Gulzar celebrates the city that welcomed him as a teenager in new book ‘Aamchi Mumbai’
The veteran poet-lyricist revisits his early years in Mumbai, reflecting on the city that shaped his life and creative journey
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The veteran poet-lyricist revisits his early years in Mumbai, reflecting on the city that shaped his life and creative journey
Updated - July 24, 2026 03:53 pm IST
Gulzar came to Mumbai in the 1950s as a 16-year-old. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
On one of those early monsoon days when the heavens seem to have opened up, I find myself in a cab winding up Bandra’s Pali Hill. Through the grey haze and incessant, thick din of the downpour that defines the city at this time of the year, we stop at an unshowy white bungalow from another era. I am here to meet someone who started off almost as a castaway 76 years ago, a migrant like countless others in a city that has since given him everything and that he has now called home for decades.
Gulzar (born in 1934 in Dina, present-day Pakistan), beloved poet, writer, filmmaker and lyricist in Hindi films, has brought out a new collection of poems and short stories from the 1980s, titled Aamchi Mumbai (My Mumbai). The anthology (translated by Rakhshanda Jalil; published by HarperCollins) is as open and tactile, as reminiscent of the salt-flecked sea air of Mumbai and as heterogenous, as the city’s capacious and chaotic heart.
At times in the conversation, we might have come precariously close to invoking the typical clichés of a dream city but of course we don’t. Gulzar’s disarmingly accessible writing masks the way in which the poetic and writerly self remains grounded in the canny outsider’s persona with a natural distance from his material. And then there is the play of languages whose often alien idioms and rhythms might draw from North India, Urdu, his native Punjabi, and his fascination with Bangla, but are uniquely alchemised in his writing and concerns as a Mumbaikar in the here and now.
In the first of his striking series of Mumbai poems, Gulzar describes the city as a long fish lying in the water. Later, he compares the city by night to a black cat, with her claws tucked into her belly. In another poem, wryly titled ‘It is probably a city of advertisements’, he acknowledges that the city is driven by a constant ubiquitous marketing hype and the anxiety to sell itself.
As the anthology progresses, Aamchi Mumbai makes way for darker and more unsettling themes: Whenever a strong wind blows in this city, my friend a few nests fall from the branches… picking every scrap and fragment of dream and attempting to stick them back together. Some dreams remain sobbing and sighing but some die…
Mumbai’s Gateway of India during the monsoon. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The stories are almost invariably written in the first person, a device that allows Gulzar to experiment with storytelling while capturing Mumbai’s tense energy and many contradictions. His portrait of the clarinet player Firoze and recollections of working with the legendary filmmaker and mentor Bimal Roy, as he raced against death to film Amrito Kumbher Sandhaney (1982), a Samaresh Basu novel, are truly memorable.
These are the impressions I carry with me into the interview at any rate. Looking for an opening, I venture to suggest that Gulzar came back to literature around 2000, after his film career of nearly four decades was winding down. This was when the producer of political thriller Hu Tu Tu (1999) had taken away his last film as a director, editing it afresh and applying for a new censor certificate.
But it turns out that this is not a good start at all. Polite disapproval, if not open contradiction, appears on Gulzar’s face before he explains, “I have always been with books and literature. I never left literature so there’s no question of coming back. Films happened somewhere in the middle, settled me, gave me stability but it was always books and writing for me.”
He adds, “Even when I joined films, I worked with Bimal Roy whose Hindi films drew mainly from Bangla literature.” Indeed, Roy’s best cinema drew from literature and included Sujata (1959), based on a short story by Subodh Ghosh, and Bandini (1963), based on a short story by Charu Chandra Chakraborty (pen name Jarasandha). Earlier, the classic Do Bigha Zamin in 1953 was inspired by a poem by the same name, by Rabindranath Tagore, with screenplay and music by Salil Chowdhury. Devdas in 1955 was based on a novel by the same name by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay.
