हम अपने लिये

'Hum Apne Liye' is listed among the twelve Albeli songs by its opening words alone, which is how many songs of the 1940s enter the catalogues - the record label carried a fragment of the mukhda and the fragment became the title. The remainder of the line has not been recovered, so the song's actual subject cannot be stated. G. A. Chishti composed it; no singer and no lyricist is recorded, here or anywhere. This page keeps the entry because the twelve titles together are the only reliable measure of what the film's score contained.

There is no recording to describe. The most that can be said with any honesty concerns the score around it: Chishti wrote Albeli in a plain, Punjabi-inflected idiom with dholak and harmonium at the centre and very little orchestral padding, and he built his melodies around refrains that repeat rather than develop. Whatever this song was, it will have been made the same way, because a composer working on a modest 1945 production had one small ensemble and one recording session per number.

The fragment that survives - hum apne liye, 'we, for ourselves' - is grammatically incomplete and its sense depends entirely on the verb that followed. In the film-song Hindi of the period the phrase most often opens a sentence about not living for oneself, the standard rhetorical move of the sacrifice song, but that is a probability and not a reading, and no line of the text has been recovered to test it against. What the fragment does establish is the register: a first-person plural, reflective rather than romantic, which is unusual in a score otherwise made of duets, laments and street cries.

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.

This entry is a good illustration of what the archival record for a minor 1945 film actually looks like. There is no print of Albeli in general circulation, no published song booklet has surfaced, and the twelve titles come from catalogues assembled decades later out of record labels and trade listings. A song can therefore be certain to have existed and still be unreadable. Keeping the incomplete entry, clearly marked as incomplete, is more useful than filling it in.