अब न बीन बजा स्नेही

'Ab Na Been Baja Snehi' is the third of Mohammed Rafi's solos in Sharbati Ankhen (1945), with words by Pandit Indra and music by Feroz Nizami. A surviving transfer of the record was posted on Atul's Song A Day in April 2013, introduced there as an extremely rare song from a very obscure film; the audio was described as unsatisfactory and the lyric had to be reconstructed with help from the blog's readers, two of whom supplied it in both Roman and Devanagari. It is one of only two songs from this film whose sound can actually be heard today.

The surviving audio is too degraded for a serious description of the arrangement; the blog that circulated it says as much. What does come through is the singing. Rafi is audibly using the open, full-throated production that he had brought with him from Punjab, at a point when the Bombay industry was steering new male voices towards a lighter and more fashionable delivery. Feroz Nizami, himself a trained Kirana-gharana singer, evidently did not ask him to change it — which is one small reason this rough recording matters more than its condition suggests.

The been is the snake-charmer's gourd pipe, and in Hindi song it is never a neutral instrument: its sound is the standard image for an enchantment the listener cannot resist, the music that makes the serpent rise out of the basket. To say 'play the been no more' is therefore to admit having been charmed already and to ask for mercy — the plea of someone who knows that one more note will end the argument. 'Snehi', the word Pandit Indra chooses for the person addressed, is pointedly Sanskritic Hindi rather than the Urdu vocabulary his co-lyricist favoured on this film: one who bears sneh, affection. Between the folk image and the tatsam form of address, the lyric sits firmly on the Hindi side of the film's bilingual song list.

The song belongs to a Wadia Movietone social picture directed by Ramchandra Thakur, in which a middle-class girl and a rich man's son are kept apart by his family until an old debt between the two households comes to light. Which scene the song serves is not recorded anywhere, and no still or synopsis survives to suggest it. The blog that published the recording noted, when it went looking, that its own post had become one of the few sources of information about the film in existence — a fair measure of how completely the picture has vanished.

This is one of the earliest Rafi recordings that anyone can still listen to, and its interest is documentary rather than musical. Heard alongside what he sounded like five years later, it shows a voice that was already itself — the openness and the weight are there before the technique that made them famous. That is why collectors keep circulating a transfer this poor, and why a 1945 film with no surviving print still has an audience of a kind.