नग़मा-ए-सहरा

Nagma-e-Sahra — released in English as Song of the Desert — is a 1945 Hindi desert adventure made by Jagriti Pictures, the banner Bhagwan Abhaji Palav had set up in 1942, and directed by Bhagwan himself, who also played one of its principal parts. No print is known to survive and no plot summary appears in the standard reference literature; what the record preserves is a cast of Perso-Arabic names — Master Vithal as Feroz, Khurshid Jr. as the princess Nargis, Bhagwan as Altamash, Amarnath as Jalal and Kavita Devi as Ishrat — and an English title that plants the story in the sand. It belongs to the run of low-budget stunt and action pictures Bhagwan directed between 1938 and 1949 for the working-class circuit, films he brought in for something in the region of sixty-five thousand rupees by doing almost everything himself, down to designing the costumes and arranging the unit's meals. The picture premiered in Bombay on 22 December 1945, sharing its opening night with Albeli. Its real interest now lies less in the film than in who was making it: Master Vithal, once the highest-paid male star in Indian cinema and the hero of Alam Ara, was fifteen years past that peak and working the B-circuit, while C. Ramchandra, two years short of Shehnai and six short of Albela, was writing a score for a friend who could not afford much.

The HFGK-derived catalogues record seven songs, all written by Ehsan Rizvi and composed by C. Ramchandra, and issued on Columbia Records (the label is named for this album by MySwar/BollySwar; no other consulted source states it). Only four carry a documented voice: 'Yeh Jalsa Tajposhi Ka (Mubarak Ho Mubarak Ho)' Part I is a three-voice number by Khan Mastana, Hamida Banu and Chitalkar — that is, C. Ramchandra singing under his playback name; 'Kisi Ki Yaad Kisi Ko Aayi' is a Hamida Banu–Chitalkar duet; and 'Bichhdi Hui Bahaar' and 'Ab Yaad Teri Leke Jiyen' are Hamida Banu solos. For 'Ghulami Majboori Barbadi', 'Jawani Zindagani Shadmani Hai' and the second part of the Tajposhi number, no singer is recorded in any source consulted, and none is guessed at here. One further voice is documented for the film without being tied to a song: the archival blog Atul's Song A Day lists Naseem Akhtar among the singers who worked for C. Ramchandra on Nagma-e-Sahra, so at least one of the three unattributed titles is likely hers. The two-part 'Tajposhi' song — a coronation salutation split across Parts I and II — is the shape a long ceremonial set-piece took when it had to be pressed onto the two faces of a single ten-inch 78-rpm disc. Hindigeetmala's page for the film lists six of the seven, omitting 'Ab Yaad Teri Leke Jiyen'.

Bhagwan Abhaji Palav was the son of a Bombay textile mill worker, had come up through bit parts in the silent era, and was known in the trade as much for wrestling as for acting. He turned producer in 1942 with Jagriti Pictures and would buy land and build Jagriti Studios at Chembur in 1947; in the interim he financed pictures like this one out of a purse of roughly sixty-five thousand rupees, personally handling the costume design and the catering as well as the direction and a leading role. Casting Master Vithal in 1945 was a piece of Bombay history in itself. Vithal (1906–1969) had been the highest-paid male star in Indian cinema around 1930, nicknamed the Indian Douglas Fairbanks — a comparison he was said to detest — and when Sharda Studios sued him for leaving to make Alam Ara he was defended in court by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and won. Sound then destroyed him: his Hindi pronunciation was poor enough that Alam Ara keeps his character unconscious or struck dumb for much of its length, and by the mid-1940s he was available to a stunt producer with a small budget and an old admiration.

The film's significance is almost entirely relational: it is one of the working films of the Bhagwan–Chitalkar partnership, the least glamorous and most consequential friendship in 1940s Bombay film music. Ramchandra Narhar Chitalkar had first come to public notice as a composer on Bhagwan's Sukhi Jeevan (1942), and through the decade he kept scoring the stunt pictures nobody reviewed while building, film by film, the light, rhythm-forward, Western-inflected idiom that would detonate in Albela (1951) with 'Shola Jo Bhadke'. Nagma-e-Sahra is a specimen of that apprenticeship. It also sits at a hinge in Hamida Banu's career — it was Bhagwan who had recommended the Lahore-born singer to C. Ramchandra in the first place, and here she carries the bulk of the soundtrack, four of the seven documented songs. And it is one of the last leading roles of Master Vithal, the man who had been India's first talkie hero in Alam Ara (1931) and whose Hindi diction had ended that career almost as soon as it began.

The film itself left nothing: it is a line in Rangoonwalla's Indian Filmography and a page reference in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, with no surviving print and no plot on record. What outlived it was the working relationship it is a sample of. Six years later Bhagwan, advised by Raj Kapoor to try a social subject instead of a stunt one, made Albela with Geeta Bali and gave the music to the same friend; the result was one of the biggest song successes of the decade and the making of both men. When Bhagwan lost everything afterwards — the Juhu bungalow, the seven cars, one for each day of the week — C. Ramchandra was among the very few who kept visiting him in his chawl. Of the singers, Hamida Banu left for Pakistan in 1956 and spent the rest of her working life at Radio Lahore and on PTV, dying in Lahore in 2006; Khan Mastana, who opens this soundtrack, died in 1972. None of the seven songs is known to circulate today in a restored transfer, which makes the surviving credit list the whole of the film's audible remains.