प्रीत

Preet is a Krishin Movietone romance directed by Ram Daryani, released in 1945 with Snehprabha Pradhan as its female lead opposite Chandra Mohan, and with Pahari Sanyal, Swarnalata, Nazir Ahmad, Gope, Miss Gulab and Majid filling out the cast. Wikipedia's list of Hindi films of 1945 classes it as a romance drama, and that single word is the whole of what is recorded about its story. No plot summary of Preet survives in any source that can be consulted openly: the film has no Wikipedia article of its own, Cinemaazi holds a page for it but keeps the text behind a subscription, no print is known to circulate, and the trade-paper coverage of 1945 is not digitised. Rather than reconstruct a story from the song titles, this entry records what is actually documented — and what is documented is the music. Thirteen songs were composed for the film by Bulo C. Rani, then about twenty-five and barely a year into working as an independent composer; ten of them were written by D. N. Madhok and the other three by Wali Saheb, a division that HindiGeetMala's per-song lyricist column and MySwar's listing confirm independently and identically. Snehprabha Pradhan sings on seven tracks, Bulo C. Rani himself on four, Amirbai Karnataki on three and Hamida Banu on one. The discs were issued by Columbia Records. What the songs are about — a woman turned jogan, a caged bird told to fly, a peepal tree kept as a landmark, Krishna at Holi, hopes decorated for an arrival that the poem never mentions — is the only real evidence of the film's emotional shape that has come down to us.

Thirteen songs are catalogued for Preet, all composed by Bulo C. Rani, and three independent catalogues — the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, HindiGeetMala and MySwar — list the same thirteen with the same singer credits. Snehprabha Pradhan is credited on seven (five solos plus duets with Bulo C. Rani and with Hamida Banu); Bulo C. Rani sings four; Amirbai Karnataki three; Hamida Banu one. One track, 'Khali Paleton Ko', carries no singer credit in any of the three and is stored here with an empty singer array rather than attributed by inference. The lyric-writing splits cleanly by register: Madhok's ten are in village Hindi and turn on folk figures — a jogan, a caged bird, a peepal tree, Krishna at Holi — while Wali Saheb's three ('Mera Bala Joban Hai Udas Kyun', 'Saja Kar Meri Ummeedon Ko', 'Asha Ko Hansaye') are in an Urdu ghazal register. MySwar records the discs as a Columbia Records release.

Ram Daryani (1915-1963) was born in Hyderabad, Sindh, started Daryani Films in 1936 and founded Krishin Movietone with his brother K. S. Daryani in 1938; Preet is a picture from the middle of that banner's run. His filmography stretches from 1933 to Chand Mere Aaja (1960), and his best-remembered work is Tarana (1951) with Madhubala. Bulo C. Rani was roughly twenty-five when he scored Preet. Snehprabha Pradhan, who both leads the film and sings most of it, made two releases in 1945 — Preet and Din Raat — and published an autobiography, Snehankita, in the 1970s. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh names K. S. Daryani as the film's producer and preserves its censor particulars — certificate Bombay/31216, 10,958 feet on 13 reels, a running time of 121 minutes 46 seconds, dated 1 March 1945. It also records one production anecdote: Daryani said in a personal meeting that Gyan Dutt had composed the film's music, but on being told that Bulo C. Rani was credited as composer in the film's own publicity booklet and on the gramophone records, he checked his copy of the booklet and confirmed that the score was indeed Bulo C. Rani's. No shooting dates and no box-office figure could be found in any accessible source.

Preet's value in the record is as an early complete Bulo C. Rani score. He had joined Ranjit Movietone in 1939 as an assistant to Khemchand Prakash and had been composing on his own account only since 1944; the thirteen songs here belong to that apprentice stretch, five years before the early-1950s scores — Jogan (1950), Wafa (1951), Bilwamangal (1954) — that are generally regarded as his best work — and it is worth noting that Preet already contains a jogan song of its own. The record is also an unusually clean document of how credits worked in 1945: the composer sings four of his own tracks, the leading lady sings seven, and only Amirbai Karnataki and Hamida Banu are on the disc purely as singers. That distribution is a snapshot of the moment just before playback singing separated decisively from acting and composing, which it did within the following five years.

Preet has effectively vanished. No print is known to be publicly available, no recording of any of its thirteen songs turned up in open circulation during this build, the film has no Wikipedia article, and the one archival page devoted to it — Cinemaazi's — is paywalled. What survives is the song list itself, carried forward through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the catalogues built on it, and it survives in unusually good order: two independent databases agree on all thirteen titles, on the singer for twelve of them, and on the per-song split between D. N. Madhok and Wali Saheb. For a 1945 film with no other trace, that is a great deal, and it is the reason a careful catalogue entry is worth making.