बहार पीने की है

A title that every catalogue of the film carries and no archive has preserved: HindiGeetMala, MySwar and the census listings all record 'Bahaar Peene Ki Hai', but no audio transfer has surfaced, no lyric text exists online, and no singer is named anywhere. The singers array is left empty rather than filled from the rest of the album. What the title fixes is the song's function — the mehfil number, the one built around wine and the turning season, which most Urdu-inflected film scores of the 1940s carried somewhere in the running order.

No recording of this song is in circulation, so nothing can honestly be said about its arrangement. The credits establish only that it belongs to the joint Lachhiram Tamar and Anupam Ghatak score; HindiGeetMala assigns it to Lachhiram Tamar alone and MySwar to both, and that disagreement is the entire documented record of its composition.

'Bahaar' is both the spring and the flourish, the season and the peak of an occasion, and the title asserts that this particular bahaar is one for drinking. That construction — declaring what the season is for — is the standard opening move of the Urdu mehfil lyric, where the argument is usually that the moment is short and must be used. Whether Aziz Kashmiri's verses took that line, and who they were put in the mouth of, is not documented; the title is the only surviving evidence and nothing is extrapolated from it here.

Champa was made at Shorey Pictures in Lahore for the producer Roop K. Shorey and directed by Barkat Ram Mehra; it opened at the Crown cinema in Lahore in October 1945 with Manorama, Asha Posley, Hari Shivdasani, Majnu, Salma and Zahoor Shah in the cast. No plot summary of the film survives, and no print is known to circulate — the discs, issued on Columbia and now in the Saregama catalogue, are effectively the whole of what is left of it. Five of the nine songs are in this condition — a title, two composer names and nothing else. They are listed here because leaving them out would misrepresent the shape of the soundtrack, and they are kept deliberately thin because the sources are thin.

Nothing of this song has been preserved beyond its listing. It has no transfer, no reissue, no text and no mention in any writing about the film or its composers — it exists only as a line in the catalogues of Champa's soundtrack.