This article is written by Sadanand Kamath, a fellow enthusiast of Hindi movie music and a regular contributor to this blog. This article is meant to be posted in atulsongaday.me. If this article appears in sites like lyricstrans.com and ibollywoodsongs.com etc then it is piracy of the copyright content of atulsongaday.me and is a punishable offence under the existing laws.
It is now more than one year since I began scouting for rare songs – especially songs from films released during the 1940s (1941-1950). My definition of rare songs is limited to those songs which have not been uploaded on video websites like YT. Among such songs, I make a further selection in that I generally prefer to write articles with those songs which sound melodious to my ears and have good lyrics.
When I started the ‘project rare songs’ in early October 2015, I had assumed that I might be able to lay my hands on not more than 50 rare songs. Sudhir ji had suggested that I should consider naming the series of such songs to be posted on the Blog. He even suggested the name of the series as ‘Forgotten Gems of 1940s’. I readily agreed with the name and for the series. But after reaching the figure of 50, I stopped naming the series for such rare songs as by that time I had realised that the series can go on for a long time. There seems to be a vast treasure of rare songs in the 1940s which are yet to be covered in the Blog.
So far, I have in my collections mp3 clips of many rare songs, mostly from Dr. Surjit Singh’s Website and a few songs which I have ripped off from Radio Ceylon’s programme ‘Puraane Filmon Ka Sangeet – Kam Sune Khabhi Na Sune Gaane’. As on date, I have already converted many of them into video clips and have uploaded nearly 150 videos on YT during the last one year. There are some more in the pipeline.
The project has been a learning curve for me. I came to know about some films that I was not aware of. Also, there were lesser known singers, whose names I had heard but not their songs. It was interesting to note that many of the rare songs which I came across were of lesser known playback singers like Dilshad Begum, Ram Pyari, Ram Dulari, Brijmala, Razia Begum, Munawwar Sultana, Sitara Kanpuri, Nalini Mulgaonkar, Saroj Wellingkar, Seeta Kalyanpur, Kantilal, B S Nanji, Yeshwant Bhatt, A R Oza etc. There were playback singers among lesser known music directors like Madhusudan Acharya, Ramchandra Pal, B N Bali, Gulshan Sufi, Qadir Fareedi etc.
It did not come as a surprise to me when I found it difficult to get rare filmy songs of popular singers like Mukesh, Mohammed Rafi, Talat Mehmooda, Suraiya, Lata Mangeshkar, Geeta Dutt etc. With the exception of Mukesh and Suraiya, all these ingers had started their careers during the second half of 1940s. I found that die-hard fans of these playback singers had already done the work of finding almost all the songs of their idols for which records were issued, and had uploaded the same on YT. I believe that there are still some songs of these playback singers which are not available even in mp3 format on websites but are available with record collectors. Some of such rarest of the rare songs, especially of Mukesh were uploaded by Sudhir ji when he wrote articles for the Blog under the series ‘The Voice of Mukesh’.
Another surprise was that I could get many rare songs of popular playback singers of the late 30s and 40s like Rajkumari, Ameerbai Karnataki, Zohrabai Ambalewaali, Shamshad Begum, G M Durrani, Khan Mastana etc. Probably these singers did not have hardcore fans who would scout for their available songs and upload the same on YT .
During the course of my project, I found some songs from unreleased films of 1940s. So far, I have identified about 20 unreleased films of the 1940s with their songs many of which are not available on YT. My hunch is that most of the unreleased films may pertain to the year around 1947 when in the aftermath of the partition, films under productions at the studios of Lahore and Bombay (Mumbai) remained uncompleted because of two-way migrations.
The most difficult and time-consuming part of the project was to identify the rare songs. As I said earlier, Dr Surjit Singh’s Website was the main source of the rare songs. My wild guess is that there are mp3 clips of more than 10000 songs which have been uploaded on the website by the die-hard lovers of old Hindi film songs. It is a continuous process.
Unfortunately, most of them are not listed in terms of categories – film-wise, singer-wise, music director-wise etc. However, a few uploaders have tried to list the songs year-wise, and some in alphabetical order based on the refrains of the songs. In a good number of mp3 clips, details such as names of singers, lyricists and music directors are not mentioned. In a few cases, the labelling of the songs is incorrect. And if the song happens to be a rare one, it is very difficult to get the correct information. I will give one isolated instance of mislabelling just to get an idea as to how difficult it is to notice the mistake in labelling:
‘O pardesia bhool na jaana’- Dhanwan (1946)-unknown female voice – Roopbani- Shanti Kumar.
The song was very melodious. I checked on the website and found that the female singer listed was Paro Devi with other parameters like refrain of the song, Roopbani as lyricist and Shanti Kumar as the music director remaining the same. However, to me the voice in the song did not match with that of Paro Devi. I thought that there might have been mistake in identifying the singer in the websites like http://www.myswar.com. After some days, I came across the mp3 clip of the song with the same refrain, sung by Paro Devi with different lyrics. Other parameters of the song remained the same. Now it became clear that the song in question was mislabelled. A google search revealed that the song was sung by Munawwar Sultana on the words of Tufail Hoshiyarpuri and composed by Ghulam Haider for the Pakistani film ‘Beqaraar’ (1950).
I was entangled in my search with no credible clue how to get to the rare songs. But after struggling hard, I really got a feeling of ‘eureka’ when I located rare songs. After few days, I felt that if Dr Surjit Singh had provided search for the songs easy in his website, I would have lost the thrill of locating the rare songs. In this context, I recall a she’r by Allama Iqbal:
ulajh kar suljhaane mein lazzat isse
tadapne phadakne mein raahat isse
I regard Dr Surjit Singh’s Website a treasure of old Hindi film songs – more like a library of mp3 clips of Hindi film songs. I must record here my appreciation of the enormous efforts made by Dr Surjit Singh to maintain the Website and also of other contributors to the Website.
I am presenting one of the rare songs which I came to know about only a couple of days back. As I mentioned earlier, this rare song is also sung by a lesser known singer, Moti. The song is ‘likhi naseeb mein hai thokaren zamaane ki’ from the film DIL (1946). There were three lyricists – Shams Lucknowi, Raziuddin and Arsh Haidari. It is not known as to whom among them had penned this song which was set to music by Zafar Khursheed.
I am surprised how this lovely gem remained in the background and over a period of time it was forgotten. The film had 10 songs of which as many as 6 songs were sung by Noor Jahan, either solo or duet. All these 6 songs have been represented in the Blog. Obviously, with six songs of Noor Jahan, the song under discussion may not have attracted as much attention as it deserved. It was also not available on YT until I uploaded it yesterday.
The song is credited to Moti. He has also sung two other songs in the film with Noor Jahan. Who is Moti? Is he Moti BA or Moti Nath or T A Moti? It is one more instance of ‘same name confusion’. Incidentally, all the three ‘Motis’ were associated with the film industry in 1946 when ‘Dil’ (1946) was released. Moti BA was mainly a lyricist while Moti Nath was singer-music director. I am aware of T A Moti only as a singer from the south who had also sang songs in Hindi version films made from the south.
I request the knowledgeable readers of the Blog to identify which of the three ‘Motis’ had rendered the song under discussion.
Song-Likhi naseeb mein hai thokaren zamaane ki (Dil)(1946) Singer-Moti, MD-Zafar Khursheed
Lyrics
likhi naseeb mein hai
thokaren zamaane ki
likhi naseeb mein hai
thokaren zamaane ki
bahaaren hi mein jali
shaakh aashiyaane ki
likhi naseeb mein hai
hansi ke saath hi aankhon se gir pade aansoo
hansi ke saath hi aankhon se gir pade aansoo
khushi wo ranj hai jo
karwaten zamaane ki
likhi naseeb mein hai
jigar mein dard
khalish dil mein
aankh mein aansoo
jigar mein dard
khalish dil mein
aankh mein aansoo
saza ye khoob mili hai
nazar milaane ki
likhi naseeb mein hai
thokaren zamaane ki
likhi naseeb mein hai
