नसीब

Nasib is a 1945 social drama made by Silver Films, the Bombay production house that the actress Pramila and her husband, the actor Kumar, ran together through the 1940s. The Wikipedia list of Hindi films of 1945 classes it as a social — the dominant commercial genre of the war years, in which the working-class or lower-middle-class family is squeezed by money, marriage and circumstance until fate ('nasib', the title) is the only explanation left for what has happened to it. Nothing of the film's shooting script or plot has been preserved in the reference literature, and no print is known to survive; what remains of Nasib is its cast list, its credits and its eight-song gramophone record. The songs themselves suggest the shape of the story rather than tell it: a street-hawker's cry, a lullaby sung over a cradle, two ghazals of remembered love, a Krishna bhajan and a pair of duets about freedom and the shortness of a life. That is the standard emotional geography of a 1940s social, and it is as far as honest reconstruction can go. This entry therefore documents Nasib as the music and credit record documents it, and stops there.

Eight songs are documented for Nasib, all composed by Gobind Ram, with lyrics divided between Rammurti Chaturvedi, Ishwar Chandra Kapoor and Aziz Kashmiri. The voices are Rajkumari (three ghazal-and-lullaby solos), Zohrabai Ambalewali and Hamida Banu (the street-hawker duet 'Chane Masaledar Babu Le Lo'), and Hamida Banu with Khan Mastana (two narrative duets). Two of the eight — 'Ghar Aaja Balam' and 'Murali Madhur Baja Kanhaiya' — appear in the catalogues with a lyricist and a composer but no singer attribution at all, so their singer arrays are left empty here rather than guessed. Three of the eight survive commercially and are still catalogued by Saregama, the successor to the original HMV rights: 'Haal-E-Dil Tumko Sunaya Jayega', 'Unhen Yaad Aaye Guzra Zamana' and 'Hum Panchhi Hain Aazad'. One further title, 'Gori Gaagar Ki Ganga Udhaar Diye Jaa', is listed under Nasib by HindiGeetMala and MySwar, but the record itself belongs to Kaise Kahoon (1945) — composed by Pandit Amarnath, written by Sharma, sung by S. D. Batish and Shamshad Begum — and it has been excluded from this soundtrack for that reason.

Silver Films was a husband-and-wife operation with an unusual origin: Kumar, born Syed Hasan Ali Zaidi, lost his job at Ranjit Studios in 1942 and set up the company with the actor Chandramohan rather than look for another contract. Pramila, whom he had married in 1939, moved into producing alongside acting, and the two of them appeared in most of what the banner made. Nasib was the second of the three talkies that can actually be traced to B. D. Vedi, a director about whom almost nothing else is recorded: Bade Nawab Saheb (1944) and Nasib (1945), both Silver Films pictures listed as his in Pramila's filmography, and Room No. 9 (1946), a Bombay thriller with Shyam and Geeta Nizami that carries his name. A fourth title has sometimes been attached to him but could not be confirmed in any source consulted, and is not claimed here. Gobind Ram was scoring at extraordinary speed in this period — six Hindi films released in 1945 — and was, by the count of the Hindi Film Geet Kosh-based survey of his career, one of the two composers of the decade who used the widest range of singers.

Nasib matters for two reasons that have nothing to do with its box office. First, it is a Silver Films production, which makes it part of the filmography of Pramila — born Esther Victoria Abraham into a Baghdadi Jewish family in Calcutta, later the first woman crowned Miss India in 1947, and the first significant woman film producer in India. Silver Films was founded in 1942 after Kumar was dismissed from Ranjit Studios, and Pramila produced or co-produced thirteen films under it and its successor banners while acting in almost all of them. Second, Nasib belongs to Gobind Ram's most prolific year: in 1945 alone he scored Chalis Karod, Hamara Sansar, Laila Majnu, Parinde, Ratnavali and this film. Its eight songs are also the single densest sample of his collaboration with the lyricist Ishwar Chandra Kapoor, with whom he worked more than with any other writer — 56 songs across eight films, of which Nasib is one.

None of Pramila's thirteen productions caught on with audiences, and Nasib is no exception: it left no box-office record, no surviving print and no critical afterlife. What did survive is the record. Three of its sides are still in the Saregama catalogue eighty years later, which puts Nasib in the substantial category of 1940s films that are now known only through their music — the film gone, the songs still playable. For Rajkumari the two Nasib ghazals belong to the stretch of the mid-1940s when she was one of the busiest voices in Bombay, before Lata Mangeshkar's arrival reorganised the field; for Hamida Banu, the two narrative duets with Khan Mastana are a documented mid-1940s pairing. And for Pramila the film is one line in a career that ended with her becoming, in 1947, the first Miss India — a title her daughter Naqi Jehan won exactly twenty years later.