गोकुल की एक नार छबीली

'Gokul Ki Ek Naar Chhabili' is the one song from Basant Pictures' Bachpan (1945) that carries a singer credit in the catalogues: Mukesh. The title puts the song in Braj country — a chhabili naar, a woman of striking charm, from Gokul, the cowherd village of Krishna's boyhood. S. N. Tripathi composed it to I. C. Kapoor's words, and a transfer from the surviving shellac disc, running two minutes and fifty-seven seconds, is one of only two pieces of this soundtrack that can still be heard at all.

S. N. Tripathi brought a Hindustani classical training to this score — Bhatkhande's Morris College of Music in Lucknow — along with the practical ear of a working orchestra musician; he had arrived in Bombay in 1935 as a violinist assisting Saraswati Devi at Bombay Talkies, and by 1945 had been an independent composer for three years. The Braj setting of the title points toward the folk-devotional register that would later become his signature in mythological films. Whatever the arrangement, it had to fit one side of a shellac 78: the surviving transfer runs 2 minutes 57 seconds, and that is the whole song.

The phrase in the title belongs to the Braj vocabulary of Krishna poetry, where Gokul is less a place than a mood — the cowherd settlement of Krishna's boyhood, its gopis, its teasing, its river. Calling a woman chhabili is a particular compliment, nearer to 'striking' or 'full of spark' than to plain beauty, and Hindi lyricists of the 1940s reached for it when they wanted a line that sounded rustic and knowing at the same time. I. C. Kapoor, who wrote the film's story and dialogue as well as its songs, is working here in the Braj-flavoured register that a village-set film about childhood invites. Where the number sits in the narrative is not documented.

Bachpan was made by Homi Wadia's Basant Pictures, a studio then known for Fearless Nadia stunt pictures, and it is a social family drama instead: Bhairav (Mazhar Khan), embittered and living alone on a mountainside after his son married outside their caste, is slowly softened by Madhu (Baby Madhuri), the young niece a relative sends to live with him. Madhu is twice abducted — once by the aunt, who sells her as a companion to the wealthy invalid Kamla (Baby Shakuntala), and once by Kamla's jealous governess — and the film ends with the village schoolteacher Ramesh (B. Nandrekar) and his beloved (Chandraprabha) clearing Bhairav's name at the police station. I. C. Kapoor wrote the story, the dialogue and all ten song lyrics; S. N. Tripathi composed the score. Mazhar Khan, who plays the recluse Bhairav here, was in the same year directing Pehli Nazar (1945) under his own Asiatic Pictures banner — the film in which Mukesh sang 'Dil Jalta Hai To Jalne De' and became a playback singer overnight.

Mukesh's 1945 is remembered for a single song — 'Dil Jalta Hai To Jalne De' from Pehli Nazar, which K. L. Saigal is said to have mistaken for his own voice. 'Gokul Ki Ek Naar Chhabili' sits entirely outside that story. It appears in no standard account of his early career, it was never reissued, and it survives because a private collector put a disc transfer online. Its value now is documentary rather than musical: it records what work a young singer was still taking on in the year his name began to matter.