गाए जा तू अपना गीत

Rekha Mallick, who plays Anup's sister Sumitra, sings the only female solo in Hamrahi that does not belong to Binota Bose. The title is an instruction — keep singing your own song — and in a film about a poor writer whose novel is stolen and published under a rich man's name, that instruction is the theme in miniature. Among collectors of 1940s New Theatres music the number is cited for its opening: writing in the Songs of Yore survey of 1945, the commentator Raunak J points to it as evidence that 'RC Boral was the master of preludes and sweetness'.

Boral's preludes are the reason his 1940s records still get pulled off the shelf, and this is one of the examples his admirers name. The instrumental opening is written as a small self-contained statement rather than as a cue for the singer, and it sets the melodic character before a word arrives. The song proper is unhurried and stepwise, with a middle-tempo pulse and a light accompaniment that keeps out of the vocal's way; Rekha Mallick's delivery is plainer and less classically weighted than Binota Bose's, which suits a number sung by the film's ordinary, wronged sister rather than by its heroine.

Munshi Zakir Hussain's lyric works on one of the durable consolations of Hindustani song: that singing is not a reward for good fortune but a defence against its absence. The address is second-person and imperative — you, keep singing your own song — which places the speaker outside the sorrow rather than inside it, closer to counsel than to lament. In the film's terms 'apna geet', one's own song, is a possession that a thief cannot take: the novel can be plagiarised, the sister can be publicly accused of theft, the strike can be broken, but the song remains the singer's. It is a modest poetic claim, and it is the one the film ends up making.

Rekha Mallick took the role of Sumitra in the Hindi Hamrahi; in the Bengali original Udayer Pathey the part was played by Rekha Mitra, and Wikipedia's plot summary carries both names side by side, which is why some catalogues list the singer as Rekha Mitra, Rekha Mullick or Rekha Malik. Sumitra is the character whose humiliation starts the story — accused of theft at her rich friend Gopa's birthday party — and it is her brother Anup's refusal to accept the resulting apology that sets the film's argument going. Giving her the score's one non-heroine solo is a small structural decision that tells you where Bimal Roy's sympathies sat.

The song has no independent fame — no cover version, no anthology life, no place in the standard 1945 shortlists. What has kept it in circulation is R.C. Boral's reputation among collectors: in retrospective surveys of 1945 it turns up not as a hit but as an exhibit, the piece produced when the argument is about how well Boral wrote his instrumental openings. That is a narrow kind of survival, but for a composer whose innovations at New Theatres were absorbed so completely into Hindi film practice that they stopped being visible, it is a fair one.