दिखा तो प्यारी

'Dikha To Pyari' is the thinnest entry in the Bisvi Sadi catalogue: a title, a composer, and nothing else. The words read as a coaxing imperative addressed to a woman — dikha, show; to, then; pyari, dear one — the register of banter rather than of longing, which in a film carrying Gope, the leading comedian of the period, would not be surprising. That is an inference from the words alone. No singer, no lyricist, no lyric text and no recording are known.

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.

There is not enough here to write about the poetry honestly. The imperative form dikha and the vocative pyari place the song in the light, conversational half of the 1940s film repertoire — the register used for flirtation, for comic byplay and for the songs that keep a plot moving between its serious numbers — but the object of the imperative, and therefore the joke or the tenderness that the song turned on, is simply not recoverable. Filling that gap with invented imagery would misrepresent a song nobody today has heard.

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. Gope, in the cast, had by 1945 become the most popular comedian in Hindi cinema; he would go on to make his name nationally lip-syncing 'Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon' in Patanga (1949) and to form a Laurel-and-Hardy pairing with Yakub that producers used through the late forties.

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.