चली चल री जमुना किनारे

One of two closely related Yamuna-bank songs in the Bisvi Sadi score; the other is catalogued as 'Chala Chal Ri Zara', which MySwar lists in the fuller form 'Chali Chal Ri Zara Jamuna Kinare'. The two are almost certainly a pair — the same lyrical idea recorded twice, as several numbers in this film appear to have been. No singer or lyricist is credited; the composer is Pannalal Ghosh.

No recording of the number has surfaced online, so nothing can honestly be said about its scoring beyond who wrote it. What is worth knowing is the hand behind it: in 1945 Pannalal Ghosh was already the leading bansuri player in the country — he had lengthened the instrument to thirty-two inches and added the teevra-madhyam hole to make the lower-octave meend possible — and he came to Bombay film work from New Theatres in Calcutta rather than from the Bombay studio system.

The Yamuna bank is the most heavily loaded piece of ground in Hindi song. It is where Krishna waits, where the gopis go for water and do not come back on time, and where the whole vocabulary of Braj love poetry — the pot on the hip, the flute heard across the water, the excuse that will have to be made at home — is kept. A line that calls a woman to walk along that bank is therefore never only an invitation to a walk; it is an invitation into a story every listener already knows the shape of. The imperative 'chal ri' is familiar and female-addressed — one girl talking to another, a sakhi's voice rather than a lover's, which is the standard framing device of the form.

Bisvi Sadi — 'The Twentieth Century' — was produced and directed by Mohan Bhavnani for Bhavnani Productions and released in 1945, with Motilal and Nargis heading a cast that also included Mazhar Khan, Gope, Ashalata, Bhudo Advani, Navin and Majumdar. Pannalal Ghosh, the flautist who made the bansuri a Hindustani concert instrument, wrote all fifteen songs; the records went out on Columbia. That a film called 'The Twentieth Century' carries two Yamuna-bank songs and a garden song is not a contradiction so much as the standard shape of the 1940s social: the older, pastoral, devotional register is exactly what the modern century is being weighed against, and the songs are where it is allowed to speak for itself.

Bisvi Sadi is out of circulation and no print is known to be accessible, so the song exists today chiefly as a catalogue line in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived databases. Its claim on attention is that it belongs to one of the very few complete Hindi film scores signed by Pannalal Ghosh, whose reputation otherwise rests entirely on the concert platform.