चाँद उगा रे

The brightest number in Pratima's surviving score, and the one song of the film that every source agrees belongs to Parul Ghosh. Narendra Sharma builds it on a single conceit, stated outright in the documented opening: the moon has risen in the sky of the heart, and someone's face has settled there. Nothing further of the text is published, so this entry describes the conceit and stops.

Arun Kumar writes a swaying medium-tempo tune with a refrain short enough to lodge on first hearing — the repeated call of the title functions as a hook in the modern sense, returning after every couplet. The accompaniment is warmer and busier than on the film's slow songs, with the rhythm section given room to lilt, and the melody rises across the antara before dropping back into the refrain, which is exactly the shape a moonrise song wants.

The song belongs to a long Indian tradition in which the interior life is described as a sky: the heart has its own weather, its own night, and here its own moonrise. Sharma keeps the register domestic and unlearned — no Sanskrit, no Persian — so that a large claim about a change in consciousness is made entirely in the language of a village song. The documented opening completes the figure by naming what the moon actually is: an image of someone, lodged where the moon would be. Beyond that line the text is unpublished and is not characterised here.

Chand Uga Re is the one song of Pratima that the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, hindigeetmala and MySwar all credit to Parul Ghosh alone; the film's other titles are split between Jyoti, Arun Kumar, Naseem Akhtar and M. V. Mukherjee. The score is by Arun Kumar Mukherjee, who had spent the first half of the decade as a Bombay Talkies playback voice. The film opened on 14 December 1945 with Dilip Kumar in his second screen role, Swaran Lata as the female lead, and P. Jairaj making his directorial debut. Since no plot summary survives, who the song is picturised on cannot be established from the record.

The song has no independent afterlife — Pratima failed, and its music went down with it — but it is one of the few surviving recordings that show Arun Kumar Mukherjee writing an up-tempo romantic melody rather than the slower material his small composing catalogue is usually represented by. For listeners tracing Parul Ghosh's range in her last active decade it is a useful record of her lighter voice.