दुनिया शराबख़ाना (भाग 2)

Part II of 'Duniya Sharaab Khana' occupies the reverse side of the record and is credited to Zeenat Begum — her only appearance on this soundtrack. The lyric is Tanveer Naqvi's and the music Feroz Nizami's, as on Part I, but the voice changes, which is a departure from the usual practice of keeping a two-sided song with one singer. Nothing of the recording survives in circulation, so the entry rests on the catalogue credit and on what can be established about the people named in it.

The number is catalogued in two parts, which in 1945 practice means it filled both sides of a single 78-rpm disc — the usual solution when a song ran past the three-and-a-half minutes one side allowed. What is unusual here is that the two sides carry two different singers, Hamida Banu on the first and Zeenat Begum on the second. Whether that reflects a genuine two-voice structure in the film or an error in the surviving catalogue cannot be settled, because no audio of either part is in circulation.

'Sharaab-khana' is the tavern, and it is one of the load-bearing images of Persian and Urdu poetry: the maikhana of the ghazal, where wine has almost never meant only wine and drunkenness is the name for any self-forgetting that the sober world disapproves of. To say duniya sharaab-khana — the world is a tavern — is to take that established image and enlarge it until it covers everything: there is no sober outside to retreat to, everyone in the house is intoxicated by something, and the only question left is what. Tanveer Naqvi is writing squarely inside the Urdu ghazal tradition here, and the choice of a woman's voice for a tavern lyric — twice over, across both sides of the record — is the film's own contribution to it.

Zeenat Begum, born in Malerkotla in Punjab, had made her playback debut in the Punjabi film Mangti in 1942, in which she also appeared as an actress. She moved to Bombay in 1944 and was recording steadily through the mid-1940s before Partition took her to Pakistan, where she became a leading radio artist and was known as the Queen of Yesteryear. A single record side in a Wadia Movietone social drama is a small entry in that career, but 1945 is exactly the stretch of it that is least well documented, which gives credits like this one a disproportionate value.

There is no reception history to report. What the entry conserves is a Zeenat Begum credit from her Bombay years, which matter because they were short: she arrived in 1944 and Partition ended that phase of her working life within three years. Her Hindi-film discography from this window is thin in the standard references, so a single documented side from a forgotten 1945 picture is a real addition to it rather than a decorative one.