बेकसों की बेकसी को देखता कोई नहीं

This is the socially pointed number in G. A. Chishti's score for Albeli (1945): a lament that nobody looks at the helplessness of the helpless, and that in this world nobody asks after the poor. The recording that survives opens with a short preamble on a different image altogether - a stringed instrument whose strings have all snapped, so that the player has nothing left to play on - before the refrain arrives. As with the whole of Albeli, the Geet Kosh names neither singer nor lyricist, and no later source has identified the voice, so both credit lines are left empty here.

The record begins out of tempo. The opening lines about the broken instrument are delivered almost as recitative, with the accompaniment holding rather than driving, and only when the refrain arrives does the metre settle and the percussion enter. This was the standard shape for the complaint song of the period - grievance stated free, then set to rhythm - and it works because the listener has already accepted the argument before the tune becomes catchy. Chishti keeps the melodic compass deliberately narrow and repeats the refrain line at the same pitch each time, which is how a message song was made to stick from a single hearing in a cinema hall.

The construction is the ordinary two-step of the Urdu-Hindi complaint song: a general proposition - that the destitute go unseen - followed immediately by its particular restatement, that nobody in this world asks after the poor. What raises it above the formula is the frame the song opens with. Before the grievance is stated at all, the lyric puts up the picture of an instrument that can no longer sound because its strings are gone; the singer's own voicelessness is made physical first, and only then does the complaint about being unseen follow. In a film whose protagonists are a street girl and a gypsy boy, the sentiment is placed in exactly the mouths it describes.

It was the earliest of Albeli's songs to be posted with a transcription on Atul's Song A Day, in December 2016 - for a film this obscure, that posting amounts to its re-entry into circulation. Albeli (1945) was made by Talwar Productions of Calcutta and directed by the company's proprietor R. C. Talwar, who also wrote the story; J. S. Casshyap supplied the screenplay and dialogue. Shooting began in Lahore and was completed in Calcutta, and the picture opened at the Central Cinema in Bombay on 22 December 1945. The plot follows a street girl in love with a gypsy boy who is wanted by two other young women as well; Ramola headed a cast that included the actor-singer Satish, Rooplekha, Manorama, Usha, Sunder and Hiralal. G. A. Chishti composed all twelve songs, and Baburao Patel's filmindia gave the film a hostile notice in its March 1946 issue.

Songs of social grievance were a recognisable strand in mid-1940s Hindi cinema, running alongside the romantic mainstream, and Punjabi-trained composers such as Chishti and Ghulam Haider wrote a good number of them. That strand fed directly into the socially conscious cinema of both India and Pakistan after 1947. This example matters less for its own reception - Albeli was dismissed on release - than as evidence that the form was already fully worked out two years before Partition, in a modest Calcutta production nobody was watching.