ख़ूनी लाश

A 1943 Hindi mystery-thriller — its title translating literally as 'The Bloody Corpse' — directed by the prolific A. R. Kardar during the period he was establishing himself in Bombay. As with much of the crime-and-stunt cinema of the early 1940s, the surviving record of the film is thin: it endures chiefly through its two gramophone songs, composed by the little-documented music director K. Narayan Rao and sung by Naseem Akhtar.

The score was composed by K. Narayan Rao to lyrics by Shevan Rizvi, with both documented numbers sung by Naseem Akhtar. The two surviving songs — 'Loot Liya Loot Liya Nainan Ne Haaye Ree' and 'Badnaam Na Ho Jana Ae Dil Diwana' — together run to roughly six minutes on the original gramophone pressings, a small but complete window onto a soundtrack that is otherwise almost entirely lost to documentation.

Khooni Laash belongs to the strain of 1940s crime-and-mystery pictures whose commercial life outran their critical reputation. For HindiGeet the film is most valuable as a document of the obscure: music director K. Narayan Rao left almost no biographical trail, and singer Naseem Akhtar's work here is among her earliest in Bombay cinema. The film is also a marker on A. R. Kardar's path from the silent and early-talkie era toward the major studio operation he would build later in the decade.