एक बात कहूँ

"Ek Baat Kahun" is the single song in Sanyasi (1945) given to Naseem Akhtar, the Lahore-Radio-trained voice who had come to Bombay after her break in Nishani (1942) and spent the decade recording around seventy songs across some forty films. Both the Hindi Film Geet Kosh-derived listing at hindigeetmala and the Wikipedia soundtrack table credit it to her alone, with music by Naushad and lyrics by Pandit Madhur. Unlike eight of the film's other numbers, no transfer of the 78-rpm side has surfaced on the collector channels that have preserved the rest of the score, so what survives of it is the credit itself.

Nothing of the recording is available to describe, so the honest account is contextual. In 1945 Naushad was working with a small Kardar Studios orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi, tabla and dholak with a modest string section, and his female solos of that year — the other three in this same film — sit in a medium tempo that leaves the singer's middle register uncrowded. Naseem Akhtar's voice was lighter and more forward than Zohrabai Ambalewali's, which is the likeliest reason a score otherwise dominated by Zohrabai reserved one side for a different colour.

The title is a formula rather than an image: 'ek baat kahun' — let me say one thing — is the phrase a Hindi-Urdu lyric uses to ask for permission before a confidence, and its whole charge lies in the pause it creates. It sets up the listener to expect a disclosure and then makes them wait for it. Pandit Madhur, who wrote all ten songs of Sanyasi, worked mostly in this plain register of everyday speech rather than in high Urdu diction, which is what allowed the same pen to serve the film's village songs, its bhajan and its laments alike. Beyond the opening phrase, nothing of the verse is documented, and this entry does not guess at it.

Sanyasi was A. R. Kardar's own production for 1945, made at Kardar Studios in Bombay with Kardar directing his own script material by Azm Bazidpuri, and it was Naushad's only release of the year — the film that had to follow Rattan (1944). Naseem Jr. plays Kiran in the cast, a separate person from the singer Naseem Akhtar, and the two names are frequently collapsed in careless listings; the song credit belongs to the singer. Naushad's Wikipedia filmography records the film as a Silver Jubilee, meaning it ran twenty-five weeks or more.

This is a lost side of a surviving album. Naseem Akhtar's own reputation rests on other films of the decade, and Sanyasi is not among the titles she is remembered for; the value of this record is archival — it fixes her presence in a Naushad score of 1945 that is otherwise entirely Zohrabai Ambalewali's and Amar's. If the disc turns up, it will be the ninth piece of a soundtrack that is eight-tenths recovered.