Hafeez Jalandhari: The Poet Behind Pakistan's National Anthem
Try this sometime, as an actual experiment and not just a rhetorical exercise. Ask a handful of people around you — friends, cousins, whoever's nearby — who actually wrote the national anthem. Not who composed the tune. Who wrote the words. You will, almost without fail, get a few blank stares. Maybe someone throws out a wrong name with total confidence. And then, eventually, somebody says "Hafeez Jalandhari" in that tone people use when they're dragging a fact up from somewhere deep and dusty, probably a ninth-grade textbook they haven't opened since. And they're right, but they don't say it like they're sure. It's more like a guess that happened to land.
That's the strange thing about this whole story. Every single Pakistani has sung this man's words. Not once. Not twice. Hundreds of times, easily, over a lifetime — school mornings standing in rows nobody wanted to be in, before cricket matches, at some government ceremony where everyone's mostly thinking about how hot it is outside. The tune gets recognized in under a second, everywhere, always. The man behind the words? Almost nobody. There's something a little unfair buried in that, if you actually sit with it for more than a passing thought, which most people don't, because why would they. Life moves on. The anthem plays, everyone stands, everyone sits back down, and the name attached to it just kind of evaporates.
So this is an attempt to actually sit with it. Not a two-paragraph Wikipedia summary dressed up with better sentences. Where this man came from, why he wrote the way he did, how somebody with almost no formal education ended up writing lines an entire country now recites without thinking twice about who put them there.
Early Life — Nobody Handed Him Anything
He was born in January 1900, in Jalandhar. Back then that was just Punjab under British rule — no Pakistan, no India as two separate countries, none of the borders that exist now had been drawn yet. It's easy to forget that when you're talking about someone whose name is now permanently stitched to Pakistani identity, but the place he was actually born in eventually ended up on the other side of a line he never crossed again. The "Jalandhari" part of his name came from exactly that — his hometown. It wasn't some deliberate branding decision, nothing calculated about it. Plenty of poets from that era did the same thing, attaching their name to wherever they were from, like a stamp that just stuck for the rest of their life, even once the geography around it changed completely.
He didn't come from money. Not even a little. And school, in the conventional sense — the kind of structured education you'd assume produced someone whose lines would eventually be memorized by tens of millions of strangers — never really happened for him. Most of what ended up in his head, he put there himself, through reading that bordered on obsession. Persian texts. Urdu poetry. Whatever he could physically get his hands on, really, in an era when getting your hands on books wasn't as simple as it is now. If you want a modern comparison, think about how people can't put their phones down, that constant low-grade compulsion to keep scrolling. Different era, arguably a healthier target, but the same kind of itch.
And you can actually feel that self-taught quality sitting underneath everything he wrote later in life. There's no stiffness to it. None of that textbook formality you sometimes pick up from poets who went through years of proper academic training and never quite managed to shake the lecture-hall voice sitting under every single line they ever wrote afterward. His work reads like it came from somebody who lived with words his entire life, day in and day out, rather than somebody who studied them for an exam and then closed the book.
Building a Career, One Poem at a Time
He started writing young, and — a little unusually for someone with exactly zero formal credentials to point to — people noticed fast. Faster than you'd expect, honestly, given how these things usually go for self-taught writers who don't have an institution's name attached to vouch for them.
His early work sat comfortably inside the usual boxes of classical Urdu poetry. Ghazals. Nazms. The forms basically every poet of his generation was more or less expected to attempt at some point, whether they actually loved the form or were just going through the motions because that's what serious poets did. But even in that early stretch, there was something a little different in how he handled it. Nature, spirituality, plain ordinary human feeling — all folded together without it ever coming across like he was performing for an audience or checking a box. A lot of his contemporaries genuinely couldn't manage that balance. It came out stiff, or overly ornamental, or too obviously reaching for effect. He, for whatever reason, could pull it off from fairly early on.
His most significant work is probably "Shahnama-e-Islam" — a long narrative poem that walks through the history of Islam from beginning to end. That is not a small undertaking, not by any measure. Years of sustained, disciplined work, the kind most writers quietly avoid because it's simply easier, and safer for your reputation, to write something short and be done with it before anyone can judge the whole arc of the thing. That poem is basically the turning point. Before it, people saw him as a poet dabbling on the side, talented but not quite serious. After it, nobody could really say that anymore.
He also spent time in journalism and in radio, including a stretch with All India Radio before Partition tore everything down the middle. This part of his life doesn't come up much when people talk about him — it gets buried under the anthem, understandably — but it mattered more than it gets credit for. Writing for radio teaches you something writing for a page simply never does. How words behave when someone is hearing them out loud, in the moment, with no chance to go back and reread a line that didn't quite land. That's a completely different discipline from writing something meant to sit quietly on a page, waiting for a reader who can take their time.
Then Came the Anthem
Fast-forward to 1954. That's the year Jalandhari sat down and actually wrote the lyrics for "Qaumi Taranah." Here's the part almost nobody knows, and it genuinely surprises people every time it comes up: the music came first. Ahmed Ghulamali Chagla had already composed the tune before a single word of the anthem existed. Which runs completely backward from how you'd expect this process to work. Normally, somebody writes the lyrics, and then a composer builds a melody to fit them, shaping the music around the meaning and the rhythm of the words. Here, it happened the other way around entirely. Jalandhari was essentially handed a finished tune and told, in effect, to make words fit it — a much harder task than it sounds, because now the poetry has to bend around a rhythm that already exists, rather than the rhythm bending around the poetry.
The language he ultimately chose is still debated, even decades later, whenever people sit down and actually talk about the anthem seriously instead of just singing it on autopilot. He wrote the entire thing in heavily Persianized Urdu — dense with Farsi vocabulary, a long way removed from the everyday, spoken Urdu that most Pakistanis actually grew up using at home, in the kitchen, on the street, with friends. It's a fair criticism, and it hasn't faded with time. Plenty of people, genuinely, cannot parse every single word of the anthem without having it explained to them at some point, usually by a teacher, sometime around primary school.
But there's a counterargument worth taking seriously too. Maybe the anthem was never supposed to sound like something you'd casually say over tea with a neighbor. Anthems, as a category of writing, generally aren't built to feel like everyday speech. They're supposed to sit a little apart from ordinary conversation — ceremonial, a bit removed, almost formal in a way that signals the occasion is bigger than a normal exchange of words. Maybe the very inaccessibility that critics point to is part of what gives it that weight, that sense of occasion, rather than being simply a flaw in the writing.
Apparently, it took him weeks to finish. Rewriting. Going back over lines he'd already settled on. Adjusting single words, sometimes just one syllable, until something finally clicked into place the way he wanted it to. That kind of obsessive, granular attention over what amounts to a fairly short set of lines tells you something important about the man. He understood exactly what he was doing. He wasn't writing a poem for himself, or for a handful of literary critics who'd pick it apart in a journal somewhere. He was writing something meant to be sung by millions of strangers he would never meet, across generations he would never live long enough to see grow up, get married, have children of their own who would also stand and sing the same words without knowing his name.
As for what the anthem actually says — and this is the part almost nobody stops to think about — most people can hum the tune without any effort at all but genuinely couldn't tell you what the words mean if you asked them directly, on the spot. It leans heavily into unity, faith, national pride, the idea of a "pure land," Pak Sarzameen, some shared destiny tying together a group of people who might otherwise, on paper, have very little in common with each other. It isn't really telling a story, not in the way some national anthems do, with a clear narrative arc about founding or struggle or victory. It reads more like an invocation. Almost a prayer, in its structure and rhythm, which actually tracks pretty well when you consider how much of Jalandhari's other poetry keeps circling back to spirituality, no matter what the poem is technically supposed to be about on the surface.
What Happened After
He kept writing well into his later years, right up until the end, really. But nothing else he ever produced came close to matching how widely known the anthem became — which, honestly, happens more often than people assume. One piece of work ends up eating an entire career's worth of other writing, swallowing it whole, whether that's fair to the writer or not. And there isn't really anything a writer can do once that happens. You don't get to choose which of your works the world decides to remember.
He eventually received the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, one of Pakistan's civilian honors, in recognition of decades spent working in literature — not just the anthem, but the whole body of work behind it. He died in December 1982, in Lahore. By that point, his words had already been sung by more people than he could have possibly counted in a lifetime, most of them never once pausing to wonder who had actually sat down, alone, with a pen, adjusting single words for weeks, to write the thing they were singing. There's something genuinely strange about that, when you slow down enough to notice it. A writer disappearing so completely into something that now belongs to an entire country, not to him personally, not anymore, maybe not ever again.
It's easy, and honestly a little lazy, to shrink a man like this down to just "the anthem guy" and leave it at that. But that's not really fair to someone who spent his entire life as a serious, working poet — decades of output across different forms, real and lasting contributions to Urdu literature that go far beyond the two minutes everyone stands up for once a year and then promptly forgets about the moment they sit back down.
Knowing where he actually came from — no formal schooling, entirely self-taught from the ground up, spending weeks obsessing over a handful of lines until they finally felt right to him — changes how the anthem sounds, at least a little, once you know it. It stops being just some tune you stand up for out of habit because everyone else around you is standing. It starts feeling like something an actual person sat with, alone, for a long stretch of time, revised again and again, and cared about more than most of us, most of the time, ever think to ask.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who wrote Pakistan's national anthem?
Hafeez Jalandhari wrote the lyrics of "Qaumi Taranah" in 1954. Ahmed Ghulamali Chagla had composed the music earlier, before the words existed.
What language is the Pakistani national anthem written in?
Mostly Persianized Urdu — heavy on Farsi vocabulary, quite far from the everyday spoken Urdu most Pakistanis actually grew up using at home, which is part of why some words still trip people up even today.
What is Hafeez Jalandhari best known for besides the anthem?
Shahnama-e-Islam, a long narrative poem tracing the history of Islam, along with decades of Urdu poetry touching on nature, spirituality, and everyday human emotion.
When did Hafeez Jalandhari die?
December 1982, in Lahore, after a lifetime spent writing.
Did Hafeez Jalandhari receive any awards?
Yes — the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, one of Pakistan's civilian honors, awarded for his contributions to literature.