अपनी कहानी हाँ अपनी कहानी

Of the eight songs S. N. Tripathi composed for the 1945 stunt picture Ji Haan, this is the only one not carried by one of the film's two actress-singers. Both the HFGK-derived listing at hindigeetmala and Saregama's catalogue give the performer simply as a chorus, with no individual credit attached; Shanta Patel takes five of the remaining seven songs and Meera two. Ensemble numbers of this kind served two standard functions in the Bombay cinema of the 1940s — an opening frame in which a troupe introduces itself and its story, or a staged performance set piece inside the plot — and since no print of Ji Haan is known to survive and no synopsis appears in the reference literature, which of the two applies here cannot be established. What the title does state plainly is the register: apni kahani, 'our own story', the collective first person rather than the lover's singular.

Tripathi's chorus writing in these years came out of two trainings: Pandit V. N. Bhatkhande's Marris College at Lucknow, where he studied, and the Bombay Talkies orchestra, where he first worked as a violinist under Saraswati Devi. A group number on a stunt-film budget in 1945 meant a small studio ensemble — harmonium and a lead melodic line over dholak or tabla, with the voices doubled in unison rather than harmonised, since Western part-writing had not yet become Bombay's habit. The side survives in the Saregama catalogue; the arrangement described here is the standard practice of the period and of this composer, not a transcription of this particular recording.

'Apni kahani' — our own story — belongs to a family of Hindi film titles that step outside the drama to address the listener directly. The doubling with 'haan' ('our own story, yes, our own story') is the rhythm of speech rather than of written verse, and that fits the brief Pt. Indra was working to on this film: eight lyrics for a low-budget action comedy, five of them comic, written to land at once on an audience that had come for the fights and the falls. Beyond the title, nothing of the text is documented, and no lines of it are reproduced here.

Ji Haan was made by Gautam Chitra of Bombay and directed by Babubhai Mistry — the trick photographer nicknamed 'Kala Dhaga' for the black threads with which he made objects fly — working with a second director recorded as R. Vaidya on indiancine.ma and as Ramnik Bhatt in the HFGK-derived blog account. The cast was led by Bhagwan Abhaji Palav and the comedian Agha, with Shanta Patel and Meera carrying the singing and Gulab, S. Nazir, Raziya, Azeembhai and Anant Prabhu in support. Contributors to the Atul's Song A Day archive place the film's budget at around one lakh of rupees, and note that casting actresses who could sing their own numbers was part of that arithmetic — professional playback voices were an expense a stunt picture of this class did not carry.

Three of Ji Haan's eight songs have been written about since: two recovered and published by the archival blog Atul's Song A Day, and one discussed by Songs of Yore in its survey of S. N. Tripathi's vintage years. This chorus number is not among them. As of this writing it exists as a catalogue line and a Saregama track — which, for a 1945 B-circuit stunt film of which no print is known to survive, is already more than most of its contemporaries left behind.