Javed Akhtar
Quick answer: Javed Akhtar craft guide: clear Urdu, rational lyricism and inherited tradition renewed. Learn the Tarkash poet's techniques for plain-spoken depth.
Javed Akhtar carries one of Urdu poetry's longest bloodlines: his father was the poet and lyricist Jan Nisar Akhtar, his grandfather the poet Muztar Khairabadi, and the line runs back further still. Born in 1945 in Gwalior, he arrived in Bombay nearly penniless, became half of the most successful screenwriting duo in Hindi cinema, Salim-Javed, and then, in midlife, stepped out as a poet and lyricist in his own right.
His collections Tarkash and Lava, the second of which won the Sahitya Akademi Award, established a voice of unusual clarity: rationalist, secular, plain-spoken Urdu that hides its craft in apparent conversation. That clarity is the teachable thing.
The inheritance and the reinvention
Akhtar's childhood was shadowed by his mother's early death and years spent between relatives, experiences his autobiographical poems revisit with controlled ache rather than display. The screenwriting decades trained him in structure, character and the audience's pulse, and when Tarkash, the quiver, appeared in 1995, readers met a poet who could make an argument walk through a poem without stiffening it.
He is also among India's most articulate public rationalists, a parliamentarian and campaigner for lyricists' rights, and a five-time National Film Award winner for songs. The film work and page poetry share one instrument: Hindustani pitched exactly where Urdu elegance meets street comprehension, ornament sacrificed for reach without sacrificing weight.
The signature moves
Akhtar's poems repay reverse-engineering because their machinery is visible once named.
What you can learn
Write a reasoned lyric. Choose a question you actually hold, does time heal, is home a place, what survives belief, and argue it entirely in images, allowing yourself no abstract assertion until the final two lines, if at all. Akhtar shows that thought and song are not rivals; the poem thinks best when the thinking is dressed as things.
Adopt the two-audience test: read each line asking whether your most and least literary friends would both keep listening. Lines failing either test get rewritten, not defended. And if writers came before you in your family or community, answer one of them: take a theme an elder handled and write your generation's reply. Tradition treated as correspondence keeps both parties alive.
Where to start reading
Tarkash is the entry point, widely available bilingually, and his own audio recording of it is a masterclass in delivery. Lava collects the mature work that won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2013. For the songcraft, study the lyrics written for films such as Silsila and 1942: A Love Story alongside the page poems, and his prose lectures on poetry and cinema, collected in Talking Films and Talking Songs, explain the craft decisions in his own words.
What poets can take from this
- Argue a real question entirely in images, permitting abstraction only in the final lines.
- Apply the two-audience test: your most and least literary friends must both keep listening.
- Answer a poem or theme from a writer in your own family or community lineage.
- Write grief through objects and steady syntax; let the reader tremble instead of the lines.
- Record yourself reading a draft and listen for the word your voice does not believe.
Try it yourself
Take a question you genuinely cannot settle, whether home is a place, whether time heals, and write a poem that argues both sides using only concrete images: rooms, roads, weather, hands. You may state a conclusion only in the last line, or refuse one.
Questions
What poetry collections has Javed Akhtar published?
His major collections are Tarkash (1995) and Lava (2012); Lava won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Urdu in 2013. Both circulate in Urdu, Devanagari and English editions.
Does Javed Akhtar come from a literary family?
Yes. His father Jan Nisar Akhtar was a noted poet and film lyricist, and his grandfather Muztar Khairabadi a distinguished Urdu poet, part of a lineage of writers stretching back generations.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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