चकोरी चंदा के अँगना

The third and last of Suraiya's solos in Samrat Chandragupta. The title invokes the chakor — the partridge of Sanskrit and Braj poetry that is said to gaze at the moon all night and to feed on its light — and places its female form, the chakori, in the moon's angan, its courtyard, which is a domestic word rather than a celestial one.

Songs built on the chakor-chanda image belong by convention to the slow, night-set part of a score, and 1945 practice would give such a number a spacious tempo, a sustained melodic line and minimal percussion. The choice to give it to Suraiya rather than to Amirbai Karnataki — who took the film's other slow solo — suggests the two singers were being used for different registers: the younger voice for longing, the older and heavier one for grief.

The chakor's devotion to the moon is the standard Indian figure for love that is total, permanent and structurally impossible: the bird can look but never reach. Madhur's addition is 'angana' — courtyard — which drags the figure down out of the sky and into a house, where a woman waits in a specific physical space. That collision of the cosmic image with the domestic one is characteristic of the Braj-derived film lyric, and it is what keeps such songs from becoming purely ornamental: the moon is unreachable, but the courtyard is somewhere you actually stand.

Samrat Chandragupta (1945) was produced and directed by Jayant Desai for Jayant Desai Productions, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after fourteen years at Ranjit Studios. It is a large-scale historical about Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan empire, built around the legend of his break with Alexander's Macedonians and his marriage to the daughter of the Greek general Seleucus Nicator. Ishwarlal, Renuka Devi, Suraiya, Nayampalli, Sulochana Chatterjee and Mubarak headed the cast; the screenplay was by Mohanlal G. Dave, Shaheed Latif and Sagar Hussain, and Dronacharya photographed it. C. Ramchandra — signing himself Chitalkar Ramchandra at this stage of his career — composed all ten documented songs to lyrics by Buddhi Chandra Agrawal 'Madhur', two years before Shehnai (1947) made him a household name.

The chakor-chanda song is one of the durable sub-forms of Hindi film music, running from the 1930s through to the playback era proper, and this is a 1945 instance of it with a firm singer attribution — which makes it useful as a dated specimen even though the recording itself does not appear to survive in public access. It is also the third documented data point establishing Suraiya as the film's principal voice.