है फागुन की रात

Among Ban Phool's nine songs, this is the only one sung by Anjali Biswas — Kanan Devi takes seven and Hemant Kumar one. Phagun (Phalguna) is the last month of the Hindu year, the month of spring and of Holi, and by long convention the season in which restraint is suspended. A song announcing that it is a night of Phagun is therefore announcing licence: colour, teasing, reversal, the temporary loosening of who may say what to whom. Dhiren Mitra composed; Pandit Madhur is the credited lyricist.

No recording of this song was found in circulation and no description of its music survives in the sources consulted, so its melody and rhythm are not described here. The structural fact worth recording is the casting: giving the film's one festival song to a voice other than the star's is a standard 1940s device — the celebratory number is often a group or secondary character's, which frees the heroine's own songs to stay in the register of longing. Anjali Biswas is otherwise almost undocumented, and no biography of her was traceable.

The seasonal calendar of North Indian song — the barahmasa tradition, in which each month carries its own emotional assignment — gives Phagun to spring, colour and the erotic permission of Holi, and Sawan to the monsoon and to separation. Ban Phool's soundtrack contains one of each: 'Hai Phagun Ki Raat' and 'Sawan Ki Badli Ne'. That pairing is not accidental; it is a lyricist covering the two poles of the seasonal repertoire in a single score. Specifying the night rather than the day pushes the song further towards the licensed, unsupervised end of the festival — Phagun's nights are where the year's rules are suspended before the new year begins.

Ban Phool was made at P. R. Productions, Calcutta, directed by Niren Lahiri and written by Pranab Roy, with Kanan Devi as Champa. The cast list includes a girl called Maina, played by Bijoli, and an aunt figure, Devbala's Mausi — the kind of secondary women's roles that a festival song would ordinarily belong to in a 1940s social. But no plot summary of the film survives in any consulted filmography or database, and no source attaches this song to a character, so the identification is not made here.

Nothing is known of Anjali Biswas beyond this credit, and nothing further of the song. It is preserved because catalogues preserve titles: the Hindi Geet Mala listing for Ban Phool names her, which is more than survives of many playback singers who worked in the Calcutta studios in the 1940s. For the film itself, this song and 'Sawan Ki Badli Ne' are the two that place it firmly inside the north Indian seasonal song tradition rather than the Bengali one its makers came from.