बाजे पवन का सितार

The one song in Kul Kalank given to a singer credited simply as Mumtaz Begum, of whom the record catalogues preserve little beyond the name. The title image — the wind sounding like a sitar — is the kind of nature-as-music conceit that Hindi film lyricists of the 1940s reached for whenever a scene needed stillness rather than incident. No recording of the side has been located; it is documented in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh-derived catalogues with composer, lyricist and singer, and nothing more.

No copy of the recording has been traced, so nothing can honestly be said about how it sounds. What can be said is where it sits: this is a slow solo placed in a score whose composer, the Punjab-gharana tabla player Allah Rakha, worked in film under the name A. R. Qureshi and generally kept his settings sparse — voice, a light rhythm bed, and the harmonium-and-strings ensemble that a mid-sized Bombay studio like Sunrise Pictures could put in a room. A title built on the sound of wind suggests one of the score's few places where the rhythm instrument its composer had mastered would have stayed out of the way.

Roopbani's title turns the air itself into a musician. It is a very old move in Indian poetry — the pawan, the moving air, is what carries scent, message and separation across distance in the whole bhakti and riti tradition, and hearing it as a plucked string makes the natural world an accomplice in whatever the singer is feeling. In a film called 'the stain on the family name', a song that hands the emotional work over to the weather is almost certainly doing what such songs did in 1940s socials: giving the audience a moment of quiet before the plot resumes its accusations.

Sunrise Pictures released Kul Kalank in 1945 under the direction of Nanubhai B. Vakil, with Shanta Hublikar and Masood at the head of the cast and Amirbai Karnataki both acting and singing. Eleven songs were recorded for the film, all by Allah Rakha to lyrics by Roopbani. The catalogues name a singer for only six of them; this is one of the six.

The song did not enter the surviving Saregama catalogue and has left no trace in the later literature on 1945. Its documentary value now is as one of the very few recorded credits attached to the name Mumtaz Begum, and as a line item in the small, scattered filmography of Allah Rakha the composer — a career of roughly two dozen scores between 1943 and the mid-1960s that he himself set aside for classical music, and which is remembered today mainly by discographers.