The Micro View of Best Songs of 1946 @ SoY – Setting the Stage

The journey of Best Songs for The Year @ SoY started rolling backwards from the initial phase of the Golden Era and has now reached well into the beginning of the end of Vintage Era. The journey has  crossed the milestones @ 1955, 1953, 1951, 1950, 1949  1948 and 1947. We now move on the next milestone ‘Best songs of 1946: And the winners are?’

As very explicitly noted in the very beginning of the SoY overview article, we are now deep into the HFM era where many more songs known to unknown and even more songs that are unknown at level of HFGK or YT fans of the vintage era songs. In the overview article, SoY notes that the year has a record figure of 153 films, having a total of around 1270 songs that are identifiable, of which almost nothing other than the initial few words of the song is known for 740 songs. That should make the journey of Micro Analysis of Songs for 1946 as much challenging task as the previous vintage era years journeys have been interesting.

We begin our journey of Micro View of the Best Songs of 1946 @SoY with this clear context. As is our established practice, we will present the excerpts from SoY overview article:

Musical landmarks:

There are several films which shine as bight stars in a dark sky of the many unknown unknowns, like Naushad’s Anmol Ghadi and Shahjehan, C Ramchandra’s Safar, Anil Biswas’s Milan, Ghulam Haider’s Shama,

Other important musical compositions

Ja Parwane Ja Kahin Shama Jal Rahi Hai – Rajputani – Mukesh, Hamida Bano – Bulo C Rani

Teri Nazar Mein Main Rahun, Meri Nazar Mein Tum – 1857 – Surendra, Suraiya – Sajjad Hussain

Debut, fact file and trivia

S D Burman – in Shikari and Eight Days, as music director and also as singer

Kishore Kumar – for a small role in Shikari and as a chorus singer in the song O Rangeela Re…Jawani Mein Sata Ke Kahan Gaye

Meena Kapoor – as singer – in song Haaye Kisi Se Meri Preet Lagi (Eight Days)

Geeta Roy – as playback singer in Bhakt Prahlad

Shankar Das Gupta, as singer in Milan

Abhi Bhattacharya – as actor in Milan.

Sudhir Phadke with the film Gokul,

Ram Ganguly with Maharana Pratap,

Chitragupta with Lady Robinhood;

Mohammad Shafi with Haqdaar.

Hansraj Bahal had his first independent assignment as music director with the film Pujari.

List Of Memorable Songs, at the first glance, appears to a very truncated list, with only 76 songs. However, in a year where more than 50% of the known songs are not traceable, the number seems to merit an appreciation of an extensive work undertaken in the compilation. We have relisted these songs Memorable Songs of 1946, by adding the relevant link to YT file.

For the year under review, Special songs also cover the songs which open a path of discovery on their own well as they have thir own personality. In this case too, I have brought these songs on the same page with Memorable Songs of 1946.

The stage is now set to commence our journey into the Micro View of the Songs of 1946. As the List of Memorable Songs and Special Songs have covered most of the well-known songs for the year, we will restrict our micro-view to in-depth listening of not-so-well-known songs. We will then combine our impressions of these songs with that we already have for the well-known ones to present our point of view in so far as

Best male playback singer
Best female playback singer
Best duets
Best music director

are concerned for the year 1946.

All the posts that will appear on this subject here have been tagged as Songs of 1946 @ SoY.