छल्ला दे जा बलम

One of the twelve Wali Saheb–Shyam Sundar songs of Gaon Ki Gori (1945), and one of the least documented. The MySwar catalogue lists the title and credits the lyricist and composer but leaves the singer field empty and its genre unclassified; the Hindi Film Geet Kosh-derived listings that circulate online carry only the film's better-known songs. The record is included here on the strength of those catalogue entries alone, with no singer attributed, because attributing one would be a guess.

No recording of this track has surfaced in the circulating archives of 1945 film music, so nothing can honestly be said about its melody, its rhythm or its orchestration. What can be said is the context: Shyam Sundar worked in a plain Punjabi-folk idiom with light instrumentation — dholak, harmonium, flute — and kept his arrangements subordinate to the tune, and the rest of the Gaon Ki Gori album is consistent in that respect.

The chhalla — a plain finger-ring, usually of silver — is one of the most persistent objects in Punjabi folk song, where it stands for a promise given and, when the singer asks for it or returns it, for the state of that promise. Asking the balam to leave a ring behind is therefore a request for surety before a departure, the same emotional situation that runs through several other songs in this film. The address 'balam' places the lyric firmly in village speech rather than in the Urdu register Wali Saheb uses for the film's Noor Jehan ghazals.

Gaon Ki Gori was made at Ramnik Productions by K. Amarnath, who also wrote the story, with dialogue by Safdar Faizpuri, camera by L. N. Verma and cutting by B. K. Mistry. It finished as the second highest-grossing Indian film of 1945. That a track from a hit of this size should have lost its singer's name inside eighty years is a fair measure of how thin the documentation of pre-Partition Hindi film music is once you step past the four or five songs of a film that stayed in circulation.