बीसवीं सदी

Bisvi Sadi — 'The Twentieth Century' — is a social film made by Mohan Bhavnani for his own banner, Bhavnani Productions, and released in 1945. It paired Motilal, by then one of Hindi cinema's most admired naturalistic actors, with Nargis, who was fifteen or sixteen at the time and only two years past her first leading role in Mehboob Khan's Taqdeer (1943); around them Bhavnani assembled the comedian Gope, the actor-director Mazhar Khan, Ashalata, Bhudo Advani, Navin and Majumdar. No detailed plot summary of the film survives in the accessible record — no print is known to circulate and the contemporary reviews have not been digitised — so what the picture actually dramatised has to be read backwards from its title and its unusually varied fifteen-song score. That evidence points to a film squarely in the tradition Bhavnani had worked in since Mazdoor (1934): the title names the modern century itself as the subject, and the songs range from a two-part patriotic number ('Bharat Ki Santan', 'Children of India') and a hard-eyed lament about the world's habit of making the poor weep ('Aansu Na Bahana') to a Holi song, a wedding song, and two songs set on the banks of the Yamuna. That spread — modernity and machine-age argument on one side, festival and Braj-country lyricism on the other — is the shape of the mid-1940s Hindi social film.

Fifteen songs are catalogued for Bisvi Sadi, all composed by Pannalal Ghosh and issued on Columbia. The surviving credits are thin: the catalogues name Parul Ghosh as the film's playback singer and attach her by name to two numbers, 'Kook Re Tu Pran Papihe' and 'Maang Rahi Hoon Tujhse', while the remaining thirteen carry only the composer's name. No lyricist is credited anywhere in the accessible record. Parul Ghosh was Pannalal Ghosh's wife — they had married in 1924, when she was nine and he thirteen — and the younger sister of Anil Biswas; she had sung on Dhoop Chhaon (1935), one of the first playback recordings in Indian cinema. The song list itself is the best surviving description of the score: a title song about the century, a patriotic number issued in two versions, a Holi song, a wedding song, a papiha song of monsoon separation, two Yamuna-bank songs, and a social lament.

Mohan Bhavnani was among the very first Indians to train formally in film abroad: he studied at the College of Technology in Manchester from 1921 to 1924 and then apprenticed at UFA in Berlin, the studio of Metropolis. He had directed Sulochana in the silent era at Kohinoor and Imperial, run three companies of his own, brought Premchand into cinema for Mazdoor (1934) — a labour-versus-capital film banned as communist propaganda — and set up an animation unit in 1935 staffed with artists from the J. J. School of Art and a German technician who had worked on Metropolis. Pannalal Ghosh came to the same city from a different direction: he had assisted at New Theatres in Calcutta, moved to Bombay in 1940 for film work, and as a teenager in 1928 had joined the independence movement in Bengal, taking up gymnasium training and stick-fighting until police attention forced him to leave for Calcutta. He would not begin his systematic study under Ustad Allauddin Khan until 1947, two years after this film.

The film's lasting interest is its music director. Pannalal Ghosh (1911–1960) is remembered as the man who made the bansuri a Hindustani concert instrument — he lengthened the flute to thirty-two inches, added the teevra-madhyam hole and introduced the seven-hole design — and film scoring was only a narrow side-channel in that life. Bisvi Sadi is one of the few complete Hindi film scores he signed, coming five years after his debut as an independent composer on Sneh Bandhan (1940) and six years before Andolan (1951). It is also a document of an early Nargis performance, made before Barsaat and Andaz turned her into the defining screen presence of the following decade, and one of the last commercial features Mohan Bhavnani directed before the Government of India appointed him the first Chief Producer of the Films Division in 1948.

Bisvi Sadi has almost entirely fallen out of circulation. It is not among the 1945 films that later writers return to, and unlike Zeenat or Humayun of the same year it produced no song that entered the standard repertoire; what survives is the catalogue entry — fifteen titles, one composer, one named singer — in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived song databases. That partial survival is itself the point: it is a reminder of how much of the 1940s output exists now only as a list of song titles. For listeners tracing Pannalal Ghosh, the film matters because it is one of the small number of scores in which India's foremost classical flautist worked as a commercial film composer, and for anyone following Nargis it is a marker of how early her career began.