Given that Kaifi once said that writing film lyrics is a task akin to first digging a grave and then looking for a corpse to fit in, he managed to do a more than competent job of not merely writing on a given dhun (melody) but also bringing in his own world view. Plagued as the film industry is with rampant populism and constrained as the very craft of writing lyrics for cinema is by context and commercial considerations, Kaifi managed to find work with like-minded people. His association with Chetan Anand was especially fruitful in a spate of spectacular films for which he wrote some hauntingly lyrical songs: Hanste Zakhm, Hindustan ki Kasam, Heer Ranjha, Aakhri Khat and Haqeeqat.

Coming to his non-film poetry, several of Kaifi’s nazms are written for the people in his life who were important to him or for others from the public domain whom he held in high esteem. For instance, there’s ‘Shaguftgi ki latafat ka shahkaar ho tum’ for his wife, Shaukat, as well as the short poem, ‘Shaukat ke Naam’, that he uses as a dedication to Awaara Sajdey. Then, there’s ‘Ab aur kya dega tera bimar baap tujhko’ that’s clearly written for his daughter Shabana or ‘Waseeat’ (‘Will’) for his son, Baba. Some have apocryphal stories attached to them such as the nazm entitled ‘Pashemani’ (‘Main yeh soch kar uss ke dar se uttha tha’) said to be inspired by an early love written on leaving Lucknow for Kanpur which he then gave to Chetan Anand to be used in the film Haqeeqat with minor tweaking.5 There are poems inspired by Sarojini Naidu, Jawaharlal Nehru, Stalin, Lenin and a jewel-like ode for Christ entitled ‘Ibn-e Maryam’.

A visit to the motherland of organized communism, the USSR, inspires a slew of poems such as ‘Moscow’, ‘Ferghana’, ‘Tashkent’ written in the summer of 1969. There are others written on Korea and Beirut. Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s famous poem ‘Iblis ki Majlis-e Shuura’ (‘The Parliament of Satan’) written in 1935 constituted a scathing indictment of the socio-economic paradigm offered by the West; Kaifi’s long poem with the same name, written approximately fifty years later, takes the story of inequities forward, bringing in topical concerns such as the growing hegemonic power of the United States, the threat of nuclear warfare, rampant consumerism, heedless capitalism, etc. Like a master vintner pouring new wine in old bottles, Kaifi has used traditional genres such as the qataa, masnavi and the ghazal to speak of radically new concerns; there is, for instance, the long ballad-like masnavi ‘Khana Jungi’ (‘Civil War’) and ‘Awaam’ (‘People’).