चली पवन पुरवाई

'Chali Pawan Purvai' is the one duet documented in the soundtrack of Dharm (1945), sung by Rattan Bai — who also appears in the film's cast — with a singer the catalogues credit only as Naseem. Its title names the purvai, the easterly wind that crosses the north Indian plains ahead of the rains. Sajjad Hussain composed it in his second year as an independent film composer, to a lyric the Hindi Film Geet Kosh credits to Shewan Rizvi. Neither a pressing of the record nor a print of the film is known to survive, so this entry documents the credit line and the tradition the title belongs to, and stops there.

No copy of this side has surfaced, so nothing here describes the arrangement as heard; what can honestly be said is where the song sits in its composer's practice. In 1945 Sajjad Hussain was one year past his independent debut with Dost (1944) and already working in the manner he is remembered for — Hindustani classical melodic material carried on instrumentation with a distinct Middle Eastern colour, written by a musician who himself played sitar, veena, violin, flute, piano and, above all, the mandolin. Female duets of the mid-1940s were built as alternation rather than harmony, each voice taking a full line before handing it over, and both singers here belonged to the older, open-throated school of the pre-playback years rather than the lighter timbre that took over Hindi film singing after 1949.

The text of the song has not been preserved in any accessible source, and none would be reproduced here in any case, since the work remains inside copyright term. The title alone, however, places it precisely. Purvai — the east wind — belongs to the barahmasa and viraha strand of north Indian song, in which the seasons are not scenery but a calendar of separation: the wind rises, the clouds gather, and the woman who is waiting measures her year by them. Setting that line as a duet for two women follows the convention's usual staging, in which the separated woman speaks not into empty air but to a companion who answers her. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh, which records a lyricist for each side separately, gives this one to Shewan Rizvi; the online catalogues, which repeat both of the film's writers against every track, do not distinguish them.

Dharm was a 'social' — the wartime industry's catch-all term for a melodrama set in the present day — produced by Star Productions and directed by Ramnik Desai, with E. Billimoria, Leela Pande, Madhuri, Maya Devi, Jamshedji and Rattan Bai among the billed cast. Rattan Bai's presence in both the cast list and the singing credits was the ordinary arrangement of the period: she had been on screen since New Theatres' Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933), had moved to Bombay after a dispute during Karwan-e-Hayat (1935), and had produced her own film, Saheli, in 1942. No plot summary, screenplay or censor synopsis of Dharm has been traced, so the dramatic situation this duet was written to serve is simply unknown.

'Chali Pawan Purvai' did not enter the gramophone canon; it was not reissued, anthologised or covered, and it survives as a line in film-song catalogues rather than as music anyone still hears. Its documentary value is that it fixes a date — a Sajjad Hussain duet from 1945, standing between the Noor Jehan songs of Dost (1944) that made his name and the 1946 scores for 1857 and Tilasmi Duniya. Dharm's song list is also among the more thoroughly garbled of its year: several databases merge it with the soundtrack of Din Raat (1945), a Roop K. Shorey film scored by Dada Chandekar, so that eight songs belonging to that picture appear under this one's name. 'Chali Pawan Purvai' is one of the seven catalogued titles that are genuinely Dharm's.