गाँव की गोरी

Gaon Ki Gori, released in English-language listings as Village Girl, is a rural romance set in the Punjab countryside. Upperstall's review of the surviving print describes Jaani, a village mischief-maker played by Nazir, who pursues Billo — Noor Jehan in the title role — from a neighbouring village. Their courtship is obstructed by the antagonist Hari, whose interference extends to a false murder charge laid against Jaani. Jaani enlists in the British Indian army during the Second World War and returns a decorated hero, only to find Billo promised to Hari. The knot is cut when it emerges that Hari has made another village girl pregnant and is compelled to marry her, leaving Jaani and Billo free to reunite. Durga Khote appears as Jaani's mother and Jagdish Sethi as the village priest. Around this spine the film hangs its harvest sequences and the twelve Wali Saheb songs that made its soundtrack one of the most widely circulated of the year. The print catalogued by Upperstall is incomplete and runs about ninety minutes.

Twelve songs, all written by Wali Saheb and composed by Shyam Sundar. The album is unusually varied for a village picture: six Noor Jehan numbers that range from the folk lament 'Sajan Pardesi Balam Pardesi' to the near-ghazal 'Kis Tarah Bhoolega Dil Unka'; three Amirbai Karnataki songs including the bhajan-shaded 'Bansi Ki Madhur Dhun Se'; and two male numbers led by G. M. Durrani — the marching patriotic 'Hindustan Ki Khatir Hum Jaan Lada Denge' and the qawwali-shaped duet with chorus in which Mohammed Rafi appears. No singer is documented for the twelfth title, 'Chhalla De Ja Balam'. Shyam Sundar, a Lahore-trained composer who worked in a plainer, more Punjabi-folk idiom than his Bombay contemporaries, kept the orchestration light so that the melodic line and the singer's diction carry the song.

K. Amarnath wrote the story himself; the dialogue was by Safdar Faizpuri, the camera by L. N. Verma and the cutting by B. K. Mistry. The surviving print reviewed at Upperstall is incomplete and runs about ninety minutes, and the picture sits squarely in the pre-Partition Punjabi-rural strand of Bombay film-making that Shyam Sundar, Wali Saheb and Nazir all came out of. Listings differ on the producer credit: Indiancine.ma has been cited for a 'Walli Sahab' producer credit, while Wikipedia and the census listings give Ramneek Productions as the banner. The casting of Mohammed Rafi was Shyam Sundar's doing — the composer gave the young singer the male-duet slot beside G. M. Durrani.

Gaon Ki Gori was the second highest-grossing Indian film of 1945, in a year whose Hindi output sat at the wartime trough of the decade under raw-stock rationing and a government production quota. It is also one of the films that carries an early Mohammed Rafi recording: Shyam Sundar cast the teenaged Rafi opposite the established G. M. Durrani in 'Aji Dil Ho Kaabu Mein To Dildar Ki Aisi Taisi'. Wikipedia's article on the film records this as Rafi's second Hindi film song, his first having been in Naushad's Pehle Aap (1944), while the Wikipedia entry on G. M. Durrani dates the recording session itself to 1944 — accounts differ on which was cut first. For Noor Jehan the film belongs to the extraordinary run of 1945 in which she led three of the year's biggest hits — Zeenat, Gaon Ki Gori and Badi Maa — and it is the film that gave her the folk-inflected register that critics still set beside her better-known Urdu ghazal singing.

Nazir remade the film in Pakistan four years later as Pheray (1949), which Wikipedia records as the first Pakistani picture to complete a silver jubilee — twenty-five weeks at Lahore's Palace Cinema and five at Karachi's Taj Mahal Cinema — so the Gaon Ki Gori story ended up founding a commercial tradition on both sides of the new border. When Noor Jehan visited India in 1982 for the Golden Jubilee celebrations of Indian talkies, Songs of Yore records that one of the songs she chose to sing on the occasion was 'Baithi Hun Teri Yaad Ka Lekar Ke Sahara' from this film. And the film has a permanent place in accounts of Mohammed Rafi's career as the source of one of his earliest Hindi film recordings — a comic-defiant male duet in a village picture that nobody at the time thought would matter.