गंगा किनारे मोरे ससुर जी का

A Nirmala Devi solo whose title locates it precisely: the marital home, the sasural, standing on the bank of the Ganga. That is one of the fixed coordinates of the eastern Uttar Pradesh women's repertoire, where the river is not scenery but the boundary between the house a woman was born in and the house she was sent to. The pronoun 'more' rather than 'mere' places the diction firmly in the Braj-Awadhi register that folk and thumri lyric share. Nirmala Devi, born in Benares on that same river and trained in thumri, dadra and kajri, was singing in her own first language of music here.

No recording is in circulation, so nothing can be claimed about how this particular number was set. What is documented is Gobind Ram's manner in these years: light melodic writing with a ghazal and thumri inflection rather than a distinctly Punjabi folk one, a small orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi and tabla, and tunes pitched to sit comfortably in the middle of a classically trained voice instead of stretching it. A lyric in this register would conventionally have been carried on a light dadra or kaharwa cycle with sarangi answering the voice between lines — the standard dress for a thumri-adjacent film song of 1945 — but the actual setting cannot be confirmed without the recording.

Everything in the title is doing work. 'Sasur ji ka' — my father-in-law's — is how a young married woman in this poetic tradition refers to the house she now lives in: not hers, always someone else's, named after the man who owns it. Setting it 'ganga kinaare', on the river bank, does two things at once: it fixes the geography of eastern UP, and it invokes the river that carries the bride away from her maika and past every landmark she knew. The bidaai songs of that region are built out of exactly this material, and they are almost never simply sad — they hold pride, resignation and homesickness in the same breath. Pandit Indra is credited with the words; no line of them is reproduced here.

Chalis Karod — 'Forty Crores', the number that stood through the 1940s for the population of undivided India — was directed by Nanabhai Bhatt for Chandra Art Productions of Bombay, a year before Bhatt set up his own Deepak Pictures. Gobind Ram composed, Pandit Indra and I. C. Kapoor were credited with the songs, and the cast paired Nirmala Devi with her husband Arun Kumar Ahuja alongside Yakub, Agha and Gope. No plot summary of the film survives in any source consulted for this entry, so the nine song titles are effectively all that remains of what the picture was about. Gobind Ram gave Nirmala Devi four of the nine songs, more than any other voice on the album, which is consistent with her having been both the film's leading woman and its principal singer.

The song is not in circulation and has no independent reputation. Its interest is that it puts a trained Benares thumri singer on a Bombay film set singing a Ganga-side sasural lyric — the exact point at which the regional women's repertoire of eastern UP was being absorbed into commercial Hindi film music, a process that ran from the 1930s through to the 1950s and left most of its individual examples, this one included, undocumented beyond a song title. Nothing of the recording is in general circulation today: there is no known commercial reissue and no print of the film in public availability. Its survival is documentary — a line in the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue and the Cinemaazi credit sheet — which is the ordinary fate of most of the roughly two hundred Hindi films released each year in the mid-1940s.