बिछड़ी हुई बहार (बहार है बहार)

A Hamida Banu solo from Nagma-e-Sahra (1945), written by Ehsan Rizvi and composed by C. Ramchandra. The song is catalogued under two titles — hindigeetmala lists it as 'Bichdi Hui Bahaar', while the BollySwar-derived myswar entry gives 'Bahaar Hai Bahaar (Bichdi Hui Bahaar)' — which usually means the record label and the film's own publicity took the title from different lines of the same song.

No copy of the disc has been located, so the setting is undocumented. What the credit establishes is that this is one of the film's four Hamida Banu numbers and one of its two straight solos for her — the places in the score where a single voice had to carry the whole side.

Bahaar means spring, and by long extension in Urdu it means flourishing, bloom, the good time. To attach bichhdi hui — parted, separated — to it is to fold the loss into the season itself: not a spring that ended, but a spring that has left you, the way a person leaves. The alternate title works the other side of the same figure, bahaar hai bahaar, insisting the spring is here — so the song as catalogued holds both halves of the paradox at once, the season present and the season withdrawn. It is the central move of the classical Urdu ghazal transposed to a film song, and it is why a title this short reads as a complete emotional statement.

Nagma-e-Sahra was a desert adventure made by Bhagwan Dada at Jagriti Pictures with Master Vithal as Feroz and Khurshid Jr. as the princess Nargis; it opened in Bombay on 22 December 1945. In a plot of that shape a female solo of separation almost always belongs to the heroine, sung at the point where the lovers are divided — but with no surviving print and no synopsis in the reference literature, the picturisation is unrecorded and is not asserted here.

No transfer of the recording is known. The song's documentary interest is that it is one of the small number of surviving credits placing Hamida Banu, later one of Pakistan's radio voices, at the centre of an Indian film soundtrack in the last months before Partition redrew everyone's career. She was seventeen or eighteen when this was recorded.