बेकस का यहाँ कोई मददगार नहीं है

One of two Urdu ghazals in the Pardesi Balam score, sung on screen by a woman, this is the film's most openly political song. Its opening couplet pairs a plain statement — that there is nobody here to help the helpless — with the sharper line that follows it, that humanity has still not woken from sleep. Written by Zahir Kashmiri and composed by Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi, the side is one of the five from this film that still circulates, and is one of the four carried in Saregama's digital reissue of the album. The Geet Kosh records no singer for it, but myswar and Saregama independently credit the voice to Munawar Sultana.

The record survives as a three-minute shellac side, and its form is the one the film ghazal had settled into by the mid-1940s: a slow, speech-weighted setting in which the melody follows the couplet's argument rather than the other way round, so that the radif — the repeated phrase at the end of each line — lands as a refrain. That construction lets a composer keep the poetry legible on a medium that allowed only three minutes, which is why the ghazal survived the transition from mehfil to gramophone at all. Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi's own musical background is undocumented, so his handling here cannot be placed within a body of work.

Zahir Kashmiri joined the Progressive Writers' Association, edited the literary journal Sawera, and spent his career writing verse that treated poverty as a political fact rather than a poetic mood — and this song is where that conviction shows through the film's surface. The ghazal's traditional subject is the lover's helplessness; Kashmiri keeps the word bekas, helpless, but redirects it from the lover to the destitute, and then makes the second line of the same couplet an indictment of everyone still asleep. Film censorship in 1940s India was watchful about anything that sounded like agitation, and one common way past it was exactly this: a sentiment that reads as personal grief and argues as social complaint. The lyric is still in copyright and is described here, not quoted.

The song belongs to Pardesi Balam, made by Parkar Films of Lahore under M. A. Mirza's direction for the producer Dr. Anand Prakash Parkar, with Pran among the players. The Geet Kosh lists its ten songs but assigns the film no year, placing it in the undated 'Forties' section, and collector archives call it unreleased — which means this ghazal was probably heard, if at all, only as a gramophone record and never in a cinema hall.

Nothing in the reception history of this song survives, because the film that would have carried it seemingly never opened. What survives is the disc and, through it, an unexpectedly clear sample of what a progressive Urdu poet was putting into commercial film lyrics in Lahore two years before Partition. Zahir Kashmiri went on to write for Aaj Aur Kal (1947) with Khursheed Anwar and, after 1947, to a long career in Pakistani letters, columns and one film he directed himself; this obscure side is an early trace of the same voice.