अब याद न कर

A Bulo C. Rani composition for Chand Chakori (1945), credited by the catalogues to Pandit Indra, with no singer named in any source consulted. The title belongs to the film's dominant emotional weather, but it takes an unusual line through it: instead of asking to be remembered - the default request of the parting song - it asks the opposite, which turns the song into an act of release rather than of appeal. Whether the release is generous or bitter cannot be judged from the phrase alone, and no recording has surfaced to settle it.

The recording has not been located and nothing is claimed about its music. All that is documented is authorship: one of thirteen songs Bulo C. Rani wrote for this Ranjit Movietone picture, in the years when he was working in a deliberately plain manner - melody first, accompaniment behind it, the words kept audible - that he had absorbed as Khemchand Prakash's assistant and would carry into Jogan (1950).

Yaad in the Hindi-Urdu lyric is not passive recollection; it is something one does, an act with a verb attached, and it is usually presented as involuntary and therefore blameless. To tell someone ab yaad na kar - now do not remember - is to demand that they perform a discipline the tradition normally treats as impossible, and the demand can be read in at least three ways: as mercy, releasing the other person from a hopeless attachment; as pride, refusing to be the object of someone's grief; or as reproach, since a person who is told to stop remembering has been remembering all along. The economy of the phrase, four short words that contain a whole history, is characteristic of how film lyricists of the period built mukhdas that could carry a full song. Nothing beyond the title survives.

Kidar Sharma directed Chand Chakori for Ranjit Movietone in 1945 with Mumtaz Shanti and Surendra in the leads. The film was among the year's biggest commercial successes - sixth on Box Office India's retrospective earnings list - and is now among its most completely lost, with no print in circulation and no plot summary in any accessible archive. Its thirteen song titles are effectively all that remains of it as a work, and this is one of the six that reached the catalogues without a singer credit.

Nothing in the record allows this song to be called well known, and it is not recorded here as such. What it does is hold a place in a soundtrack whose shape still tells a story: five or six of the thirteen titles turn on parting, one on renunciation, one on a sinking boat, and one asks how far the moon is. Kept together and kept honest, the list is a legible object even though the music is gone, and dropping the unverifiable entries would quietly distort it.