शरबती आँखें

Sharbati Ankhen is a Wadia Movietone social romance built around a debt that is older than its lovers. A middle-class girl and the son of a wealthy household fall in love, and the boy's family resists the match on the usual grounds of station — without knowing that the fortune they are guarding was founded on sacrifices the girl's father once made for the boy's grandfather. The picture turns on the disclosure of that buried history, which inverts the moral arithmetic between the two families and clears the way for the marriage. Ishwarlal took the male lead opposite a heroine catalogued variously as T. R. Rajakumari and simply as Rajkumari, with Vanmala — a considerable name in 1945 — taking only a small role, and Agha, Sumati Gupte, Harish, Aftab and the Kirana-gharana classical vocalist Firoz Dastur filling out the cast. The title is itself a piece of Urdu-Hindi love-poetry vocabulary: sharbati aankhen are eyes the pale amber colour of sherbet, a stock image of beauty that the film borrows for its name.

Ten songs are catalogued. Three are Mohammed Rafi solos — 'Bahut Mukhtasar Hai Hamari Kahani' to Tanveer Naqvi's words, and 'Pyar Karna Hi Padega Ek Din' and 'Ab Na Been Baja Snehi' to Pandit Indra's. Hamida Banu sings the happy version of 'Dil Tu Hi Bata De' and the first part of 'Duniya Sharaab Khana'; the sad version of 'Dil Tu Hi Bata De' is credited to Amirbai Karnataki and the second part of 'Duniya Sharaab Khana' to Zeenat Begum. Firoz Dastur, who is in the cast as an actor, sings two numbers — 'Bikhre Kitne Roop Jagat Mein' and 'Ke Rama Bade Gazab Ki Naar' — and no singer at all is documented for 'Aao Aao Saloni Naar': hindigeetmala's track table leaves that cell empty and MySwar lists only 'various artists', so that credit is left empty here rather than guessed. The lyric-writing is split three ways: Tanveer Naqvi's Urdu register on four songs, Pandit Indra's Hindi on five, and one number credited to Baalam Pardesi.

Aspi Irani is credited as producer and Ramchandra Thakur directed. Wadia Movietone made two Feroz Nizami films in 1945 — this one and Piya Milan — which is the clearest sign of how far the studio's tastes had shifted from stunt spectacle towards music-led social drama. The oddity of the production is Firoz Dastur: a Kirana-gharana khayal singer who had started as a child performer in the early Bombay talkies, he appears here both in the cast and as the voice on two of the ten songs, at a stage of his life when he was moving away from cinema and towards the classical concert platform he would occupy for the rest of his career. Arunkumar Deshmukh's note on the film also records that Vanmala, by then a well-known actress, was given only a very small part.

The film's lasting claim on attention is Mohammed Rafi. In 1945 Rafi was an unplaced newcomer from Lahore, and by the account preserved on Atul's Song A Day — assembled from Hindi Film Geet Kosh by the researcher Arunkumar Deshmukh — he had recorded only two solos before this picture; Sharbati Ankhen gave him three, the largest share any film had yet handed him. It also belongs to the short run of Bombay assignments Feroz Nizami took before Jugnu (1947) made his name, so the film is an early snapshot of a composer-and-singer pairing that would, two years later, produce the decade's biggest soundtrack. Beyond that it is a representative example of what Wadia Movietone had become by the mid-1940s: a studio that had left its Fearless Nadia stunt-picture identity behind and was turning out modest social dramas with strong song lists.

Sharbati Ankhen is forgotten in the plainest sense of the word: no scene-level synopsis, no stills and effectively no press survive in accessible archives, and the fullest account of it anywhere online is a set of blog posts assembled from Hindi Film Geet Kosh. What has survived is audio. Two of Rafi's three solos circulate among collectors in poor transfers, and they are valued precisely because they catch the singer before his style was standardised — already full-throated at a moment when, by the blog's reading, the industry was pressing him to sound like somebody else. The film is now essentially a Rafi-origins document and an early Feroz Nizami credit rather than a picture that anyone watches.