नीलम

Neelam was a 1945 social picture made in Bombay by the small independent banner A. H. Productions and directed by Ahmed Essa. No plot synopsis of the film survives in any source accessible today: the Wikipedia record of 1945 Hindi releases classes it simply as a 'Social', the genre label the trade press of the period used for contemporary domestic melodrama, and the Cinemaazi entry for the film is behind a paywall and returns no storyline. What the archives do preserve is a cast — Harish and Meena at the front, with Jagdish Sethi, Yashodhara Katju, Kanhaiyalal, Kalyani, Satyarani, Mehdi Raza, Sayani and Abdul Hussain around them — and a soundtrack of nine songs, all written by C. M. Hunar and composed by Khan Mastana. The songs were issued not on HMV but on Young India, the indigenous Bombay label, and it is those shellac discs, not the film, that carried Neelam into the present. Two of its songs, both sung by the Kirana gharana vocalist Roshan Ara Begum, survive as audio; the print does not.

Nine songs, every one of them written by C. M. Hunar and set to music by Khan Mastana — an unusually tight single-writer, single-composer album even by 1945 standards, and a sign of how small the production was. Singer credits survive for only three of the nine. Roshan Ara Begum sings 'Aaj Bas Mein Nahin Dil Mera' and 'Na Mane Koi Dil Ki Baatein'; Khan Mastana takes 'Badnaam Na Kar Den Mujhe Armaan Wafa Ke' himself, as he habitually did with his own compositions. For the remaining six — 'Kya Khoob Hai Jadoo Ye', 'Inhe Ghere Hue Sab', 'Kisko Gham Ka Geet Sunaein', 'Mohe Jhoola Jhulane Aao', 'Phool Khile Mann Ke Aaj' and 'Zaalim Tere Andaz Ne' — no singer is named in any surviving list, and none has been invented here. One Young India 78-rpm disc from the film is documented in a collector's archive: MP 672, matrices NG 244 and NG 245, coupling 'Kya Khoob Hai Jadoo' on the A side with 'Inhe Ghere Hue Sab' on the B, its label printed in Roman, Urdu and Devanagari and pressed by The National Gramophone Record Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Bombay.

C. M. Hunar is credited on Neelam as lyricist of all nine songs, and that is the only role for the film that any accessible source records; the Cinemaazi encyclopaedia lists just five films for him in all — Neelam (1945), Kangoo (1946), Dildar (1947), Night Bird (1961) and Kala Jadoo (1963). Ahmed Essa is credited as director, and no writing credit for the picture is documented anywhere reachable. The choice of label is the more telling production detail. Young India, run by The National Gramophone Record Manufacturing Co. Ltd. from its factory at Sri Laxmi Mills, Sewri Cross Roads, Wadala, was founded in Bombay in 1934 by Duleria A. Pandya and others amid rising nationalist sentiment, and The Heritage Lab records that what set it apart from its competitors was that it 'supported and encouraged emerging talent' and could answer local tastes and regional languages in ways the foreign-owned labels did not. It pressed hundreds of 78-rpm shellac discs before closing in 1955. A. H. Productions taking Neelam's songs to Young India rather than to HMV places the film exactly where it belonged in the industry's pecking order. One caution about the cast: Wikipedia's list of 1945 Hindi films adds Khursheed and Sadhana Bose to Neelam's credits, but neither name appears in the hindigeetmala or myswar records of the film, in Sadanand Kamath's 2021 write-up, or against any of its nine songs — the two names are recorded here as unverified rather than adopted.

Neelam's importance is not dramatic but documentary, and it rests on a single startling credit: Roshan Ara Begum sang playback in it. Roshan Ara Begum — born Waheed-un-Nisa in Calcutta in 1917, trained in the Kirana gharana by Abdul Karim Khan himself, later titled Malika-e-Mauseeqi, the Queen of Music, in Pakistan — was one of the leading Hindustani classical vocalists of the twentieth century, and she almost never sang for films. Her handful of film credits (Pehli Nazar in the same year, Hamjoli in 1946, Jugnu in 1947) are among the very few recordings in which a front-rank khayal singer of her stature can be heard inside the compact three-minute form of the Hindi film song. That she did so for a small independent picture scored by Khan Mastana, rather than for one of the prestige studios, makes Neelam a genuine curiosity of 1945. The score is also a late one from Khan Mastana, the Agra-born singer-composer whose Bombay career would be over within about seven years — Cinemaazi records that assignments stopped coming to him after 1952.

Neelam vanished. No print circulates, no plot summary was ever written down, and for decades the film existed only as a nine-line song list in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and its online descendants. Its recovery has been the work of record collectors rather than film archivists: a Young India disc from the film, sourced from the Hyderabad collector Ramesh Panchkarla, was scanned and catalogued into a public audio archive by Suresh Chandvankar of the Indian record-collecting community, and around 2018 a private collector posted audio of two of its songs to a video-sharing platform. Those uploads led directly to the researcher Sadanand Kamath writing the film up on Atul's Song A Day in August 2021 — the first substantial piece of writing the picture had received in seventy-six years, and the reason anyone now knows that Roshan Ara Begum sang in it. Neelam is a good illustration of how the bottom nine-tenths of 1940s Hindi cinema actually survives: not through films, but through shellac, and through the people who keep it.