फ़स्ल-ए-गुल आई (भाग दो)

Issued as the second part of 'Fasl-e-Gul Aayi', this is not a reprise but a separate composition: Gyan Dutt gave Begum Akhtar — then Akhtari Faizabadi — a wholly different melody for words that differ only slightly from the Zohrabai Ambalewali version. Where that one takes the return of spring as pleasure, this one takes it as loss. It is the second of the two songs the composer recorded with her for this film, and the more characteristic of the two.

This is the version that plays to what Begum Akhtar was: a slow tempo, long unhurried phrases, and space at the ends of lines where a ghazal singer does her real work. Gyan Dutt keeps the setting close to the mehfil idiom rather than the film idiom, which is unusual for a 1945 studio recording and suggests he built the number around the singer rather than around the situation.

The conceit is the ghazal's oldest: spring arrives, everything flowers, and the flowering itself becomes the injury because it measures what is missing. Read at this tempo and in this voice, the poem stops being a seasonal observation and becomes a report on time passing — which is why the pairing works. The two recordings show, better than any argument could, that in this repertoire the tune and the singer decide the meaning at least as much as the words do.

Pannadai (1945) was produced by Kamalabai Mangalorekar for Pradeep Pictures, Bombay, and directed by Ram Daryani, with Durga Khote in the title role and Chandra Mohan, Meenakshi Shirodkar, Master Vithal, Mubarak, M. Ismail, Gope and Nana Saheb Phatak in support. The film retells the sixteenth-century Mewar episode in which Panna Dhai, nursemaid to the child heir Udai Singh II, put her own son Chandan in the prince's bed so the usurper Banbir would kill him instead, then carried the heir to safety at Kumbhalgarh. Gyan Dutt wrote ten songs for it, with lyrics split between D.N. Madhok and Dewan Sharar.

Along with 'Main Raja Ko Apne Rijha Ke Rahungi', this is one of the last film recordings Begum Akhtar made before her 1945 marriage to the Lucknow barrister Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi ended her studio work for roughly five years. Her return, when it came, was to the concert platform and to the ghazal, dadra and thumri repertoire that made her Mallika-e-Ghazal; the film songs of the early 1940s are a closed and small chapter.