बेगम

Begum is a 1945 social drama made under Taj Mahal Pictures, the banner the actress Naseem Banu ran with her husband Mian Ehsan-ul-Haq, and it puts her opposite Ashok Kumar — then the biggest star in Indian cinema after Kismet (1943) — a year after the two had played together in Filmistan's Chal Chal Re Naujawan (1944). Sushil Majumdar directed; MySwar credits the screenplay to Saadat Hasan Manto, who was in the middle of his most productive Bombay period and had written the earlier film as well. The supporting cast on record is Sharda, Puri, Vikram Kapoor and V. H. Desai. No plot summary of Begum survives in the accessible archives — indiancine.ma, the English list of 1945 Hindi films and the Hindi Wikipedia stub all carry credits without a story, and the film itself does not appear to be in circulation. What the record does preserve intact is the cast, the authorship, and the complete nine-song soundtrack, whose titles run from youth arriving in a rush through waiting eyes to closed eyes and a fire of tears going out.

Nine songs, all written by Gopal Singh Nepali and all composed by Hari Prasanna Das — a single writer-composer pairing across the whole album, which was less common in 1945 than the shared-credit scores of the bigger studios. The vocal distribution is the score's defining feature: six numbers go to Naseem Banu herself, one to Ashok Kumar singing his own song, one to a Mohammed Rafi-Mohantara duet — the film's only outside casting — and one, 'Ye Aansuon Ka Taar Nahin', carries no surviving singer credit at all. None of the recordings appears to have been reissued, so the album is documented rather than audible: the credits and titles are preserved in the trade catalogues and the modern song databases, the sound is not.

Saadat Hasan Manto had joined Filmistan in 1942 on Shaheed Latif's invitation and formed a close friendship with Ashok Kumar there; his screen work of these years includes Chal Chal Re Naujawan (1944), which had already put Ashok Kumar and Naseem Banu opposite each other, and later Aatth Din and Shikari (1946). Begum reunited that pairing away from Filmistan, on Naseem Banu's own banner. Naseem Banu came to the industry from a household of professional musicians — her mother Chamiyan Bai was a celebrated singer and tawaif of Old Delhi — which is why an actress rather than a playback singer could carry two thirds of a soundtrack in 1945. The composer, Hari Prasanna Das, was a working studio man of the 1930s and 1940s whose documented credits run from Bombay Mail (1935) through Mohabbat (1943), Kadambari (1944), Meena (1944) and Mazdoor (1945) to Sati Toral (1947) and Veerangana (1947), the last co-composed with a young Manna Dey; no birth or death dates for him survive in the standard reference works.

Begum matters for three things the record can prove. It is the first film in Gopal Singh Nepali's documented filmography: the Bihar-born post-Chhayavaad poet wrote all nine songs here and all six of Mazdoor the same year, both for Hari Prasanna Das, before going on to some fifty films and his long partnership with Chitragupta. It carries one of Mohammed Rafi's earliest Hindi film recordings, cut in the year after he arrived in Bombay and well before the Naushad association that made him. And it is a rare 1940s case of a leading actress producing her own vehicle — Naseem Banu not only starred but co-owned the banner, and she sings six of the nine songs herself, so the score rests primarily on the voice of its own star rather than on hired playback singers.

Begum left no reissued music and no surviving print, and it is absent from the standard retrospectives of 1945 — a year remembered instead for Zeenat, Humayun and Pehli Nazar. Its afterlife runs entirely through the people it employed. Gopal Singh Nepali went on to write for around fifty films across two decades, dying on a Bhagalpur railway platform in 1963 with a body of Hindi poetry and film verse behind him that began here. Mohammed Rafi became the defining male voice of Hindi cinema. Naseem Banu acted until 1957 and is remembered for Pukar (1939), Sheesh Mahal (1950) and as Saira Banu's mother; her singing, confined to the years before playback took over, is credited on some twenty titles in the song databases, and with six of them Begum is the largest concentration of it in any one film. For the database, the film is what a large share of pre-Independence Hindi cinema now is: a complete song list, a firm set of credits, and no film.