ग़ुलामी

Ghulami — the word means 'slavery' or 'bondage' — is a Hindi-Urdu social drama directed by Mohan Wadhwani for Shalimar Pictures and released in 1945, two years before Independence. Contemporary listings classify it as a 'social', the trade term for a present-day reform drama, and it starred Renuka Devi (the screen name of Begum Khurshid Mirza) opposite Masood Parvez, with David Abraham, Mumtaz Begum, Ramayan Tiwari and the lyricist-actor Bharat Vyas in support. No detailed plot record of the film survives in the public archives consulted, and its narrative is not documented in the catalogues, censor summaries or trade indexes available today — so this entry deliberately makes no claim about its story. What does survive, and survives completely, is the soundtrack: nine songs by music director S. K. Pal, preserved in the Saregama/HMV catalogue and reissued digitally, which is why the film is remembered at all.

S. K. Pal scored nine songs for Ghulami, and the album runs barely half an hour — the standard shape of a 1940s 78-rpm film soundtrack. Renuka Devi sings on eight of the nine, either solo, in duet with Masood Parvez, or with chorus; she was one of the last generation of actress-singers who rendered their own songs on screen before playback fully displaced them. Bharat Vyas, unusually, appears three ways on this film: as an actor, as the lyricist of five songs, and as a singing voice on 'Is Nashwar Sansar Mein' and the duet version of 'Aaja Re O Geeta Ke Bhagwan'. The nine tracks cover the standard emotional map of the period — a patriotic address to the homeland, a devotional call, a monsoon song, a dance number, a philosophical solo and an Urdu nazm — and are documented consistently across the Saregama catalogue, JioSaavn and Hindi Geet Mala.

Renuka Devi came to films from an unusually rarefied background: she was born Khurshid Jehan in Aligarh, daughter of Sheikh Abdullah and Waheed Jahan Begum, founders of the Women's College there, and sister of the Urdu writer Rashid Jahan, a founding figure of the Progressive Writers' Movement. Devika Rani signed her at Bombay Talkies and gave her the screen name in memory of her own late sister. Ghulami came near the end of that run — Renuka Devi announced her retirement from films in February 1945 — and after Partition she moved to Pakistan, returning to performance only in the 1960s as a character actress on Pakistan Television. Masood Parvez, her co-star here, worked in Indian films before 1947 and then became one of Pakistan's most decorated directors, winning Nigar Awards for Heer Ranjha (1970) and Khak Aur Khoon (1979).

Ghulami is remarkable less for its story than for whose names appear on its song credits. Shalimar Pictures, W. Z. Ahmed's Poona studio, was the one Bombay-era production house that put the Progressive Writers' Association on its payroll — Josh Malihabadi, Krishan Chander, Ramanand Sagar, Akhtar-ul-Iman and Saghar Nizami all worked there — and Ghulami is where that policy shows most plainly on a single soundtrack. Three of its four lyricists are major Urdu progressives: Josh Malihabadi, the 'Shair-e-Inquilab', wrote two songs; Akhtar-ul-Iman, later one of the most respected voices in modern Urdu nazm, wrote one; and Majaz Lucknawi supplied the fourth. The remaining five went to Bharat Vyas, then early in a career that would run to Do Aankhen Barah Haath and Navrang. For a 1945 film called 'Slavery' to carry a Josh Malihabadi song addressed to the homeland is a matter of record worth noting in itself.

The film itself has effectively vanished from circulation; there is no restored print in public view and no surviving plot record in the standard reference works. Its music, however, has had a long afterlife of a very specific kind. 'Ae Gham-e-Dil Kya Karoon' is a film setting of Majaz Lucknawi's most famous refrain, and it predates by eight years the version everyone remembers — Sardar Malik's setting sung by Talat Mahmood for Thokar (1953), which became one of the most-loved Urdu film songs ever recorded and whose opening line has since supplied the title of a 2017 biographical film about Majaz. Whether the Ghulami lyric uses the same verses as Majaz's nazm 'Aawaara' or a separately written film lyric on the same refrain is not established by any source consulted, so no claim is made here beyond what the song credits show: Majaz's words, S. K. Pal's music, 1945. Beyond that, the album is one of the fullest surviving records of Renuka Devi's singing voice in her final year as a leading lady, and of Bharat Vyas at the very start of a four-decade career.