Unique Music Director-Lyricist Combinations in Hindi Films

A few days ago, Shankar Iyer of Nostalgiaana kicked off an interesting discussion on Facebook. Which are some music director-lyricist partnerships that have appeared in only one Hindi film? What started as a list of 10 films in Shankar’s post grew rapidly with inputs from other music aficionados.

Given the interest this topic generated, I thought I’d expand the list using MySwar. Since a comprehensive list of all films with unique music director-lyricist combinations would have been too long, I filtered the list to include only the most prominent artists. The list is valid as of July 2026 because it includes currently active artists and excludes some recent releases.

Some observations:

• Kalyanji – Anandji seemed to experiment with lyricists the most. There were 21 films in which they worked with a lyricist and never worked with them again. Roshan, Usha Khanna, and Shankar – Jaikishan (probably in the post-Jaikishan phase) also moved quite a bit from one lyricist to another.
• Among lyricists, Naqsh Lyallpuri, with 28 films, featured the most in unique music director-lyricist combinations. Bharat Vyas was a close second with 26 films.
• Many more lyricists appeared in this list 15 or more times than music directors. This is perhaps a testament to the music director’s pre-eminence over the lyricist in the Hindi film industry.

As always, this list can be verified by performing combination searches using MySwar’s Advanced Search feature (requires login, requires a subscription after a few limited free uses).

A follow-up post listing similar unique combinations of music directors and singers – Unique Music Director-Singer Combinations in Hindi Films.

The list: