होली का त्योहार

A Holi song is close to obligatory in a 1940s Hindi social, and this is Hamara Sansar's. It is also the score's only multi-voice women's number: HindiGeetMala and MySwar both credit it to Zohrabai Ambalewali, Naseem Akhtar and Shamshad Begum together, which makes it the one place in the film where the two competing female styles of the period — Shamshad's bright, forward, cutting tone and Zohrabai's fuller, classically schooled one — are set side by side rather than in separate solos. Saregama's own listing for the surviving album files the track slightly differently, as 'Chorus, Naseem Akhtar', which suggests the three named voices sit above a group of unnamed chorus singers.

Nothing about the arrangement is documented, and the recording is not one of the Hamara Sansar sides that vintage-music archivists have circulated, so what follows describes the position the song occupies rather than the sound of it. Gobind Ram's reputation in the vintage-music literature rests specifically on rhythm and orchestration — he is described there as a composer of beat rather than of melodic ornament — and a festival number written for three lead voices over a chorus is the kind of writing that reputation was built on. The pairing of a group of unnamed chorus singers with named soloists above them was the standard Bombay method for staging a crowd on a three-minute 78-rpm side, where there was no room to develop anything and the whole effect had to be established in the first few bars.

The documented title says only that this is about the festival of Holi, and no lyric text for it has been published — HindiGeetMala's own page for the song states that its lyrics are not available. What can be said is what the occasion carries. Holi in the Hindi film song of this period is rarely just a spring festival: it is the one licensed occasion on which the ordinary rules of a household are suspended, when colour lets people say to each other what they cannot say on any other day of the year, and when a joint family briefly becomes a crowd. In a film called 'our world' — a title pointing squarely at the household — a Holi number is structurally the moment the walls of that world come down for an afternoon.

Hamara Sansar was a Prakash Pictures social directed by Shanti Kumar, made in the stretch when the studio was deliberately moving away from the mythologicals that had made its name. The film failed commercially and no print is known to circulate, so nothing is recorded about which character sings this number or where it falls in the story. The soundtrack is unusually tidy for 1945: eight documented titles, one composer, one lyricist, and four singers between them.

The track is one of the six Hamara Sansar numbers that Saregama still carries on the surviving commercial album, so it has outlived the film that contained it. Beyond that it has left almost no trace: HindiGeetMala records that no authorised video of it is available and that its lyrics have never been submitted to the site, and it does not appear among the Hamara Sansar sides that 78-rpm collectors have transferred and reposted. It survives, in other words, as a catalogue entry and a set of credits rather than as a song anyone still listens to — which is the ordinary fate of the festival numbers of lost 1940s socials, and the reason a metadata record of it is worth keeping at all.