चमन के अंगूर

'Chaman Ke Angoor' appears in the standard song list for Albeli (1945) as one of G. A. Chishti's twelve compositions for the film, with no singer and no lyricist attached. It presents a specific bibliographic problem: the pre-Partition database pakmag.net quotes an Albeli mukhda that runs from a call to buy, through the word saiyan, and on to sweet grapes of the garden - which means this title may be nothing more than the tail of the line catalogued elsewhere as 'Koi Le Lo Saiyan'. Both entries are preserved here as separate records because the primary song catalogues list them separately, but the doubt is recorded rather than resolved by guesswork.

No recording under this title has been located and nothing about its arrangement can honestly be described. If the identification with the film's grape-seller cry holds, it belongs to the same family as Albeli's tooth-powder song: a walking pulse, a melodic line shaped like a street call, and the plain harmonium-and-dholak accompaniment that Chishti used for everything in this score that was not a love duet.

A chaman is a garden in the ornamental Urdu register, and grapes from it are, in the poetry of the period, a stock image of sweetness that has been cultivated rather than found. Placed in a vendor's mouth the phrase does double duty: it advertises the fruit and it borrows the language of the ghazal to do so, which is exactly the small comic effect the hawker song trades on. Beyond the title phrase nothing of the text has been recovered, and the Geet Kosh does not say who wrote it.

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.

The entry's value now is as a caution. Song lists for films of this period are reconstructions, built from 78-rpm labels, censor registers and studio publicity rather than from a surviving master list, and the same recording can enter two catalogues under two different opening phrases. 'Chaman Ke Angoor' is a clean example of the problem, and it is kept here as a record of what the catalogues say rather than as a claim about what was recorded.