देखो जी देखो

The song appears in the catalogues under two names: HindiGeetMala lists it as 'Dekho Ji Dekho', MySwar as 'Chhun Chhun Baaje (Dekho Ji Dekho)'. Double titles like this are normal for 78-rpm labels, where a disc was often known by its opening words in one catalogue and by its refrain in another. No singer is credited in any source and none is supplied here; MySwar assigns the composition to Anupam Ghatak alone while HindiGeetMala gives it to Lachhiram Tamar, so both are listed.

No recording of the song is in circulation and no description of its arrangement exists. The alternate title is the one real clue: 'chhun chhun' is the fixed onomatopoeia for the sound of ankle bells in Hindi and Urdu song, so the number was almost certainly built on a dance rhythm, with percussion carrying whatever movement the scene required. That is an inference from the title's own words rather than from any surviving audio, and it is offered as no more than that.

The primary title is an invitation to look — 'look, ji, look' — the phrase a film song uses when a performer is drawing an audience's eye, whether on a village stage, at a wedding, or in the kind of set-piece where a character shows off. Paired with the anklet refrain, the two titles together point at a performance number rather than a dramatic one. Beyond that the poem is undocumented: no lyric text for it exists online and HindiGeetMala says so explicitly.

Champa was made at Shorey Pictures in Lahore for the producer Roop K. Shorey and directed by Barkat Ram Mehra; it opened at the Crown cinema in Lahore in October 1945 with Manorama, Asha Posley, Hari Shivdasani, Majnu, Salma and Zahoor Shah in the cast. No plot summary of the film survives, and no print is known to circulate — the discs, issued on Columbia and now in the Saregama catalogue, are effectively the whole of what is left of it. A dance or display number in the running order alongside a bhajan, a ghazal and a panghat folk song is exactly the spread a 1945 'social' was built to cover, which is the most this song can tell us about the film it belonged to.

Nothing of the song survives but its two catalogue names. It has no transfer, no digital reissue and no text, and the disagreement between its two recorded titles is now the only thing about it that anyone can check.