सरस्वती कुमार दीपक

Saraswati Kumar Deepak was a prolific Hindi film lyricist whose career stretched from the mid-1940s into the late 1960s, during which he wrote over 400 songs for an estimated hundred films in Hindi and Marathi cinema. Born in 1918, he was writing for the screen by 1944, when Mazhar Khan's Badi Baat featured his lyrics set to Firoz Nizami's music and sung by Amirbai Karnataki — among them 'Soti Hoon Ab Sab Soti Hoon'. In 1948 he contributed songs to Aag, Raj Kapoor's directorial debut, with composer Ram Ganguly, and through the 1950s he wrote for films such as Shole (1953), Naya Rasta (1953) and Adhikar (1954). His most enduring specialty, however, was devotional and mythological cinema: he penned bhajans for Pawan Putra Hanuman (1955) with composer Chitragupt and singer Mohammed Rafi, and wrote for Ramayan (1960), Lav Kush (1967) and Hanuman Chalisa (1969). Though never as celebrated as contemporaries like Shailendra or Sahir, Deepak was one of the dependable craftsmen of the studio era, and his Ram and Hanuman bhajans still circulate in devotional collections today.