फ़रियाद

A 1942 Ranjit Movietone social drama directed by Jayant Desai, its title meaning 'the complaint' or 'the plea'. Built in the studio-melodrama mould of wartime Bombay cinema, the film is best remembered today as part of the early Ranjit phase of composer Khemchand Prakash, whose score — set to D.N. Madhok's lyrics and carried by the voices of Shamim and Ishwarlal — anchors a story of love, longing and reproach.

Khemchand Prakash's score for Fariyaad runs to nine songs set to D.N. Madhok's lyrics, with the bulk of the singing carried by Shamim and Ishwarlal, and additional voices from Rajkumari and Binapani Mukherjee. The compositions sit in the ghazal-and-light-classical register typical of early-1940s Ranjit productions — melody-forward, restrained in orchestration, built around the carrying power of the playback voice.

Fariyaad belongs to the formative Ranjit Movietone years of Khemchand Prakash, the composer who would go on to define a generation of film melody and famously launch Lata Mangeshkar with 'Aayega Aanewala' in Mahal (1949). With lyrics by the prolific D.N. Madhok, the film is a document of the productive Madhok–Khemchand working relationship at Ranjit during the early 1940s.