आवाज़ आ रही है

'Aawaz Aa Rahi Hai' is listed second in the Bisvi Sadi catalogue and carries no singer or lyricist credit; Pannalal Ghosh is named as composer. The title — 'a voice is coming' — is the summons formula of 1940s Hindi film verse: a call heard from off-screen that the listener must decide whether to answer. Nothing further about the song is documented. It is, for what it is worth, the only number from the film that HindiGeetMala's users have rated more than once.

No recording of the number has surfaced online, so nothing can honestly be said about its scoring beyond who wrote it. What is worth knowing is the hand behind it: in 1945 Pannalal Ghosh was already the leading bansuri player in the country — he had lengthened the instrument to thirty-two inches and added the teevra-madhyam hole to make the lower-octave meend possible — and he came to Bombay film work from New Theatres in Calcutta rather than from the Bombay studio system.

The title is all that survives of the poem, and it is a formula rather than an image: aawaz aa rahi hai places the listener in the position of someone who hears before he sees. In the film songs of the period that construction does a specific job — it opens a distance between the singer and whatever is calling, and the song then becomes the act of closing or refusing that distance. Whether the voice here was a lover's, a mother's, or the abstract summons of conscience that a film called 'The Twentieth Century' might well have wanted, the record does not say, and guessing would only invent a song that may never have existed in that form.

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. The two catalogues that preserve the film's song list — HindiGeetMala and MySwar — agree on all fifteen titles and on the composer, and disagree on nothing except transliteration, which is the strongest evidence that both descend from the same Hindi Film Geet Kosh compilation.

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.