धर्म

Dharm is a 1945 Hindi social drama made by the Bombay banner Star Productions and directed by Ramnik Desai. Its billed cast brought together the veteran leading man E. Billimoria, whose screen career reached back to the silent era, and the singer-actress Rattan Bai, who had been on screen since New Theatres' Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933) and had turned producer with Saheli in 1942; Leela Pande, Madhuri, Maya Devi, Jamshedji, Ismail, G. Mohammed, Kumar and Premi complete the listed credits. Contemporary listings classify the film simply as a 'social' — the wartime industry's catch-all label for a melodrama set in the present day and built around family, money and moral obligation — and the title, dharm, meaning duty or righteous conduct, points squarely at that register. Beyond this the record stops: no print, screenplay, censor synopsis or contemporary plot summary of Dharm has been traced in any accessible archive, and the film is not known to survive. It was certified by the Bombay board on 27 July 1945 (certificate Bombay/31989), running 10,996 feet on twelve reels, a little over two hours. What does survive is its soundtrack — seven documented songs composed by Sajjad Hussain in only his second year as an independent film composer — and this entry deliberately describes the documented record rather than inventing a story for it.

Seven songs are documented for Dharm, all composed by Sajjad Hussain, and the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, MySwar and hindigeetmala agree on the same seven. MySwar attributes the album to Saregama; the Geet Kosh entry names no record company, and no source reachable for this entry names HMV. The vocal load is carried entirely by women. Rattan Bai sings on four of the seven: 'Duniya Mein Rahe', which the Geet Kosh credits to her alone; 'Jam Jam Rahe Meharban Mere Allah Mian' and 'Jeevan Ki Dor', on both of which it credits her together with unnamed other voices; and the album's one duet, 'Chali Pawan Purvai', shared with a singer the sources credit only as Naseem. Naseem also has a solo of her own, the record whose mukhda begins 'Aane vale, aane vale, aane vale jab aenge, kaise man samajhaun' — catalogued by MySwar and hindigeetmala under its second phrase as 'Kaise Mann Samjhaoon' and by the archive Songs of Yore under its first as 'Aanewale jab aayenge', which is why some reckonings of this soundtrack reach eight. Alaknanda sings 'Tera Mera Pyar Ho'. The remaining title, 'Naveli Albeli', is credited to a chorus: the Geet Kosh says 'Chorus', MySwar 'various artists', and hindigeetmala leaves the singer column blank. 'Jam Jam Rahe Meharban Mere Allah Mian' is classified as a qawwali-inflected devotional address to God, and MySwar's entry for it notes that several female voices are audible on the record although only Rattan Bai was credited — which matches the Geet Kosh's 'Ratan Bai, Others'. One of the seven, 'Aanewale jab aayenge', is the only side for which a recording has been traced; Songs of Yore posts it. No male playback voice appears anywhere in the documented track list: every credited singer on this soundtrack is a woman. That is unusual even for 1945, and it is the single most distinctive fact about the album.

Sajjad Hussain came to Dharm after nearly a decade in the Bombay studios as a hired instrumentalist rather than a composer. Born in Sitamau in 1917, the youngest of nine children of a tailor who played the sitar, he learned that instrument from his father and went on to master veena, violin, flute, piano and the mandolin, the instrument he remained identified with; as a session player he is reputed to have appeared on more than twenty-two thousand recordings. He moved to Bombay in 1937 and worked at Sohrab Modi's Minerva Movietone for thirty rupees a month before also working with Wadia Movietone, and only in 1944 did he begin composing scores under his own name. The perfectionist, short-tempered manner for which he became notorious — and which would later cost him working relationships with figures as senior as the lyricist D.N. Madhok and the actor Dilip Kumar — dates from these first years. Dharm's verses were divided between two writers: Shewan Rizvi, then at the very start of a career that ran into the early 1970s, and Baalam Pardesi, a name that appears on around forty 1940s film songs but for whom no biographical record has been traced at all. The online album listings credit the two jointly across the whole soundtrack without saying who wrote what, but the Hindi Film Geet Kosh does separate them side by side: it gives Shewan Rizvi 'Jam Jam Rahe Meharban', 'Tera Mera Pyar Ho', 'Duniya Mein Rahe', 'Chali Pawan Purvai' and 'Aanewale Jab Aayenge', and Baalam Pardesi — whom it prints simply as 'Balam' — 'Naveli Albeli' and 'Jeevan Ki Dor'. Songs of Yore independently credits 'Aanewale Jab Aayenge' to Shewan Rizvi, agreeing with the Geet Kosh.

Dharm's importance is almost entirely musical: it is the second film Sajjad Hussain scored on his own. He had written two songs for Gaali and then made his independent debut with Dost, both in 1944, and Dharm follows in 1945, a year before 1857 and Tilasmi Duniya. Because a famously exacting temperament kept his total output to fewer than twenty films across a thirty-four-year career, every one of his scores carries disproportionate weight in understanding him, and this is one of the earliest. The film is also among the last screen credits of Rattan Bai, who sings on four of its seven documented records while appearing in the cast — an arrangement that belongs to the vanishing era before playback singing became a separate profession. Finally, Dharm is a useful test case for the reliability of Hindi film-song data: it is one of the 1945 titles whose song list has been visibly corrupted in circulation, and reconstructing it correctly means subtracting eight songs the listings wrongly import from another film, and then recognising that one of the seven that remain has been catalogued under two different titles and must not be counted twice.

No copy of Dharm is known to circulate and none of its songs entered the gramophone canon; the film survives as a catalogue entry rather than as music people still hear. Only one side, 'Aanewale Jab Aayenge', has been traced to a surviving recording, and that one is missing from the catalogues. Its afterlife is documentary — an entry in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh with its censor particulars and seven song titles, a row in Wikipedia's list of 1945 Hindi releases, a seven-track album listing in the BollySwar/MySwar compendium credited to Saregama, two duplicate records on indiancine.ma, and a page on hindigeetmala. That last point is where the film has acquired an unintended second life: several online listings merge Dharm's soundtrack with that of Din Raat (1945), the film scored by Dada Chandekar to lyrics by Santokh Nadim, so that eight Chandekar songs sung by Snehaprabha Pradhan, Paresh Banerjee and Rajkumari appear under Ramnik Desai's title and inflate its song count to fifteen. The two soundtracks are entirely distinct — different composer, different lyricist, different singers, different film — and hindigeetmala's own summary line for Dharm names only Sajjad Hussain, Shewan Rizvi and Baalam Pardesi, contradicting the eight rows on its own page. This entry restores the separation, keeping the seven songs that the Geet Kosh, MySwar and hindigeetmala independently agree on.