ज़िद

No plot synopsis of Zid has been located in any accessible archive, and none is invented here. What the record does preserve is the shape of the production. Zid was the second feature directed by H. S. Rawail, then in his early twenties: born in Lyallpur in 1921, he had moved to Calcutta to write scripts and had debuted behind the camera with Dorangia Daku (1940). Wikipedia's filmography credits him on Zid as both director and cinematographer — an unusual double, and a measure of how small the unit was. The film was made in Calcutta for Shree Bharatlaxmi Pictures (catalogued in pre-Partition Pakistani archives as Bharat Lakshmi Pictures), and Wikipedia's List of Hindi films of 1945 classes it as a Social. Its leading lady was Ramola, the Khazanchi (1941) star who had also headlined Rawail's previous film Shukriya (1944); the rest of the cast is recorded as Sunder, Hiralal, Zahur Shah, Ajit, Ramesh Sinha, Manorama and Balkrishna. G. A. Chishti — the Lahore-trained composer of Khamoshi (1942) and Manchali (1943), both of which featured Ramola — wrote the music for eight songs, the lyrics credited jointly to Shanti Swaroop Madhukar and to Chishti himself. Commercially it failed: Wikipedia records Shukriya (1944), Zid (1945) and Jhoothi Kasmein (1948) as three consecutive flops before Patanga (1949) finally made Rawail's name.

Eight songs, all composed by G. A. Chishti. Six of them — 'Chala Jaa Raha Hoon', 'Dil Ko Kisi Se', 'Ek Baat Kahoon', 'Muddat Baad Aaye Ho', 'O Roothne Wale' and 'Rakm Itni Mil Gayi' — are credited on both hindigeetmala and myswar to Sunder, who is also in the cast; hindigeetmala's own singer index for Sunder lists these same six titles, which is an independent confirmation within the same source. HFGK (Hamraaz) goes further than either catalogue: it names Balkrishna as a second voice on 'Rakm Itni Mil Gayi' and 'Chala Jaa Raha Hoon', and it credits 'Aate Nahi Woh' to Radharani, a singer the two catalogues leave blank. Those HFGK credits are followed here and the disagreement is recorded on each song. Only 'Kyon Khila Phool' carries no singer credit in any of the three sources, and none has been invented. Neither catalogue offers a usable per-song lyricist: both simply repeat the film-level pair — Shanti Swaroop Madhukar and Chishti — against every track, so the per-song lyricist arrays are left empty throughout.

Wikipedia's filmography for H. S. Rawail marks Zid as the one film on which he served as his own cinematographer in addition to directing. The production was Calcutta-based — pakmag.net records the film as made in Calcutta for Bharat Lakshmi Pictures — at a moment when Rawail's working relationship with Ramola carried over directly from Shukriya (1944). The Osianama archive is listed as holding three photographic stills from Zid, filed under the entries for Hiralal, Balkrishna, Ajit and Ramola.

Zid is a crossing point between two careers that had not yet arrived. For H. S. Rawail it is the middle film of the three consecutive failures — Shukriya, Zid, Jhoothi Kasmein — that preceded Patanga (1949) and, much later, Mere Mehboob (1963); for G. A. Chishti it is one of the last Hindi scores of his pre-Partition career, before he migrated to Pakistan in 1949 and became a founding figure of that industry. The film also documents the pre-playback working method still normal in 1945: six of its eight songs are credited to an actor in the cast rather than to a professional playback singer.

Zid left almost no afterlife. It was a commercial failure, no reissue of its records is documented, and in film history it survives mainly as a line in H. S. Rawail's filmography. Two of its songs exist in collector uploads on YouTube, and those uploads disagree with each other about who sang them — the clearest sign of how thin the surviving documentation is. Its people went on: Chishti became a pillar of Pakistani film music after 1949, and Sunder became one of Hindi cinema's busiest character comedians, hindigeetmala's singer index for him running from Shukriya and Zid in the mid-1940s through Chandni Chowk, Jhamela, Pilpili Saheb and Badhti Ka Naam Daadhi.