सन्यासी

Sanyasi is a Hindi/Urdu social film made and directed by A. R. Kardar under his own Kardar Productions banner, from a story and dialogue by Azm Bazidpuri. The title role, a sanyasi or wandering renunciate, was played by the actor Ghulam Mohammed, who had appeared the same year in Sohrab Modi's Ek Din Ka Sultan; around him Kardar built a village cast of Hindu character names — Radha, Mohan, Kiran, Tulsi, Chetan, Ramdas, Banke and Chobe — with Shamim Bano as Radha and Amar as Mohan. No detailed plot summary of the film survives in the accessible reference literature, and this entry does not invent one. What can be reconstructed comes from the credits and from Naushad's ten songs, which move between a village-Hindi world of peepal-tree meetings, cuckoos and dusk homecomings and a starker Urdu register of endurance, broken boats and a world that garlands what it has spent a lifetime misunderstanding — the emotional territory a film about renunciation would be expected to cover.

Ten songs, all composed by Naushad and all written by one lyricist, Pandit Madhur — credited on some labels under his full name, Pandit Buddhi Chandra Aggarwal. Wikipedia records that the sound was taken on R.C.A. equipment. The discs were pressed by HMV in its GE series: the HMV India discography at discog.piezoelektric.org lists GE 3532, GE 3534 and GE 3535 against Sanyasi (1945), though it carries no song titles and no matrix numbers. Two label readings survive on collector transfers whose uploads reproduce the disc text — GE 3532 / matrix CEI 23805 for "Duniya Chadhaye Phool" and GE 3536 / matrix CEI 23812 for "Tooti Hui Kishti Ka Bane Kaun Sahara"; GE 3532 is corroborated by the discography, GE 3536 is not listed there. Zohrabai Ambalewali dominates the album with three sides carrying no named co-singer and four duets with Amar — seven of the ten sides; Amar sings five sides, one of them alone; Naseem Akhtar and Shyam Kumar have one each. The score divides cleanly into a village-Hindi group built on folk metre and a slower Urdu-inflected group of laments, with the bhajan "Nainon Mein Krishna Murari Hain" as its centre of gravity. Eight of the ten sides survive in collector transfers; "Ek Baat Kahun" and "Peepal Ki Chhaon Tale" have not been digitised.

The film was made at Kardar Studios in Bombay, the plant A. R. Kardar built after buying out Circo Productions when it went into liquidation in 1939 — reputedly the first studio in the city with air-conditioned make-up rooms. Naushad had been Kardar's house composer since Nayi Duniya (1942), the film that first gave him the screen credit 'music director', on an arrangement that left him free to take outside work; it was one such outside job, Rattan for Jagdish Productions in 1944, that made his name and his fee. Sanyasi is the film he delivered to Kardar immediately afterwards. Among the supporting cast is the twelve-year-old Mehmood, playing Banke — two years after his first appearance as the young Shekhar in Kismet (1943) and long before he became one of Hindi cinema's most loved comedians.

Sanyasi is the film Naushad made in the year immediately after Rattan (1944) — and his only release of 1945, which makes these ten songs the whole of his output for that year. It matters as the hinge between the two best-known phases of his early career: the folk-classical breakthrough of Rattan behind it and Anmol Ghadi, Shahjehan and Keemat, all in 1946, ahead. Commercially it delivered: Naushad's filmography records Sanyasi as a Silver Jubilee, a run of twenty-five weeks or more, at a time when a Kardar Productions release was expected to carry the studio's overheads. It is also a record of the last full season of Zohrabai Ambalewali's primacy — she sings seven of the ten sides — before Lata Mangeshkar's arrival reset the market for female playback voices within three years.

Sanyasi has not survived as a film. No print is in general circulation, no plot summary appears in the standard reference works, and the soundtrack has never had a commercial reissue; what exists of it is nine of its ten sides digitised by private collectors and a set of credits preserved in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition. That is a fair description of the condition of most 1940s Hindi cinema outside the two dozen famous titles, and it is why an entry like this one is worth keeping: the film sits in the gap between Rattan and Anmol Ghadi in every Naushad biography, usually as a single line, and the songs are the only evidence of what he was actually doing in that gap. Kardar himself went on to Shahjehan (1946), Dard (1947), Dillagi and Dulari (1949) and Dastan (1950) with Naushad before the partnership ended with Deewana (1952).