छाए हैं काले मेघ तो बौछार भी होगी

'Chhaye Hain Kale Megh To Bauchhar Bhi Hogi' is the Amirbai Karnataki solo from Mazdoor (1945), Nitin Bose's first film for Filmistan and a story built around a mill, a labour dispute and a village romance caught between the two. Gopal Singh Nepali wrote it, Hari Prasanna Das set it, and it is the song of the six that commentators have picked out as the album's most durable — a monsoon-image song whose whole purpose is to say that the present darkness is a promise of relief rather than a verdict. The Saregama reissue runs it at 3:38.

No detailed account of the arrangement has been published and the song has not been assessed here by listening, so what can honestly be said is about the voice and the brief. Amirbai Karnataki was, in 1945, one of the two or three most-recorded female singers in Bombay — a Karnataka-born singer with a firm, forward, slightly nasal tone that carried on 78-rpm shellac without needing much orchestral support. Hari Prasanna Das, a Chittagong composer with two dozen Bengali films behind him and a background as Pankaj Mullick's assistant, was writing here for a Filmistan social picture, a house that favoured clear melody over classical display. The reissued track runs 3:38, standard single-side length for the format.

Nepali builds the song on the oldest consolation figure in Indian verse and turns it into a piece of reasoning rather than a mood. Gathering black cloud is not, in this lyric, the image of gloom it usually is; it is evidence. The cloud is the guarantee of the shower, so the darkness overhead is not the thing to be feared but the thing to be read. Placed in a film about mill workers, that reading has an obvious second address: the argument about weather is also an argument about waiting out a bad season, and the song can be sung to a heartbroken girl and to a shop floor at once without changing a word. Nepali, already a considerable Hindi poet before he came to Bombay, keeps the register plain — this is not an ornate lyric, it is a proposition stated in an image that every listener already carried.

Mazdoor was made at Filmistan by Nitin Bose, who had come to Bombay after a bitter break with B. N. Sircar at New Theatres, Calcutta, and was brought into the studio by S. Mukherjee. The story follows a village youth (Nasir Khan, making his debut a year after his elder brother Dilip Kumar's) who leaves his sweetheart to look for work in the city, rises to a manager's post at a mill after rescuing the owner's daughter, and is then forced to choose a side when the workers' grievances become a dispute. Both heroines — Indumati and Veera — were also debutantes. Secondary accounts describe the film as having been inspired by How Green Was My Valley (1941). In a picture whose subject is a hard season for working people, this is the song that argues the season will end.

The film itself did not survive into circulation, but this song did: it is the Mazdoor track that has drawn the most attention from Hindi-film-music writers, and it remains available on the Saregama/HMV reissue of the six-song album. It sits inside Amirbai Karnataki's densest working years — the period after Kismet (1943) when she was recording constantly across studios — and belongs to the large family of monsoon songs that Hindi cinema has used, decade after decade, to say that a bad time is temporary.