हम बहिश्त के मालिक

The third of Rafiq Ghaznavi's compositions for Ek Din Ka Sultan (1945) and the only number in the film credited to a chorus rather than a named singer. The title's word-play is not incidental to the story. Bahisht is Persian for paradise; a bahishti — the form that becomes bhishti in common Indian usage — is literally an inhabitant of paradise, and it is the name of the water-carrier caste whose most famous member, Nizam, is the reason this film exists. Wali Saheb wrote it.

A chorus piece in a 1945 Bombay historical usually means one of two things: a crowd number staged in a court or a marketplace, or a work-song for a group of labourers, and in a film about water-carriers the second is the likelier shape. Ghaznavi, who came to composition from singing and who had scored Modi's Sikandar (1941) with its mass battle sequences, knew how to write for unison voices. Beyond that nothing can be said with any confidence: no recording has been traced, the singers are not named in any accessible source, and even the mood tags on this entry are inferred from the title rather than heard.

The naturalist Edward Aitken glossed the word in 1897 in Behind the Bungalows: 'Behisht in the Persian tongue means Paradise, and a Bihishtee is, therefore, an inhabitant of Paradise, a cherub, a seraph, an angel of mercy. He has no wings; the painters have misconceived him, but his back is bowed down with the burden of a great goat-skin swollen to bursting with the elixir of life.' The bhishti's own claim of descent runs to Abbas ibn Ali, killed at Karbala in 680 while carrying water to Husayn's camp, from which the honorific saqqa, water-bearer, comes. A first-person plural title — we are of paradise — spoken by the people who carry water is therefore not a boast but a piece of self-description with a thousand-year lineage behind it, and in this film it belongs to the men from whose ranks a one-day emperor came.

The historical episode behind Ek Din Ka Sultan is documented in outline: at Chausa in June 1539 Sher Shah Suri broke Humayun's army, thousands drowned in the flooded Ganga, and a bhishti named Nizam inflated his mashak and floated the emperor across to safety. Humayun rewarded him with the throne — for a day, by most accounts — and Nizam is said to have cut his water-skin into discs, had them gilded and stamped with his name and the date of his coronation, and issued them as currency. A chorus of water-carriers claiming paradise is exactly the kind of set-piece a 1945 Minerva production would build around that, though no source consulted describes the scene.

The song is unrecovered: no recording, no reissue, no named voices. What survives is the title, and the title is the most interesting single line in the film's song list, because it shows the screenplay and the lyricist working the same seam — the film's whole conceit is that a man from the class the word names ends up on a throne, and the word for that class already means 'of paradise'. The bhishtis themselves have all but disappeared; a handful still work in Old Delhi around Jama Masjid and Jadid Qabristan, and their trade is now the subject of documentary film rather than feature film.