बीसवीं सदी

The film's title song shares its name: Bisvin Sadi, the twentieth century. Naming a whole century in a film song is a specific gesture of the 1940s Hindi social picture, in which speed, machinery, money and the new manners of the city are set against an older order and the song is where the argument gets stated out loud. Nothing of the text survives. Pannalal Ghosh is credited as composer; no singer or lyricist is named.

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.

'Bisvin sadi' entered Hindi as a phrase people used about themselves — a period label carrying, depending on who said it, either pride in the machine age or a complaint about what it had cost. A film that takes the phrase for its title and then writes a song under the same name is placing a thesis at the centre of the picture; the rest of the score, which runs from a Holi song and a wedding song to a Braj monsoon lament, is what the thesis is being measured against. The specific case the lyric made is not recoverable, and it is better to leave that blank than to fill it with a plausible-sounding argument nobody wrote.

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. Bhavnani was an unusually literal choice of director for a film with this title. He had trained at the College of Technology in Manchester and then at UFA in Berlin, ran an animation unit in 1935 with a German technician who had worked on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and three years after Bisvi Sadi was appointed the first Chief Producer of the Films Division of India, where his job was to film the new republic's dams, steel plants and fertiliser works.

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.