Ahmad Rahi

Amritsar's voice of Partition — where does the day go, where does the night go? Ahmad Rahi (1923–2002), born Ghulam Ahmad on 12 November 1923 at Amritsar in Punjab, was a Pakistani Punjabi poet and writer, an Urdu ghazal poet, and one of Lollywood's most prolific film lyricists. Schooled at Amritsar, he went on to M.A.O. College, Lahore, where he was expelled for taking part in political movements, and he stood with the Progressive Writers' Movement. At Partition in 1947 he migrated to Pakistan and became the founding editor of the quarterly literary magazine *Sawera* at Lahore. His first book, *Tarinjan* (1952), sang Punjabi culture and mourned Partition's dead — its lament poems carry the folk lovers Heer, Sahiban and Sohni through the bloodshed of 1947 — and his Urdu ghazals were gathered in *Rag-e-Jaan*. For the cinema he wrote more than 1,900 songs and some 260 film scripts across 51 films, Punjabi and Urdu, among them *Heer Ranjha* (1970), *Mirza Jat* (1967), *Baji* (1963) and *Yakke Wali* (1957). His services to letters were honoured with the Pride of Performance and the Adamjee Literary Award. He died at Lahore on 2 September 2002, after seven months of paralysis.