रागिनी

Ragini — romanised 'Ragni' by hindigeetmala and by Atul's Song A Day quoting the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, though the HFGK database itself gives 'Ragini' — was a social drama made at Maheshwari Pictures in Lahore, directed by Shankar Mehta from a screenplay by M. R. Kapur and photographed by Harcharn Singh Kwatra, with Smriti Biswas and Najm-ul-Hassan in the leads and a young Pran, then four years into a Lahore apprenticeship, in support. No plot synopsis of the picture survives in any accessible source: no print is known, the film has not been in circulation for eighty years, and the trade notices that would have carried a story outline have never been digitised. What is recoverable is its shape. The title is the Hindustani word for the consort-melody of a raga — not, as is often assumed, a reference to the Lahore star Ragini, who is not in the cast — and the ten songs Pandit Amarnath wrote for it run from a devotional plea at a barred door and a garden courtship through a duet about two lives setting off on golden wings, to the flat statement that the dream of a life has broken and that there was once a world made of a single hope. That arc, and the 'Social' genre label the period listings give the film, are as close to a plot as the surviving record allows, and this catalogue does not go further than the record.

Pandit Amarnath wrote ten songs for Ragini and they are the only part of the film that can still be examined. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh, which prints the full track list, records a singer for two of them and both times it is Zeenat Begum — the composer's own discovery and, in the Atul's Song A Day account built on the HFGK, his main singer across many of his films: the ghazal-shaped lament listed as 'Ek Hook Si Uthti Hai' and the awakening song 'Uth Soye Huye Husn Tujhe'. pakmag.net adds two singer credits the HFGK does not carry, both Zeenat Begum with S. D. Batish: the duet 'Hum Do Jeevan Saathi' and the garden-courtship number listed as 'Mujhe Chun Ne De'. One credit is genuinely contested: for 'Uth Soye Huye Husn Tujhe' hindigeetmala names Zohrabai Ambalewali, and Sharad Dutt's Millennium Post profile of the composer says the same, while the HFGK names Zeenat Begum and the copy of the recording circulating on YouTube is captioned for her. This catalogue follows the HFGK, which is its first-priority source, and records the disagreement rather than hiding it. For the remaining six songs no singer is named anywhere, and those fields are left empty. Lyric credits are thinner still: the HFGK gives a per-song poet for two songs only — Nazim Panipati on 'Mujhe Chun Ne De' and on 'Kismat Ne Milaya Hai', which hindigeetmala and pakmag.net independently confirm — and pakmag.net adds Mela Ram Wafa on 'Ek Hook Si Uthti Hai' and Zahir Kashmiri on 'Hum Do Jeevan Saathi'. On the other six songs hindigeetmala simply repeats the film's full trio of lyricists, and the Atul's Song A Day post that carries the audio of 'Ek Hook Si Uthti Hai' records its lyricist as not known — so this catalogue leaves the unattributed songs' lyricist arrays empty rather than dividing three names among six songs by guesswork.

Shankar Mehta directed only four films in seventeen years — Pagli (1943), Ragini (1945), Aai Bahar (1946) and Rickshawala (1960), the last of which he also co-produced — so Ragini represents a quarter of a very small output. His composer was the senior musician of his family: Pandit Amarnath, described by Atul's Song A Day as the eldest brother of Husnlal and Bhagatram — the pair he is credited with sending to Prabhat, having turned down that studio's Chand himself and proposed his assistants instead — and who went on to become Hindi cinema's first composer duo. After 'Raaten Na Rahin Woh Bhi Na Rahen' in Daasi (1944) Amarnath was known in the trade as 'Pandit Amarnath of Daasi fame', and Zeenat Begum — whom he had found — sang for him repeatedly, Ragini included. His hero had a more notorious history: Najm-ul-Hassan, born into a Lucknow family in 1910 and cast by Himanshu Rai as the first male lead of Bombay Talkies in Jawani Ki Hawa (1935), eloped with Devika Rani during the making of Jeevan Naiya (1936); she was persuaded back, he was not forgiven, and he rebuilt a career first at New Theatres in Calcutta and then in Lahore, where Ragini was made. One point Atul's Song A Day is careful to make: the actress Ragini — born Shamshad Begum at Gujranwala, Lahore's 'Aahoo Chashm' and the leading lady of Kaise Kahoon the same year — is not in this film despite sharing its name. No cast list that can be reached for it, HFGK's included, carries her.

The film's importance is positional rather than artistic: it is a dated marker of the Lahore film industry working at full strength in one of its last complete production seasons. In 1945 Lahore was still the third pole of subcontinental film-making alongside Bombay and Calcutta, and Maheshwari Pictures was one of the smaller houses feeding an all-India distribution market from it. Ragini also falls inside the busiest and shortest stretch of Pandit Amarnath's career — the Jalandhar-born composer, born 1912, who had introduced Zeenat Begum and who would be dead at thirty-five in 1947, with Mirza Sahiban left for his younger brothers to finish. For its hero Najm-ul-Hassan, once the first male lead of Bombay Talkies and afterwards unemployable there, it is one of the Lahore pictures — with Daasi (1944) and Kaise Kahoon (1945) — that Atul's Song A Day names for him between Calcutta and Partition. And it is the second of only four films Shankar Mehta directed in a career that ran from 1943 to 1960.

Almost nothing of Ragini survived the two years that followed it. Pandit Amarnath died in 1947, at thirty-five. Najm-ul-Hassan migrated to Pakistan the same year, worked in Lahore films through the 1950s and died there in 1980, by all accounts embittered. Zeenat Begum also settled in Pakistan; the Lahore studios that had employed them all did not outlast Partition in any recognisable form. The film itself left no print and no plot summary — what remains is the HFGK song list, two recordings that collectors have put online — 'Ek Hook Si Uthti Hai' and 'Uth Soye Huye Husn Tujhe' — and the trace it leaves in two careers that went the other way: Smriti Biswas, twenty-one here, went on to work with Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Mrinal Sen and to appear in Jagte Raho (1956) before retiring on her marriage in 1960, and Pran, in a supporting part, would leave Lahore in 1947 with nothing and become the most famous screen villain in Hindi cinema and, in 2013, a Dadasaheb Phalke laureate.