काहे पाप करे पापी

The fourth of the ten sides the Geet Kosh indexes for Pardesi Balam, and the only one of them for which the Kosh records no picturisation note at all — every other song carries a bracketed 'Female', 'Male', 'Female Dancer' or 'Female-Others', but this one is left blank, so who sang it on screen is simply not known. What the first line establishes is the register: a direct moral address to a wrongdoer, asking why he sins and warning him to tread carefully. Zahir Kashmiri wrote it and Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi set it, as with every song in this film. myswar lists the same song as 'Paapi Kaahe Paap Kare' and gives it no singer either.

Nothing of this recording is known to circulate, so its music can only be placed by category rather than described. The admonition or upadesh number was a fixture of 1940s Hindi film scores — a slow-to-medium cycle, a sententious returning line, and antaras that argue rather than decorate — and it was normally scored plainly, since the words are the point. Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi left no other documented film score, so there is no body of work against which to read what he did here.

Zahir Kashmiri was an Amritsar-born Urdu poet associated with the Progressive Writers' Association, and the interesting thing about his work on this film is how far he moves away from Urdu when the situation asks for it. Here he writes in a plain Hindi devotional-didactic idiom — the vocabulary of paap, of the careful step, of the warning delivered to a man rather than to a beloved — which is a different instrument altogether from the Urdu ghazals he supplies elsewhere in the same score. One lyricist writing all ten songs of a film was unusual in the mid-1940s, when Bombay and Lahore alike split a soundtrack between three or four poets; it let him vary the register deliberately, song by song.

Pardesi Balam was a Parkar Films production of Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza for the producer Dr Anand Prakash Parkar, with the young Pran among a cast the Geet Kosh could only list because a collector in Karachi supplied the names decades later. All ten of its songs were written by Zahir Kashmiri and composed by Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi. No print, poster or synopsis survives, and myswar records the picture as unreleased, so the Geet Kosh's song index — first lines and a bracketed note on who sang each number on screen — is very nearly the whole of what is known about the film.

This is one of the five Pardesi Balam sides that has left no trace beyond its Geet Kosh entry: no known surviving disc, no digitisation, no singer. It exists as a first line and a pair of credits. That is worth recording rather than passing over, because it is the normal condition of the Lahore output of these years — the films that were never reviewed, the records that were pressed in small numbers, and an industry that Partition dispersed two years later.