More than 10,000 talkie Hindi feature films have been produced since 1931. During the compilation of information relating to Hindi films and their songs, I always felt the need of categorising all the films music director-wise. In order to collect information of Hindi film songs, I had the privilege of meeting with numerous music directors of Hindi films including those who started composing music and songs right from the advent of talkie era i.e. 1931.
During my memorable meetings with the music masters of Hindi films, I strongly felt that with the passage of time, they had even forgotten the titles of the films for which they had composed the songs. In order to get the information of songs of their films, I had to manually prepare the list of films of every music director so that I may prompt them during personal meetings to recall their films for which they composed the songs. It helped me a lot to collect lot of information of the songs with respective singers, lyricists from the music directors.
Thus, in early eighties, the idea of categorising ALL Hindi films music director-wise struck in my mind. But somewhow, the idea continued to remain only in my mind and all my time was spent in compiling and publishing HINDI FILM GEET KOSH volumes one by one which followed by the compilation work of HINDI FILMOGRAPHY, since updated and published to the year 2010.
In late eighties, for the preparation of HINDI TALKIE FILM INDEX [1931-1987], I had engaged an outside computer agency. In addition to the titles and years of censor, names of music directors and banners of the films were also included. Though a very costly project of his time, I was able to get the music director-wise lists of ALL Hindi films censored till date. In late 1993, when I did not know the a, b, c of computer, I purchased it and spent sufficient time in working as well maintenance of the computer so that I may work smoothly and continuously as per my requirements.
In early 2004, when I approached my all time supporter and ardent MUKESH songs fan, Mr.Harish Raghuwanshi of Surat, he immediately agreed to work on the MUSIC DIRECTORS OF HINDI FILMS project. And thus, the compilation work started though the progress was slow. During the compilation work, it was disclosed that many renowned music directors like Hemant Kumar, Hans Raj Behl, Avinash Vyas, R.C. Boral have contributed in regional films also. So, it was strongly felt that if the titles of regional films of such music directors are not included in our compilation, it would not only be a great injustice to the maestros but also the proposed compilation would be treated as incomplete work. And thus, we started preparing lists of regional films with their music directors' names of main languages like Bangla, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Rajasthani. Finally, the idea of including the lists of films of music directors who had contributed in pre-independence era but migrated to Pakistan subsequently, also floated so that our compilation may be made useful to the fullest extent.
And, thus this story goes on and with the whole-hearted support of Harish Raghuwanshi, this project goes on by making strenuous efforts in collecting the available information relating the music directors, their photographs, awards won, etc., etc. Needless to add that all time support from many known and unknown music is being received for this project. All efforts are being made to publish this work in book form in the year 2012 !