परदेसी बालम

Pardesi Balam was a Hindustani production of Parkar Films, Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza for the producer Dr. Anand Prakash Parkar, with the young Pran — then working through the twenty-odd Lahore pictures he made between 1942 and 1946 — among its cast. No plot summary of the film survives in the standard reference literature. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh carries the picture without a release year at all, filing it in the undated 'Forties' section it reserves for films whose gramophone records reached the shops but whose theatrical release cannot be established; collector archives working from the same records describe it flatly as unreleased. What can be reconstructed of the story comes from the ten songs the Geet Kosh indexes: a woman who gives her heart to a pardesi — an outsider, a man from elsewhere — and is warned that a wanderer's love belongs to nobody; a dancer's display number; a chorus set aboard an express train called the Toofan Mail; a moral admonition against sin; a spring-festival chorus; and a Krishna bhajan. Whether the film was ever finished and shown, and what became of its negative once Partition emptied the Lahore studios two years later, is not recorded anywhere we could find.

All ten songs were composed by Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi — credited on record labels simply as I. H. Qureshi — and all ten were written by Zahir Kashmiri, an unusual single-lyricist score at a time when Bombay and Lahore films routinely divided their songs among three or four poets. The set covers the whole range a 1940s soundtrack was expected to cover: two Urdu ghazals of desolation (Ab Koi Aarzoo Nahin and Bekas Ka Yahan Koi Madadgaar Nahin Hai), a courtship duet built on the old conceit of the beloved's hair as black serpents, the title-idea folk duet about loving a pardesi, a dancer's number, a novelty chorus named for the Toofan Mail express, a spring-festival chorus, a moral admonition, and a Krishna bhajan to close. The Geet Kosh names the Gramophone Company of India (GCIL-HMV) as the record company, though myswar's catalogue credits Columbia Records instead. Five of the ten sides still circulate. Four of them — Ab Koi Aarzoo Nahin, Bekas Ka Yahan Koi Madadgaar Nahin Hai, Mera Joban Chhab Dikhlaye and Pardesi Se Preet Lagai — make up the four-track Pardesi Balam album in Saregama's digital catalogue, carrying a 1946 copyright line; the fifth, Teri Zulfen Hain Naag Kaale, is absent from that catalogue and survives instead through collector uploads. The Geet Kosh could name singers for only one of the ten.

The credits for this film are themselves a small piece of film-history salvage. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh entry carries a remark stating that its information on the producer, director, lyricist, music director and actors was obtained courtesy of Sultan Arshad Khan, a resident of Karachi — that is, the crew list survives because a private collector in Pakistan supplied it decades later, not because any Indian trade paper recorded it. The only censor detail preserved is that the certifying centre was Bombay, which is itself odd for a Lahore production and may be why the film is sometimes dated 1945 in Indian sources even though the Geet Kosh assigns it no year. Zahir Kashmiri's other film work of the period places the picture: he wrote for Ragini (1945), a Lahore film that also featured Pran, for Kahan Gaye (1946), and for Aaj Aur Kal (1947) with Khursheed Anwar — and, like Pardesi Balam, one further undated 'Forties' title, Basant Panchmi.

The importance of Pardesi Balam is documentary rather than artistic. It is one of the pre-Partition Lahore productions that survive only as a Geet Kosh entry and a handful of shellac sides — no print, no poster, no review, not even a settled release year — and it shows how thin the record becomes at the edges of the 1940s Hindi film industry. It matters, too, because of who worked on it: the lyrics of all ten songs are by Zahir Kashmiri, the Amritsar-born Urdu poet of the Progressive Writers' Association, and the one song whose singers the Geet Kosh could name credits two voices — Nazira Begum and Inayat Bhatti — neither of which name appears against any other song in that entire 1931-1985 database. For a project cataloguing Hindi film music, an entry like this is the difference between a filmography and a real census: the film that nobody remembers is exactly the one that ordinarily disappears.

Pardesi Balam left almost nothing behind, and that absence is its afterlife. The film has no Wikipedia article, no surviving synopsis and no confirmed release; what remains is a Geet Kosh page, an IMDb stub, a Cinemaazi listing, and five ten-inch record sides that collectors have digitised and put online. Its most durable trace is a single line in a database: the duet Teri Zulfen Hain Naag Kaale is the only song in the entire 1931-1985 Geet Kosh corpus credited to the name Inayat Bhatti, and the only one credited to the name Nazira Begum — though the same database separately carries a singer listed simply as 'Nazira', credited in Toofan Express (1938) and Muqabla (1942), who may or may not be the same performer. Two years after these records were pressed, Partition split the industry that made them, and the Lahore studios that produced Pardesi Balam were reconstituted as the nucleus of Pakistani cinema — which is why so many films of this kind exist today only in the memory of collectors on both sides of the border.