कुल कलंक

Kul Kalank — literally 'the stain on the family name' — is a Bombay 'social' made by Sunrise Pictures and directed by Nanubhai B. Vakil, a journeyman film-maker who had been working continuously since the silent era of 1929. Contemporary listings classify it under the period's standard label for a domestic melodrama: the kind of film built around a household's fear that something in it will become public. Shanta Hublikar, the Prabhat star whose multilingual song in Aadmi (1939) had been one of the most talked-about set-pieces of the previous decade, headed the cast opposite Masood, with Amirbai Karnataki appearing on screen as well as singing three of the film's songs, and a company that included Shahzadi, Dulari, Majid, Pratima Devi and Wazir Mohammed Khan — the fakir of Alam Ara (1931), whose voice was the first ever heard singing in an Indian talkie. No print of the film is known to survive and no detailed plot has been preserved in the standard reference literature. What remains of Kul Kalank is its record catalogue — eleven songs composed by Allah Rakha to lyrics by Roopbani — together with the cast and credit lines recorded in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and the databases derived from it.

Eleven songs are documented for Kul Kalank, all composed by Allah Rakha to lyrics by Roopbani. Singers are named for six of them: Amirbai Karnataki takes three, one of which is her duet with Mohammed Rafi, and there is one each for Mumtaz Begum, Rajkumari and Lalita Parulkar. For the remaining five — including the openly agitational 'Paida Karenge Inqalab Baazuon Ke Zor Par' — the catalogues carry a composer and a lyricist credit and nothing else; no source consulted supplies a singer, and those entries are therefore left with an empty singer credit rather than a guess. The song titles alone show the range a single lyricist was expected to cover in one 1945 picture: a saqi song, a nationalist march, a braj-inflected folk address to a husband, a reflective 'life is two days' piece and a light flirtation duet. Only four of the eleven sides survive commercially, in the Saregama digital catalogue.

Allah Rakha had joined All India Radio in Lahore in 1936 and moved to the Bombay station before taking a composing job at Rangmahal Studios in 1943, beginning with the mythological Mahasati Anusuya; Kul Kalank falls in the first years of that film sideline, which he ran under a professional name kept separate from his classical identity. The screen company Sunrise Pictures assembled reached across the whole first generation of Indian sound cinema: Wazir Mohammed Khan, who as the fakir in Alam Ara (1931) had sung the first song ever recorded for an Indian talkie, shares a cast list with Shanta Hublikar, whose Aadmi (1939) song for V. Shantaram at Prabhat had been a national talking point, and with Amirbai Karnataki, then at the height of her fame after Kismet (1943). One database entry records an alternative title, 'Jeevan Chhaya', for the film; the same source's own filmographies list a separate 1946 picture of that name, and the claim has not been confirmed here.

The film's importance today is almost entirely musical, and it rests on two names on the label. The composer credited as 'Allah Rakha' is Alla Rakha Qureshi — later Ustad Alla Rakha, the Punjab-gharana tabla master who accompanied Ravi Shankar at the Monterey Pop Festival and became the most internationally recognised Indian percussionist of the twentieth century. In 1945 he was twenty-six, two years into a film sideline he pursued under the name A. R. Qureshi and would abandon in the 1960s, and Kul Kalank is one of the roughly two dozen scores from that abandoned career. The second name is Mohammed Rafi, who sings the film's one still-circulating song: 1945 was only Rafi's second year in Bombay, a year in which he recorded twelve songs across seven films for six different composers, and Kul Kalank is one of those seven. A film that left no other mark is therefore a datable point in two of the largest careers in Indian music.

Kul Kalank is not remembered as a film. No print survives, it appears in no standard history of Indian cinema, and it left almost no press trace in a year when Bombay released more than seventy Hindi pictures. It survives as four sides in the Saregama digital catalogue out of the eleven it recorded, and the one that still travels is 'Topi Wale Babu Ne Dil Chheena Re', 'Topi Wale Babu Ne Dil Chheena Re', recorded in only Rafi's second year of work in Bombay. The remaining seven songs exist now only as titles in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh listings — a reminder that most of what Hindi cinema recorded in the 1940s is preserved not as sound but as a line of catalogue text.