भुलाने वाले हमें भी

Documented in fuller form as 'Bhulaane Waale Hamen Bhi Na Yaad Aaya Karo', this is the only number in Ghazal (1945) known to have been sung by Zahoor Raja himself — the film's producer, director and male lead — in duet with Naseem Akhtar. The address 'bhulane wale', one who forgets, is aimed at someone who has already done the forgetting, and the request that follows is not to be remembered but to be spared a particular kind of remembering.

A duet built on the ghazal's turn-taking logic rather than on the interlocking harmony a later composer would have written: two voices in sequence, each completing a couplet, which is how the form argues with itself. Zahoor Raja was an actor who sang rather than a trained singer — he had made his singing debut in Pooja (1940) — so Gyan Dutt keeps the melodic demands modest and lets Naseem Akhtar's schooled voice carry the ornament. Gyan Dutt had been Ranjit Movietone's house composer, the man behind Sant Tulsidas (1939) and the fifteen-song Bhakt Surdas (1942) with K. L. Saigal, and across 1937-1965 he wrote some 600 songs for around 58 films. By 1945 he was working freelance for small independents like Raja Movietone, and within a few years the arrival of Naushad, C. Ramchandra and S. D. Burman had pushed him to the margins of an industry he had helped build.

The Urdu here is doing something sharper than it first appears. To call someone 'bhulane wale' is already an accusation dressed as a name: the beloved is identified by the act of forgetting, as though it were their profession. The fuller line then asks them not to remember — 'yoon na yaad aaya karo', do not come to mind like this — which inverts the entire convention. The standard ghazal complaint is that the beloved has forgotten; this one complains that the beloved keeps surfacing in memory in a way that reopens the wound. The speaker is asking to be left alone by a ghost, not by a person, and that is a far more modern and far more uncomfortable request.

Ghazal was produced and directed by Zahoor Raja for Raja Movietone, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after learning the craft as an editor and assistant at Eastern Pictures. Contemporary accounts describe the picture as a Muslim social with a light comedy touch: Noor Mohammad Charlie — the reigning screen comedian of 1945 — played hero opposite Leela Chitnis, while Raja himself was paired with Radharani. Gyan Dutt composed all eight songs, and the four lyricists are credited collectively, with no catalogue splitting the titles between them. That Raja sang this particular number himself is the most interesting production fact recoverable about the film. He was, by the account of the Pakistani film press, one of the last genuinely multi-skilled men in the industry — actor, producer, director, editor, writer, singer, lyricist and composer by turns — and on Ghazal he was exercising four of those functions at once. He had come to Bombay from Government Gordon College in Rawalpindi on the strength of a letter to A. R. Kardar, broken through in Mirza Sahiban (1939) and had his largest success in Sohrab Modi's Sikandar (1941).

The song is the only surviving audible trace of Zahoor Raja as a singer in his own production, and it therefore carries more documentary weight than musical fame: Raja is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as Sikandar's supporting player and as the man who went to Lahore. He left Bombay around 1950 as the climate for Muslim film-makers deteriorated, made Jihad there, withdrew into business, returned with Ghazi Bin Abbas and Gulfarosh (both 1961) and Baghi Sardar (1966), then moved to England and left films altogether. He died in Lahore in August 1993. The collector who posted this song noted he could not be certain of the singer identifications and asked readers to confirm them, so even this attribution is offered provisionally.