रास रचाए

The second of the two Hamara Sansar songs that the indexes preserve without a voice. HindiGeetMala and MySwar both carry the title against this film, both give Gobind Ram as composer and Ramesh Gupta as lyricist, and both leave the singer column empty; it is not among the six tracks on the surviving Saregama album, and no vintage-music archivist appears to have transferred it. Its singers array is empty here for the same reason as its companion's — because the attribution genuinely does not exist in the record, and a plausible name filled in from the film's other credits would be a fabrication dressed as data.

No musical detail for this track is documented anywhere consulted — no arrangement, tempo, raag, taal or instrumentation. What is certain is only the authorship: Gobind Ram composed every song in the film. The vintage-music literature places him as a Lahore-trained composer, strongest in rhythm and orchestration, working inside the mainstream Bombay idiom of the 1940s rather than an audibly Punjabi one; his other sides for this film run from a slow male ghazal to a three-voice ensemble number, so the score's range was wide. Where within that range this song sat cannot be established, and the classification fields have been left empty rather than filled to make the entry look finished.

Raas is the circular dance associated with Krishna and the gopis, and 'raas rachaana' — to stage or set the raas going — is the standard phrase for it. In Hindi film music the image travels well beyond devotional material: a raas can be invoked for any scene of collective dancing, and in a social drama it would most naturally attach to a festival or a wedding sequence rather than to a mythological one. Given that the same score contains a Holi song, a film with two dance-shaped numbers is not surprising. All of this is inference from a title, though, and it is offered as that. No words for the song have been published, no source describes its picturisation, and nothing about its content is asserted here as fact.

Hamara Sansar was a Prakash Pictures social directed by Shanti Kumar, made in the stretch when the studio was deliberately moving away from the mythologicals that had made its name. The film failed commercially and no print is known to circulate, so nothing is recorded about which character sings this number or where it falls in the story. The soundtrack is unusually tidy for 1945: eight documented titles, one composer, one lyricist, and four singers between them.

'Raas Rachaye' has no performance history that can be traced. It is not on the Saregama album, it has not been reposted by the 78-rpm collectors who have kept several other Hamara Sansar sides in circulation, its lyrics have never been published, and no writer appears to have discussed it. What it does have is a documented place: two independent song indexes agree that a song by this name belonged to this film, composed by Gobind Ram to Ramesh Gupta's words. In an encyclopaedia of Hindi film music that is worth recording precisely because it is all that is left — the difference between a song that is forgotten and a song that has been erased is that somebody wrote the first one down.