होली का त्योहार मना लो

Every Hindi film with a village or a joint family in it wanted a Holi song, and Bisvi Sadi has one. The title is phrased as an urging rather than a description — mana lo, go on and celebrate it — which is the standard Holi-song posture: someone is holding back and the song exists to break the resistance. Catalogued with Pannalal Ghosh as composer and no singer or lyricist credit.

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.

The Holi song is one of the oldest fixed forms in Hindi film music and it does a job no other song can: it is the one occasion on which the ordinary rules of who may address whom, and how, are suspended for the length of a festival. That is why so much Hindi cinema puts its declarations, its unmaskings and its reconciliations inside a Holi number. The imperative in this title — mana lo — is the invitation that opens that space; whether Bisvi Sadi used it for celebration, for a confrontation or for the sharp irony of colour and laughter set against the film's harder social material is not documented, and the lyric has not survived to say.

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. The Holi number sits in the same half of the score as the wedding song and the two Yamuna-bank songs — the festival-and-village register that a film named after the twentieth century keeps deliberately in play.

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.