आँसू न बहाना

The one song of Bisvi Sadi for which a lyric text has survived in circulation, 'Aansu Na Bahana' is a hard, unsentimental address to someone about to weep. Its argument is not that grief is unwarranted but that it is useless: the world is stocked with deceit, it has always been its custom to make the poor cry, and tears will move nobody. The counsel it offers instead is vigilance — to weigh every step taken on this road. Neither singer nor lyricist is credited anywhere; the composer is Pannalal Ghosh.

A recording circulates online, but no authoritative credit for its voice or arrangement has been published, and the song is not written about in any of the standard survey literature on 1945. What can be stated is the authorship: Pannalal Ghosh composed it, five years after his debut score for Sneh Bandhan (1940).

The poem works by refusing the standard filmi move. A 1940s film lyric that opens on a weeping listener almost always goes on to promise better days; this one goes the other way and tells the listener that crying is a category error. Its picture of the world is flatly social — a place structured so that the poor are the ones who weep, and where deceit is not an accident but the material the world is made of. The advice that replaces comfort is practical: think before each step. That combination of fatalism about the system and vigilance about one's own conduct is a characteristic register of Hindi social-film verse in the last years before independence, and it sits naturally in a Mohan Bhavnani picture — he was the director who had brought Premchand into cinema for the banned labour film Mazdoor (1934).

Bisvi Sadi — 'The Twentieth Century' — was produced and directed by Mohan Bhavnani for Bhavnani Productions and released in 1945, with Motilal and Nargis heading a cast that also included Mazhar Khan, Gope, Ashalata, Bhudo Advani, Navin and Majumdar. Pannalal Ghosh, the flautist who made the bansuri a Hindustani concert instrument, wrote all fifteen songs; the records went out on Columbia. No plot summary of the film survives in the accessible record, but this song's subject — poverty, deceit and the futility of appealing to the world's pity — is the clearest single indication of what kind of social picture Bhavnani was making under a title that names the modern century.

Of the fifteen songs catalogued for Bisvi Sadi, this is the only one whose words are still findable, which makes it the film's de facto surviving text. Bisvi Sadi is out of circulation and no print is known to be accessible, so the song exists today chiefly as a catalogue line in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived databases. Its claim on attention is that it belongs to one of the very few complete Hindi film scores signed by Pannalal Ghosh, whose reputation otherwise rests entirely on the concert platform.