अब मोती गिराने लगीं सावन की घटाएँ

Hindi Film Geet Kosh lists this as song number six of Lakharani (1945) under the title 'Ab Moti Girane Lagi Sawan Ki Ghatayen'; when the recording was finally heard, the researchers who published it retitled it 'Ik Gori Ki Aankhon Se Mujhe Pyaar Hua Hai' after the refrain that returns at the end of every stanza. It is a duet for an unidentified male and female voice with a female chorus, written by Qamar Jalalabadi and composed by Master Krishnarao Phulambrikar. In December 2017 it became the first Lakharani song of any kind to be published online, from the private collection of a gramophone collector.

The structure is unusually elaborate for a film of this budget and moment: an opening statement, a female chorus answering — the collector who recovered the record read it as the bride's side of the gathering — and then the duet proper, with the refrain returning after each antara. Krishnarao keeps the melodic line clean and singable and lets the two voices carry it rather than burying them in orchestration, which is the habit of a stage composer rather than of a Bombay film arranger.

The lyric is a young man's announcement that he has fallen in love, and Jalalabadi lets him make it to the whole visible world rather than to the girl: he addresses the koel, the birds, the anklet on her foot, the waves of the river, asking each in turn to carry the news outward. The seasonal frame does the emotional work — the monsoon clouds that scatter pearls, the flower already prepared to open — so that the private admission arrives dressed as a natural event, something the season has authorised. It is the oldest device in Indian love poetry, handled here with real lightness.

Lakharani was Guru Dutt's first film. He had trained in dance at Uday Shankar's academy in Almora and joined Prabhat as a choreographer, but Vishram Bedekar used him as an actor — Lachman, the heroine's brother — and as his assistant director. The film's story, Bedekar's own, argued for temple entry for all castes through a tale of a devout forest community and its atheist neighbours. It flopped, its prints were lost, and until 2017 not one of its six songs was available anywhere. This is the song that broke that silence: a collector had four of the six, and uploaded this one on request.

The publication of this recording in December 2017 is the moment Lakharani re-entered the record of Hindi film music as something audible rather than merely listed. The commentary that followed is itself part of the song's history: the collectors who heard it argued that the song is finely made and would stand up in any period, while the historian who wrote it up held that Krishnarao's classicism simply could not compete with what Rattan and its successors were offering in 1945 — a small, precise argument about why good songs die.