This article is written jointly by Atul and Sudhir. 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.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Atul Song-A-Day 10K Song Milestone Celebrations –46 (Song number 10000)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Writeup by Atul
————————–
So the eagerly awaited moment is here. It was planned to happen on 19 july 2014, on the sixth anniversary of the blog, but that was not to be and it has finally happened one day later. Paucity of time necessitated by urgent personal and even official engagements/ matters were the cause for this delay by one day. I also had to reluctantly defer three eagerly awaited writeups, viz introductory posts on M/s Arunkumar Deshmukh, Raja and Sudhir ji. They very graciously agreed to have their introductions deferred in view of the circumstances. I am very thankful for their understanding.

If one notices, the lion’s share of the writeups for the last few days have been done by Sudhir ji. He has been spending unimaginable hours on the blog for the last few days despite being tied up in his own personal and professional engagements. And this 10000th post is very much a result of his own initiative, meticulous research and hard work. My heartfelt thanks goes to Sudhir ji without whom this blog would not be what it is today.

Coming to the occasion, It is like the occasion of an Indian wedding (ladke ki shaadi or more like ladki ki shaadi), where you have to invite all near and dear ones, and sometimes you have to cajole people to come and attend. You also have to deal with different service providers-catering, florists, transportation etc and you are often on tenterhooks when some of the service providers do not turn up at the appointed time and place. And obstacles, staunch adherents of Murphy’s law that they are , arrive like uninvited guests. The obstacles that I was up against for the last few days were such that it was becoming difficult to follow the schedule that was already decided upon.

The schedule had to be deferred by one day. There were no options because otherwise the 10k moment could have got delayed even further. Quite fortuitously the next day happened to be a sunday so we all had a full day of holiday in which to await the moment without any other engagements.

This journey has been an amazing one. A one man show kept getting members and a few of them kept getting metamorphosed into commentors, lyrics contributors, articles contributors etc. The idea of introducing all the regular contributors to the blog in a series of articles leading upto the big moment has turned out to be an extremely popular decision. Not just the readers, even the contributors writing these introduction articles have enjoyed themselves. As many as five contributors have written introductory articles for others, which shows that many of the regulars have become acquainted with each other as a result of their online interactions. Indeed there are several regulars who have either met other regulars or they have had contacts either telephonically or through e mails. What is more, regulars from this blog have made friends with members of other HFM sites as well.

What had started with the aim of being just another blog has become one of the shining examples of the power of online collaborations which had led to the creation of an amazing collection of authentic information on the topic of HFM. Unlike most other online sources, this blog takes pains to cross check and verify information that most other sites blindly copy without verification.

The blog has progressed in several areas and it has become a complex site to maintain unlike in the past. There is so much data in the blog that some of the pages take considerable time to open. These are matters that will need to be addressed in future.

Not that we have progressed in all areas. I find that the average number of daily visitors (3000 plus these days)had reduced drastically compared to the figures of the past (figure of 4700 plus in 2011), but the important thing is that the blog has continued to attract the attention of people who matter, viz quality readers and music lovers and also celebrities and their relatives.

The mark of 10,000 posts is a landmark that takes us to the five figure mark. This figure is a mindboggling figure. I recall that Raja had came to meet me in 2010. The blog then had 4000 songs in it and I has told Raja that I had about 6000 songs with me in all. Both of us had considered that figure to be an enormous figure. And now we are talking of 10,000th post. 🙂 And now we find that we still have lots of songs that have not yet been covered in the blog !

This blog is a labour of love as has been stressed many a times. And the fact that this blog has continued on and on for six years shows what love and passion for a cause combined with the ability to harness the capabilities of likeminded contributors can achieve.

I have likened the blog to quite a few things in the past. Today I feel like likening it to the coach of an Indian Railway train. No, not the general compartment, but AC sleeper, where the co travellers are of good upbringing and calibre and blessed with qualities of sharing, caring, respectfulness, generosity and tolerance towards others.

I am fond of saying that the most universal currency in the world is the currency of love and respect and this currency is accepted everywhere, including in the animal world. If one thinks about it, the high quality individuals are contributing their mite in the blog because they feel loved and respected in this blog that makes them go the extra mile in their contributions and involvement in the blog. My abovementioned theory has applications in the field of human resource management, I feel. 🙂

Coming to the ten thousandth song, it is the rarest of rarest of rarest HFM song and it will redefine the generally accepted view about the oldest Hindi movie records. It is popularly believed that the oldest Hindi film record was issued in 1932. The song under discussion is a Hindi film record of 1931 ! So, the bar gets raised to the uppermost possible level !

Personally I have little information about this song as all the research and digging up in this case has been done by Sudhir Ji. So the readers will get to learn about this song from his writeup which follows next.

I take this opportunity to thank one and all whose love and support (in the form of the most widely accepted currency, remember) makes all of us feel extremely enriched and fulfilled and that in turn keeps us motivated to go on and on.

10k is a great milestone, but one can be sure that we will not rest on our laurels but will move on and on in this musical journey. I thank one and all. Let us move on to the next milestones. In the meanwhile let us savour this song which will be heard by the vast majority of music lovers for the first time ever.

Writeup by Sudhir
————————-

After all the days of preparation, communication and waiting, celebrations are very much in order. As I try to search for ideas and sentences, for a moment I find myself thoughtless, and numb. For the past so many weeks, the drive and the actions have all been geared towards reaching this milestone. Now that we are here, the mind calls for a quiet moment, just to allow the message to sink in.

The past two weeks have been such a whiz. At times they seemed to be still and unmoving, and at other times, it seemed that the pace could not be hastened any more. The wonderful spectacle of the past two weeks has been the unveiling of messages and articles, one by one, from practically all members of the team, and more importantly, about each one of the members of this team. Uncertain and unfamiliar as to how this idea of introductions would work, we simply went ahead with a schedule, arranging it such that every member of the team would be actively participating and contributing. Looking back on the storm of activity over the past two weeks, this experimentation has succeeded well beyond imaginations. The degree of participation, at the apparent level, has been immense, as folks have spent virtual time with each other, knowing more about one another, and even sharing more in comments.

At the subliminal level, once again there has been a spurt in activity as amount of emails exchanged directly between members of the group went up significantly, as there continued to be eager and anticipatory queries about the progress and keeping track of the numbers still to be logged. The purpose of enhancing familiarity and increasing exchange between the group members, I daresay has been magnificently achieved.

And the fun, of reaching this grand milestone, has been enhanced many times over. Instead of one, two or a handful, this time we have been regaled with a plethora of perspectives on what the achievement of this milestone means to each one of us, and the special flavors and sentiments that are shared through special selections – gosh it has been a kaleidoscope moving at a very rapid pace.

The numbers, they speak for themselves. A lot has been presented, and from various perspectives – number of visitors, the distribution of contributions, the time spent and the pace at which the progress has been made over months and years – there is a huge variety of methods by which this repository can be analyzed. It the sheer volume of data that is being assigned to each post and its content, that makes this blog so heavenly rich in substance and in its subject matters. Let me add a couple of perspectives here.

For each post, there are almost five dozen different items of information that become available, just by the manner in which the various parts of the post and the blog are structured. That is such an enormous amount of data that it now need more detailed methods for it to be arranged and managed properly. We are now graduating from manually maintained tables on the blog, to some sophisticated excel file structures, and now on to a formal data base.

Another aspect to view is how we are handling multi part and multi version songs, as also songs that are apparently duplicated across films and between film and non-film categories. And so, although we have reached the magic number of Ten Thousand in terms of posts on the blog, the actual number of songs that are accommodated within these posts is much more. Actually a few hundreds more. And by the way, just loved how Raja ji presented the many different ways we now have to come to terms with a five digit number. Ah yes, the “Ten times Ten times Ten times Ten” algorithm will boggle even the most astute mathematical minds. As I was reading that analysis by him, my mind went back about 2 decades, when the Y2K problem hit the entire world. As the turn of century was approaching, the profound realization set in that once we hit the year 2000, there will be a very specific and definite need to write the year as a four digit number, instead of a two digit number. A change as minute as it apparently was, turned out to be a near disaster for the computerized systems, and huge fortunes had to be applied just to make this minute change in the systems worldwide. So much for our presumed expectations of how some seemingly very insignificant attributes have such a huge impact on how we operate.

But I digress. Y2K is behind us over almost a decade and half, and today we are gathered around (our individual computers 🙂 ) waiting for the ticker to change from 9999 to 10000, and signal a complete change in the level that this blog is all about. Seriously, there has been an eager flurry of emails as the participants have probably been wondering at the pace at which the day’s progress is being made. As I sit at my keyboard, aligning the words in this write up to the reality that we are late by a few hours, yet once again the realization surfaces – the amount of effort and dedication required to maintain this blog is so enormous and yes, also demanding.

Atul ji has been having some very busy schedule on his work front, included a four point travel part of last week and earlier this week. And then again today, he has had to make a round trip to Nagpur. In a normal life, all these can be handled and planned for. With a blog such as this to take care and manage, the difficulties are multiplied many times over. I can only marvel at the tenacity and the relentlessness of this gentleman, to carry forward this indomitable endeavor.

Let me rein in back the impetuous and raring horses of my mind, and let us talk music. The focus being the Hindi film song, the scope and the volume of this field is immensely vast. Granted that we are a professed blog that “discusses Bollywood songs of yesteryears”, but let us not forget that every year, we are adding one more ‘yesteryear’ to the scope of our space. Further granted that our pace of covering the number of songs in a year is faster than the number of new songs being created and added to the mix, we should also remember that we are working with a huge backlog. Just the first five decades, the Geet Kosh tells us, is worth a shade less than 44,000 (or as Raja ji would put it, FORTY FOUR THOUSAND) songs. Add to it the next three and a half decades, and we are talking no less than approximately SEVENTY FIVE THOUSAND songs to be dealt with.

So that is another fresh perspective all in itself. The journey only gets more interesting as we pause for a brief party today (ah yes, Atul ji, when and where is the celebration party?? 🙂 🙂 ). For tomorrow we simply just put down our heads and continue the onwards march, one more song at a time, and one more century milestone at a time. Actually that brings another thought – this significance of this milestone and its celebration – well it is not going to be matched for quite some time now. And when I say quite some time, I do mean quaaaaaaaaite some time. For having cracked the 10K target, then the 15K and 20K are going to be relatively minor in comparison, and the next BIG ONE (as they say in surfing) is now going to 25K. Ah well, we are all going to be gainfully occupied for many many years to come. Now that is a BIG thought. 🙂

And let me add another twist to it. The mysteries and the information related uncertainties from the earlier decades are far from being resolved, if ever. As we expand the scope and add more decades to focus on, so will be multiplied the mysteries of unlisted songs and unreleased films. Well on thing is sure; the fun in this field in never going to end. And Peevesie, we are going to need a lot of help from you.

Time to catch some breath. And time to pass around the congratulations to all members of the bandwagon. We knew it could be done, it had to be done. And we have done it.

For this special occasion, I have dug out a very special item. It is the rarest of the rarest of rare breed of discoveries, very much in line with our “Ten times Ten times Ten times Ten” accomplishment. There have been references to this in research papers, and allusions to it in discussion forums and articles. The records of the record company (HMV) have been available all along, but the discovery of the physical records themselves have been the key.

For the longest of times, it has been established that the first records of Hindi film songs were made in 1932. The accepted facts are that the film is ‘Madhuri’ and that two records were cut for this film, meaning four songs of this film are the first Hindi film songs ever recorded.

But there is more research that comes from the work of Micheal Kinnear, author of ‘A Definitive Discography of Indian Music’ and from the doctoral thesis of Sh. Narendra Shrimali, titled ‘Music of Theatre and Hindi Cinema 1900 – 1950′. This PhD research project has been published in book form, with the same title. Sh. Shrimali’s work is a thoroughly researched dissertation on the interplay and influence of stage plays and theatre on the early years of cinema. In the early years, both for silent and then for talkie films, the source of dramatic material for cinema came from the trans-positioning of the readymade subject materials already available with the theatre industry. When the films were silent, it was the themes and plots that were imported into cinema. And when the films started to talk in 1931, then the even the music and the song was imported from the theatre and used in the cinema. Sh. Shrimali’s book makes a very interesting reading, as it traces the history behind the music in talkie film industry in India.

It established based on the work by the above mentioned research workers, that in the time prior to the cutting of the records of film ‘Madhuri’ in 1932, there may have been or that there are, instances wherein the songs of a film were released on records, without any specific reference to the film itself. For all practical purposes, such records have always been treated as private or NFS recordings. The analysis and data digging done by these two researchers establishes at least one specific case in which the songs of the film are released on records, albeit without a specific reference connecting them. It is possible that the songs may have been recorded earlier and then used in the film, or that they were first a part of the film, and then were released as private recordings. One argument given in favor is that in all likelihood, and due to the infancy of the art form and the industry itself, the film producers did not attach any significance to associating the film with songs on record. Maybe that realization had to wait for more than one year to set in (i.e. in 1932).

Shrilmali ji refers to the 1931 film ‘Trapped’ (also titled as ‘Farebi Jaal’). The booklet of this film lists 6 songs, three of them being sung by Durga Khote and the remaining three being rendered in the voice of Master Vasant Amrut of Surat. It is established by his research, and with detailed reference to the earlier work by Michael Kinnear, that two songs sung by Master Vasant for this film are available on 78 rpm records, which do not carry the name of the film. On pages 70 and 71 of the publication, he summarizes as follows: [quote] “. . .if we consider above mentioned facts and evidences we should consider that the first ever Gramophone Record of Hindi cinema was not N5622 but they were P13474 and P13542”.

(NOTE: N5622 refers to the record number on which the songs of film ‘Madhuri’ (1932) are available and P13474 / P13542 refer to the record number on which the songs of film ‘Trapped’ (1931) are available).

Today, I am uploading and presenting this rarest of rarest of rare discoveries. The physical record P13542, is available, in the collection of my collector friend, and he has graciously, with some coaxing, allowed me the liberty to upload this song online and post it at the 10,000th song on our blog.

It is a befitting salutation, both to the blog and its team on one hand, and on the other, a befitting tribute to the Hindi cinema. For the first time anywhere in the online world, we have a Hindi film song from 1931 posted on Atul-Song-A-Day. A momentous occasion calling for a historically vital song recording.

There is not much other information available for this film, other than the film booklet. Once again, the benefaction of another dear friend and guide, Harmandir Singh ji, has been instrumental in getting details of the lyrics of this song, from the film booklet which part of his collection. He has been generously helpful to make a scan of the booklet and share it with me.

The film is produced under the banner of Indian Art Productions, Bombay. It is a social drama directed by M Bhavani. The cast of actors include Inakshi Ramrao, Arundhati Sansaare, Durga Khote, Sushila Devi, Smt Singh, Waman Talpade, Jal Khambatta, Baburao Sansaare and Manohar Kapoor etc. The name of the music director is not available. The name of lyricist is mentioned as Master Vasant himself.

Song-Phul rahi belariyaan doley (Trapped)(1931) Singer-Master Vasant Amrit, Lyrics-Master Vasant Amrit

Lyrics

phul rahi belariyaan doley
phul rahi belariya. .aa. .an
do. .ley
phul rahi belariyaan doley
boley koyaliya ambuwaa ki da.aar
do. .o. .ley
boley
phul rahi belariyaan doley

bhaanti bhaanti ke vriksh jhoolat hain
bhaanti bhaanti ke vriksh jhoolat hain
piyu piyu karat pukaar pappayyaa

ritu basant lo kheeli bahaar
phul rahi belariyaan doley
phul rahi belariyaan doley
phul rahi belariyaan doley
phul rahi

(long alaap)
phul rahi belariyaan doley
phul rahi belariya. .
aaaa aaaaa aaaaa doley
phule bela. .
phule je belariyaan doley naa
boley koyaliya
ambwaa ki daar doley doley doley

bana (?) belariyaan doley
phul rahi
e e ban aye
ae ri boley bana
ae ri bana bo. .
bana boley
ae ri bana boley
bana boley. .
bana boley
bana boley naa
bana ae
bana boley
bana boley naa
mann doley
ae ri doley
rim bana aaye doley
bana ay ri naaye
doley doley re mann

phul rahi belaryaan doley
phul ri bela. . do. .ley
phul rahi
. . .aan bana doley
phul rahi belaryaan bana doley
(?) bana naahin doley boley
(alaap)
phul ri belariyaan. .aaa aaa
phul rahi
aa bana
bana dole
bana dole
(alaap)

phul ri belariyaan . . . doley
phul rahi belaryaan doley
ri bana doley
ri bana boley
phul ri belariyaan . . ah
belariyaan
belariyaan
belariyaan
belar. .
belariyaan
doley
phul rahi belaryaan
aaaaaa doley
phul rahi belaryaan
——————————–
Hindi script lyrics (Provided by Sudhir)
——————————–
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाआं
डोले॰ ॰एss
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ डोले
बोले कोयलिया अंबुवा की डा॰ ॰आर
डो॰ ॰ओले॰ ॰एss
बोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ डोले

भांति भांति के वृक्ष झूलत हैं
भांति भांति के वृक्ष झूलत हैं
पियु पियु करत पुकार पप्पईया

ऋतु बसंत लो खिली बहार
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ डोले
फुलरहि

(लम्बा आलाप)
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ॰ ॰आsss आsssss आsss डोले
फुले बेला
फुले जे बेलरियाँ डोले ना
बोले कोयलिया
अंबवा की डार डोले डोले डोले

बन (?)बेलरियाँ डोले
फुलरहि
ए ए बन अए
ऐ री बोले बन
ऐ री बन बो॰ ॰
बन बोले
ऐ री बन बोले
बन बोले॰ ॰
बन बोले
बन बोले ना॰ ॰
बन ए
बन बोले
बन बोले ना॰ ॰
मन डोले
ऐ री डोले
रिम बन आए डोले
बन ऐ री ना॰ ॰ऐ
डोले डोले रे मन

फुलरहि बेलरियाँ डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ॰ ॰ डो॰ ॰ले
फुलरहि
॰ ॰ आंss बन डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ बन डोले
(?) बन नहीं डोले बोले
(आलाप)
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ॰ ॰आss ॰ ॰आss
फुलरहि
आ बन
बन डोले
बन डोले
(आलाप)

फुलरहि बेलरियाँ॰ ॰डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ
री बन डोले
री बन डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ॰ ॰आः
बेलरियाँ
बेलरियाँ
बेलर॰ ॰
बेलरियाँ
डोले
फुलरहि बेलरियाँ
आss डोले

फुलरहि बेलरियाँ