लेफ़्टिनेंट

Lieutenant is a 1944 Hindi action feature directed by the stunt-film specialist Nari Ghadiali, with lyrics by Mustafa. Made in the lower-budget action register that flourished in wartime Bombay, it carried the martial, patriotic colouring suggested by its English title and a soundtrack whose song titles — among them 'Dushman Ki Chati Par' and 'Woh Aayi Victory' — speak directly to the war years in which it was released. Like much of the period's stunt-and-action output, the film survives today chiefly through its catalogued songs rather than as a viewable print, and its detailed plot is no longer documented.

Eight songs are documented for Lieutenant on period catalogue listings, all with lyrics by Mustafa. The recorded singing voices associated with the film are Kusum Joshi, Murli and Miss Sharda, performing across the patriotic and romantic numbers in the period's familiar harmonium-and-tabla idiom. A consolidated music-director credit is not reliably documented in surviving listings, and per-song singer attributions cannot be split with confidence.

The film belongs to the patriotic-action strand of 1944, when the Second World War was an explicit backdrop for Bombay's stunt cinema. Its documented eight-song soundtrack — written by the lyricist Mustafa and carried by the singing voices of Kusum Joshi, Murli and Miss Sharda — is a small but real document of the second tier of the year's film-music economy, the workmanlike action-melodrama songs that ran beneath landmark scores such as Naushad's Rattan.