घर

Ghar was a family drama made at Sunrise Pictures, the third picture in which V. M. Vyas built a film around the Hindi word for home, following Ghar Ki Laaj (1941) and Ghar Sansar (1942) — Ghar Sansar was a Sunrise Pictures production, while no source consulted names the banner of Ghar Ki Laaj. No print, press book or detailed plot summary is known to survive, so the story cannot be recounted scene by scene; what can be reconstructed comes from the cast list and from the four song texts that survive in the song archives. Two of those four point unambiguously at the film's subject. One is addressed to a woman widowed almost as soon as she was married — her vermilion wiped away, her home broken, called a widow after being a bride for barely two days — and tells her not to plead and not to weep, because in a world this large nobody will listen. The other is that same woman's own voice, ordering her tears to stay asleep in her eyes so the world will not shame her, saying that laughter and weeping have both become sins for her, and that the earth will not let her die while the world will not let her live. Around that figure Vyas assembled the repertory company he had been using since 1941 — Kalyani, Mirza Musharraf and Yakub — together with the Calcutta actress Molina Devi and, in one of his earliest screen roles, the young Iftekhar. What emerges is the kind of reformist domestic melodrama that Bombay's mid-budget studios turned out steadily through the 1940s: a household picture built around the question of what a family owes a woman it has stopped counting as one of its own.

Eight songs, all written by Roopbani and composed by Allah Rakha. MySwar is the only source consulted that names a record label for the film, giving it as Columbia Records; HindiGeetMala, Wikipedia and Saregama name none. The album divides cleanly in two. Its serious half is a pair of widow songs — 'Fariyad Na Kar Aansu Na Baha' sung to the widow by Zohrabai Ambalewali, and 'Meri Aankhon Ke Aansu' sung by the widow herself in Rajkumari's voice — which put the same predicament in two registers, one consoling from outside, the other refusing consolation from inside. Against them sit lighter numbers: two Rajkumari and Afzal Lahori duets ('Acchi Nahi Ye Chhed', a quarrel about a woman refusing to say her man's name aloud, and 'Sajaniya Chale Aao'), Amirbai Karnataki's celebratory 'Ye Hawayein Salaam Kehti Hain', Kalyani's 'Tu Aayi Piya Ke Dwar', Molina Devi's 'Honi Thi Jo Ho Gayi', and 'Mera Market Ke Saamne Makaan Hai', on which the composer himself sings opposite Amirbai. The lyrics of those last three have never been published, so nothing is claimed here about what they say.

V. M. Vyas — Vishnu M. Vyas — was a Sunrise Pictures house director who worked with a settled repertory company. Kalyani and Mirza Musharraf had been appearing in his casts since Ghar Ki Laaj (1941) and Ghar Sansar (1942); Yakub came over from Maa Baap (1944), the film Vyas had made the previous year with the same composer and the same lyricist. Ghar is therefore the second consecutive Vyas–Allah Rakha–Roopbani collaboration, and the third Vyas picture in five years to take the household itself as its title and its theme. Kalyani's position on this film is unusual and worth noting: she is listed both in the cast and as the singer of 'Tu Aayi Piya Ke Dwar', the sort of double credit that was still ordinary in 1945 and would be almost extinct ten years later. Equally of its moment is the composer stepping in front of the microphone to sing a duet on his own score.

Ghar's importance today rests almost entirely on its music director. The score is credited to Allah Rakha — Alla Rakha Qureshi, the Punjab gharana tabla master who would spend the 1960s and 1970s on stages from Monterey to Woodstock as Ravi Shankar's accompanist, and who scored close to two dozen Hindi and Punjabi films between 1943 and the mid-1960s under his film name, A. R. Qureshi. Ghar belongs to the very beginning of that parallel career: it is his second score for V. M. Vyas, after Maa Baap (1944), the picture on which he and the lyricist Roopbani had first worked together. It was not, however, his next score of any kind — Ghar Ki Shobha (1944), made at Magnet Pictures under a different director, carries the same composer and the same lyricist. The film is also one of the earliest screen credits of Iftekhar, who a generation later became the most instantly recognisable police officer in Hindi cinema. And its eight songs are a snapshot of the female playback field in the last years before Lata Mangeshkar reset it: Rajkumari on three numbers, Zohrabai Ambalewali and Amirbai Karnataki on the rest, with Kalyani and Molina Devi taking one apiece.

No print of Ghar is known to survive and the film has long since dropped out of circulation; what remains is the music. All eight songs are still sold by Saregama, five of them have also surfaced as audio on the archival blog Atul's Song A Day, and four of the eight lyric texts survive in the song archives. Its afterlife runs through its people rather than its plot. Allah Rakha's film scoring is now a footnote to a classical career of international importance, but Ghar is part of the record of how a young tabla player supported himself in wartime Bombay before the world knew his name — and of how comfortably a Punjab gharana percussionist could write a Hindi film widow's lament. For the singers it fixes a moment: Rajkumari and Zohrabai Ambalewali at the height of a primacy that had only two or three years left to run, and Amirbai Karnataki still a first-call voice. For Iftekhar it is near the start of a fifty-year career. And the lyricist Roopbani, of whom no birth year, death year or biography survives at all, is here at the beginning of a run of more than two hundred credited songs — Ghar is one of the earliest films by which anything about him can be known at all.