सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना

“Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna” is the patriotic Urdu ghazal written by Bismil Azimabadi around 1921, during the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat upsurge. Never recorded on disc in its own decade, it spread through mushairas, processions and prisons, was immortalised by the Kakori revolutionaries, and remains India's most quoted revolutionary verse. Text in copyright until 2038; only the matla is quoted here.

The ghazal's metre is built for crowds: even stresses, a refrain that lands like a drumbeat, rhymes ('dil mein hai', 'qaatil mein hai') that a procession can pick up on first hearing. It needed no composer — the street set it to march time, and every later film tune has only borrowed that pulse.

Bismil Azimabadi performed the era's great alchemy: he took the ghazal's oldest metaphor — the lover offering his head to the cruel beloved — and aimed it at the empire. Sarfaroshi, qaatil, maqtal: every word keeps its romantic ancestry and acquires a political target. That double exposure is why censors could never quite pin it and why crowds never let it go.

Composed around 1921 — Jallianwala's wound still open, Non-Cooperation and Khilafat at full tide — the ghazal travelled through mushairas and Congress-Khilafat meetings. Its second life began when Ram Prasad 'Bismil' adopted it; he and Ashfaqulla Khan recited it through the Kakori trial, and at the gallows in 1927 it became scripture. The shared takhallus 'Bismil' confused authorship for decades until the Azimabadi's handwritten bayaz settled the claim.

From Bhagat Singh's generation to school assemblies, from Manoj Kumar's Shaheed (1965) to Rang De Basanti (2006), the ghazal has never left circulation. It is the rare freedom-struggle text whose afterlife in film and album music is larger than most film songs' first lives.