नहीं है कोई भी

'Nahi Hai Koi Bhi' stands first in the song list for Albeli (1945), composed like the rest of the score by G. A. Chishti. Beyond the title, almost nothing about it has come down: the Hindi Film Geet Kosh records no singer and no lyricist for any single Albeli song, no recording of this one has resurfaced, and no later researcher has attached a voice to it. The credit arrays on this page are therefore empty by decision rather than by omission. What remains is the title itself - there is no one at all - and its place at the head of a score whose surviving pieces are sung by Zeenat Begum.

Nothing can honestly be said about the arrangement of a recording that has not been recovered. What can be described is the musical environment it belonged to. Chishti was a Jalandhar-born composer who worked his whole life inside the Punjabi ang, and the Albeli songs that have been found show his consistent preferences: an unhurried melodic line pitched for a single voice, dholak and harmonium carrying the pulse, very little instrumental decoration between phrases, and refrains built to be repeated at the same pitch rather than developed. A slow lament in that idiom would have been carried almost entirely by the singer.

The title is a bare declarative sentence: there is no one at all. In the film-song Hindi of the mid-1940s that construction almost always opens a lament of abandonment rather than a philosophical statement - the speaker running through the people who might have stood by and arriving at none of them. Albeli's plot, built on a street girl with no family behind her, gives the phrase an obvious dramatic home, though which character sang it is not recorded anywhere. The only lyricist documented for the film anywhere is Shanti Swarup 'Kaif', and no source attaches him to this title, so no attribution is made here.

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.

Albeli's songs never entered the 1940s canon and this one has left less trace than most: it exists in the catalogues and nowhere else. Its interest is documentary. It is one of the twelve titles that fix the size and shape of G. A. Chishti's last Indian score for R. C. Talwar, four years before the composer left for Lahore and built a second, far larger career there - and it is a reminder of how much of the pre-Partition industry's output survives only as a line in a list.