चम्पा

Champa was a 'social' made at Shorey Pictures in Lahore and released in that city in October 1945, playing at the Crown cinema. Barkat Ram Mehra directed it for the producer Roop K. Shorey, with Manorama — then in the run of heroine roles that preceded her long later career as a character actress — heading a cast that included Asha Posley, Hari Shivdasani, Majnu, Salma, Zahoor Shah, Sheikh Iqbal and Ghulam Qadir. No plot summary of the film survives in any accessible archive: Indiancine.ma carries the title, the year and the director but no synopsis, no print is known to be in circulation, and the trade paper record for Lahore productions of this period is thin. What is left is the soundtrack — nine songs jointly credited to Lachhiram Tamar and Anupam Ghatak, most of them carried by Zeenat Begum — and the record labels themselves, which sketch the film's world in outline: a village well and a washed muslin veil, a lover gone to a far country, a supplicant standing at a door that will not open, a night of wine and spring, and anklets sounding somewhere off-screen.

Nine songs are documented, credited jointly to Lachhiram Tamar and Anupam Ghatak; the sources disagree over which composer took which number — HindiGeetMala assigns most of the album to Lachhiram Tamar alone, MySwar splits it between the two, and the four surviving 78-rpm transfers label every side they carry 'Anupam Ghatak + Lachhiram' — so this record lists both on every song except 'Chhaya Chahun Ore Andhera', which HindiGeetMala and MySwar both give to Lachhiram Tamar alone and for which no disc survives to say otherwise. Zeenat Begum carries the album: she is documented on at least four of the nine, including the ghazal 'Mere Dil Ki Duniya Se Jao To Janoon' and the mendicant's plea 'Data Band Padi Hain Dwaar Tere'. The one ensemble number, 'Doriye Ki Odhni Mein Mal Mal Dhoun Ri', sets her against Munawwar Sultana and a chorus in a village panghat idiom. For the remaining five titles the discs are catalogued but no singer credit has been traced, and none is invented here. Pakistan Film Magazine dissents on both counts: it names Shamshad Begum and 'Kumari Indoraniray' as the film's singers, and gives 'Doriye Ki Odhni' to Shamshad Begum and Zohrabai Ambalewali — an attribution no other source and no surviving disc supports.

1945 was the year Roop K. Shorey travelled to Britain and the United States with an Indian film delegation, touring Hollywood studios including Paramount, and in October — the very month Champa opened in Lahore — announced an ambitious bilingual colour production on Omar Khayyam intended for American distribution. Champa belongs to the steady programme output that paid for such ambitions. Pakistan Film Magazine's credit sheet for the film names Ehsan B.A. and Ramanand Sagar among its writers; the Ramanand Sagar attribution, if it is right, would place the future maker of the Ramayan television serial in Shorey's Lahore writing room, but no other source consulted here corroborates it and it is recorded as unverified. The lyricist Aziz Kashmiri had made his own film debut on a Shorey production, Himmat (1941), and stayed with the house through Shalimar (1946); the discs were issued on Columbia, whose catalogue Saregama holds today.

Champa matters chiefly as a document of the Lahore film industry at its commercial peak in the last two years before Partition. It brought the Bengali composer Anupam Ghatak — a trained flautist who had assisted R. C. Boral on Vidyapati (1937) and is better remembered today for his Bengali scores — together with the Punjab-based Lachhiram Tamar, a pairing Shorey Pictures liked enough to use again on Shalimar (1946), where Pandit Amarnath joined them, and which reappeared on Badnami (1946) — each time with Aziz Kashmiri supplying the verses, as HindiGeetMala's per-track credits for both films confirm. The film also falls inside Zeenat Begum's densest stretch as a recording artist: four Champa sides survive as 78-rpm collectors' transfers and all four carry her name, catching her at the point where a Lahore-trained classical voice was being asked to carry an entire album. No reliable total for her pre-Partition output has been traced, and none is asserted here.

Almost nothing of Champa survives beyond its records. Saregama, inheritor of the Columbia catalogue that issued the discs, has digitised part of the soundtrack, and a handful of 78-rpm transfers circulate among collectors — which is more than can be said for most Lahore productions of 1945. The combination that made it did not outlast the decade: Shorey Pictures lost its Multan Road studio, then described as the largest in the East, to arson during the 1947 Partition riots and rebuilt in Bombay; Zeenat Begum crossed to Pakistan and became a mainstay of Radio Pakistan's Lahore station; Anupam Ghatak went back to Bengali cinema, where Agni Pariksha (1954) made his name, and died in 1956. Champa is therefore less a remembered film than a marker — one of the last things this particular assembly of Lahore talent put on record before the city stopped making Hindi films at all.