadi

Screenwriter and director of the social film (1914-1997)

Zia Sarhadi was born in Peshawar in 1914 and came to Bombay at nineteen, where Mehboob Khan met him and set him to writing stories and screenplays - this film's story is one of them, written with Babubhai A. Mehta. He became a director of the social film: Hum Log (1951) and Footpath (1953), the second with Dilip Kumar and Meena Kumari, who is the child in this one. Footpath is about a writer who drifts into the wartime black market in medicines during a famine, and it is the kind of film its decade mostly did not make. He moved to Pakistan and died in Karachi in 1997.