कैसे कहूँ

Kaise Kahoon was made at Dalsukh M. Pancholi's studio in Lahore in the last full working years of Pancholi Art Pictures, and directed by Moti B. Gidwani. Wikipedia's list of Hindi films of 1945 classifies it as a social drama (pakmag.net leaves its genre field blank); it was released on 16 November 1945, with Atul's Song A Day giving a Bombay opening at Imperial Cinema and pakmag.net a Lahore release at Palace Cinema. Ragini and Najam-ul-Hasan played the leads, with Gajanan Jagirdar, Baby Akhtar, Pran, Durga Mota, Ajmal, G. N. Butt and Begum Parveen in support. Atul's Song A Day credits the story to Dalsukh Pancholi himself, while pakmag.net names Dr. A. H. Roypuri as the writer. No plot summary of the picture survives in any source this catalogue could reach, and none is invented here: what is documented is the production, the cast and the eleven-song register, and that is what is recorded.

Pandit Amarnath — Amarnath Batish of Jalandhar, a different man from the later composer of the same first name — wrote eleven songs for the picture, and Zeenat Begum sings the larger share of them: 'Ambuva Pe Papiha Ye Ga Gaya Hai', 'Tute Huye Do Dil Darbar Me Aaye', 'Mann Se Chinta Kee Ghata Dur Ho Ja', 'Sipahiya Babu Aaja' and 'Dukhiya Dil Ka Ek Tarana' among them. Shamshad Begum — discovered by Ghulam Haider, but singing for Amarnath here — joins her on 'Aao Hum Aaj Chale' and takes the female half of the chorus-backed banter duet 'Gori Gagar Ki Ganga Udhar Diye Ja' opposite S. D. Batish, who also partners Zeenat Begum on 'Daman Na Chod Dena'. Four lyricists share the album — Moti B.A. with the largest number of credits, then D. N. Madhok, Qamar Jalalabadi and Sharma. Period listings differ on some attributions, and the accessible HFGK-derived listings leave the singer unidentified for three of the songs; this catalogue leaves those fields empty rather than filling them with a guess.

Kaise Kahoon was directed by Moti B. Gidwani, described by Atul's Song A Day as foreign-trained and credited there with seventeen films across his career. His leading lady Ragini — born Shamshad Begum in Gujranwala on 22 October 1924 and no relation to the singer of the same name — was one of the biggest draws in Lahore, and Wikipedia records that a year later Shahjehan (1946) brought her a fee of one lakh rupees, 'making her the highest-paid actress of that time'. Her filmography there lists this film as 'Kaisay Kahun' (1945). The composer, Pandit Amarnath, was born in Jalandhar in 1912 and was working for Pancholi in Lahore and for Bombay producers at the same time; Kaise Kahoon is one of several scores he delivered that year. Nothing further about the shooting of the picture is documented in any source this catalogue could reach.

The film matters less for its plot than for where and when it stands. In 1945 Lahore was still the third pole of Hindi film production alongside Bombay and Calcutta, and Pancholi Art Pictures — the house that had given the industry Khazanchi (1941), Khandan (1942), Zamindar (1942) and Daasi (1944) — was, in Wikipedia's description, the largest film studio in Lahore at the time of Partition. Kaise Kahoon is a record of that industry working at full strength barely two years before Partition erased it. It is also one of a cluster of Hindi scores Pandit Amarnath delivered in 1945, the busiest stretch of a career that ended with his death at thirty-five in 1947, and it falls inside the short window in which Zeenat Begum — a singer Amarnath himself had discovered — was carrying nearly a whole film's music on her own voice.

Within four years of its release the people who made Kaise Kahoon were scattered. Pandit Amarnath died in 1947 at the age of thirty-five. Dalsukh M. Pancholi was forced to move to Bombay in 1947 by Partition, his Lahore studio continuing, by Wikipedia's account, for about two more years. Ragini moved to Pakistan after Partition, and Zeenat Begum migrated there too and joined the Lahore station of Radio Pakistan, where she worked into the late 1950s. The film itself is not in general circulation today and survives mainly through its 78-rpm records and period listings — which is why the two titles that period and later listings put at the head of the score, 'Gori Gagar Ki Ganga Udhar Diye Ja' and 'Ambuva Pe Papiha Ye Ga Gaya Hai', carry more of its memory than any scene does.