ज़िंदगी फ़रेब है

'Zindagi Fareb Hai' is one of two solos taken by Noor Mohammed Charlie in Chand Tara (1945), sung in his own voice rather than by a playback singer. The title is a flat philosophical assertion — that life is a deception — and it sits oddly against Charlie's public identity as India's first star comedian, which is precisely what makes it interesting: the 1940s social film routinely handed its comic actor one reflective number in which the joking stopped. Gyan Dutt composed it and Swami Ramanand Saraswati wrote it, as with every song in the film. No print of Chand Tara circulates and the scene it belonged to is not recorded.

Charlie was hired by the Imperial Film Company in 1925 to sing, several years before he was known as an actor, and he remained a singing performer through the sound era at a time when most comic actors were being dubbed. A song of this kind in Gyan Dutt's hands would sit in the slow, harmonium-and-sarangi register the composer used for reflective numbers, with the tune subordinated to the words so that a non-classical voice could carry it intelligibly. That balance — melody kept simple so an actor's own voice can deliver the sense — is the practical reason so many 1940s 'philosophical' film songs sound plainer than the romantic ones beside them.

'Fareb' is an Urdu word with a sharper edge than the Hindi 'dhokha': it carries the sense of an elaborate, sustained illusion rather than a single lie, and it belongs to the vocabulary of the ghazal, where the world itself is routinely accused of it. To place it in the predicate of a bare declarative — life is a fareb — is to write in the aphoristic mode that Urdu poetry lends the Hindi film song, where a whole worldview is compressed into four or five words that an audience can repeat. The construction assumes a listener who already knows the ghazal's stance on the world and only needs it stated.

Noor Mohammed Charlie, born in 1911 near Porbandar, took his screen name from Charlie Chaplin after the success of The Indian Charlie (1933) and for a period commanded fees higher than many leading men. He is credited as the first comedian in Indian cinema to have songs picturised on him, and his Barrister's Wife (1935) carried what is described as the first filmi qawwali shot on screen. Chand Tara, in which he is billed third behind Swarnalata and Jagdish Sethi, comes near the end of that Bombay run; after Partition in 1947 he moved to Pakistan and worked in Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi cinema until his death in Karachi in 1983.

Nothing suggests the song had a life beyond the film. Its interest now is as evidence: it is a documented instance of a comic star being given a serious song in his own voice in 1945, at the exact point when Bombay was completing its shift to specialist playback singers who never appeared on camera. Within a few years that arrangement would be rare, and comedians of the next generation — Johnny Walker and Mehmood, both of whom film historians describe as influenced by Charlie's style — would be sung for by Mohammed Rafi and Manna Dey rather than singing themselves.