भारत की संतान (संस्करण 2)

'Bharat Ki Santan' — 'the children of India' — is catalogued twice in the Bisvi Sadi song list, as two separate recordings. In the 78-rpm era a title issued in two versions normally means either a two-sided record carrying a long number across both faces, or a reprise sung by a different voice or grouping later in the film. Which of the two applies here is not recorded. Neither version carries a singer or lyricist credit; Pannalal Ghosh is the composer of both. This entry is the second of the two.

No recording of the number has surfaced online, so nothing can honestly be said about its scoring beyond who wrote it. What is worth knowing is the hand behind it: in 1945 Pannalal Ghosh was already the leading bansuri player in the country — he had lengthened the instrument to thirty-two inches and added the teevra-madhyam hole to make the lower-octave meend possible — and he came to Bombay film work from New Theatres in Calcutta rather than from the Bombay studio system.

The phrase itself is a political construction. 'Bharat ki santan' addresses the audience not as subjects of an empire and not as members of a community but as the offspring of a single parent-country — the formula on which nationalist song of the period is built, from Vande Mataram onward. In 1945 that address had a very particular temperature: the war ended in August, the INA trials at the Red Fort began in November and turned into the largest mass-nationalist moment since 1942, and the Bombay studios were producing patriotic numbers faster than the Board of Film Censors could reliably read them. Nothing of the actual verse survives, so its specific argument — whether it exhorted, reproached or simply celebrated — is unknown.

Bisvi Sadi — 'The Twentieth Century' — was produced and directed by Mohan Bhavnani for Bhavnani Productions and released in 1945, with Motilal and Nargis heading a cast that also included Mazhar Khan, Gope, Ashalata, Bhudo Advani, Navin and Majumdar. Pannalal Ghosh, the flautist who made the bansuri a Hindustani concert instrument, wrote all fifteen songs; the records went out on Columbia. There is a biographical detail worth setting beside a patriotic song in this particular score: Pannalal Ghosh had joined the independence movement in Bengal in 1928, as a boy of seventeen, training at a gymnasium in martial arts and stick-fighting until government surveillance made him leave for Calcutta in search of a livelihood. The connection to this song is circumstantial, not documented — but it is the one composer of 1945 for whom the phrase 'children of India' was not an abstraction learned in a studio.

Bisvi Sadi is out of circulation and no print is known to be accessible, so the song exists today chiefly as a catalogue line in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived databases. Its claim on attention is that it belongs to one of the very few complete Hindi film scores signed by Pannalal Ghosh, whose reputation otherwise rests entirely on the concert platform.