दिन विपदा के टल जाएँगे

A Kanan Devi solo from Ban Phool, and the film's clearest statement of hope. The title promises that the days of vipda — calamity, catastrophe, affliction — will pass. Where most of the soundtrack works in the register of longing or enquiry, this one is a consolation, the counterpart in a woman's voice to Hemant Kumar's devotional 'Laga Usse Lau Tu Madadgar Hai'. Dhiren Mitra composed it; Pandit Madhur is credited with the lyric.

The recording is not available and the music is undocumented, so no description of melody or arrangement is offered. What can be noted is diction rather than sound: 'vipda' is a tatsama Hindi word with a Sanskritic weight to it, and its presence in the same nine-song score as 'chaman' shows a lyricist moving deliberately between the Urdu and the Sanskritic-Hindi ends of film-song vocabulary — a range that a score aimed at both the Hindi belt and the Bengali audience of a Calcutta studio would have found useful.

'Tal jayenge' — will be averted, will pass by — is a gentler verb than 'beet jayenge' (will end). It carries the sense of a blow that swerves rather than a season that finishes, and that is a specific kind of comfort: not that suffering has a natural term, but that it can miss you. Sung by a woman in a village drama, the line reads as the standard consolation offered to the powerless. Sung in Calcutta in 1945, two years after the Bengal famine of 1943 had killed some three million people in the province, it carries a local resonance that no source connects to the film's making, and it should not be read as intended — but a first audience there would have brought their own hearing to it.

No plot summary of Ban Phool survives, so the placement of this song is unknown. The film is a 'social' — Wikipedia's 1945 filmography uses that industry label — set in a village around Devi Mukherjee's zamindar Narendra, with Kanan Devi as Champa. It was made at P. R. Productions in Calcutta, directed by Niren Lahiri, written by Pranab Roy, produced by P.N. Roy, and released in a year when the Second World War was ending and the political shape of Indian independence was becoming concrete.

The song has no recorded afterlife of its own. Its interest lies in the pairing it forms with the Hemant Kumar number: a nine-song score with two consolation songs, one male and devotional, one female and worldly, is a score built for an audience that expected to be reassured. That is a small but real piece of evidence about what a 1945 Calcutta production thought its Hindi viewers wanted.