जाग रहे या सोये हो

The one number in Gobind Ram's Chalis Karod score given to Naseem Akhtar, and the only song from the film whose Devanagari title the Hindi Geet Mala record preserves. Some catalogues list it under a longer opening line that names its addressee outright — 'Jaag Rahe Ya Sote Ho Bhagwan Kahaane Wale', roughly 'are you awake or asleep, you who are called God' — which would make it a complaint pitched at heaven rather than at a person. Naseem Akhtar was then at the busiest point of her Bombay career, a Lahore-radio-trained voice recording some seventy songs across around forty films between 1942 and 1949; this is one of the many that never came back into circulation.

No recording is in circulation, so nothing can be claimed about how this particular number was set. What is documented is Gobind Ram's manner in these years: light melodic writing with a ghazal and thumri inflection rather than a distinctly Punjabi folk one, a small orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi and tabla, and tunes pitched to sit comfortably in the middle of a classically trained voice instead of stretching it. Naseem Akhtar's instrument suited that approach: schooled on Lahore Radio before Pandit Amarnath gave her a film break in Nishani (1942), it was clear, unforced and better at plain statement than at display.

Pandit Indra's title asks rather than declares, and the choice carries the whole song. 'Are you awake or asleep' is the opening of an address, not of a lament: it presumes a listener who could answer if he chose to, and it makes the silence that follows the real subject. In the longer form some catalogues record, the addressee is named as the one who is called God — which turns the line into the oldest reproach in devotional poetry, that the deity is present in name and absent in practice, and puts the song in the same family as the sant-tradition complaint rather than the film bhajan of praise. Indra, who wrote more than 875 songs across roughly 130 films and moved easily between devotional and social registers, worked this seam often. Beyond the title nothing further can responsibly be said: the text is not reproduced here and no recording was available to study.

Chalis Karod — 'Forty Crores', the number that stood through the 1940s for the population of undivided India — was directed by Nanabhai Bhatt for Chandra Art Productions of Bombay, a year before Bhatt set up his own Deepak Pictures. Gobind Ram composed, Pandit Indra and I. C. Kapoor were credited with the songs, and the cast paired Nirmala Devi with her husband Arun Kumar Ahuja alongside Yakub, Agha and Gope. No plot summary of the film survives in any source consulted for this entry, so the nine song titles are effectively all that remains of what the picture was about. Naseem Akhtar sang for a great many composers in these years — Naushad, Khemchand Prakash, Anil Biswas, Ghulam Mohammed, C. Ramchandra — and Gobind Ram's single assignment to her here is typical of how a 1940s female playback voice was distributed across a season's films.

The song's afterlife belongs to Naseem Akhtar's rather than to the film's. She is remembered now for 'Aag Lagi Dil Mein' from Shahjehan (1946) and for the Sindoor (1947) duet 'Kisi Ke Madhur Pyar Mein'; after Partition she moved to Pakistan, where her career never regained its Bombay momentum, and she died in Lahore in 2007. Nothing of the recording is in general circulation today: there is no known commercial reissue and no print of the film in public availability. Its survival is documentary — a line in the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue and the Cinemaazi credit sheet — which is the ordinary fate of most of the roughly two hundred Hindi films released each year in the mid-1940s.