गुलाब छड़ी मार गयो

'Gulab Chhadi Maar Gayo' is one of the eleven Chhamia songs listed in the gramophone catalogues, composed by Gyan Dutt to lyrics by Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari. No singer is documented for it, and no recording is in circulation. What survives is a title in unmistakably Braj-inflected Hindi — gayo rather than gaya, the verb ending that marks the speech of the Braj country rather than standard Khari Boli — attached to two objects, gulab and chhadi, which the Holi tradition has kept together for centuries.

The recording does not circulate and the catalogues carry no description of the arrangement, so the setting cannot be described. Gyan Dutt's strength across a decade at Ranjit Movietone lay precisely in this territory — Braj and Awadhi folk registers set for the gramophone — and the score of Chhamia clearly draws on that range, but nothing further can be verified about this particular number.

In the Braj songbook the chhadi — the cane or switch — belongs to Holi, and specifically to the tradition in which the women of the village drive the men off with sticks while the men shield themselves and the air is thick with colour and rose water. Gulab, rose, carries the same festival: gulab-jal is what is thrown alongside the gulal. A title in which someone strikes with a rose-cane and leaves therefore reads as a Holi song of the teasing, adversarial kind — an assault that is also a courtship, which is the whole comic logic of the festival. This is a reading of the diction, not a documented fact: no picturisation notes, no scene placement and no singer for this song survive in any accessible catalogue.

Chhamia (1945) was produced and directed by Protima Dasgupta for her own company, P.D.G. Pictures, from an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with Begum Para in the lead and a supporting company that included the comedian David, the dancer Azurie and Dixit. Gyan Dutt supplied eleven songs to lyrics by Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari. The picture was a commercial success and remained the high point of Dasgupta's short career behind the camera; it is not in circulation today, so its songs are known chiefly through catalogue listings and surviving 78-rpm discs.

The recording is not in commercial circulation and does not appear in the standard 1940s reissue compilations; it survives as a title in the Chhamia song list rather than as living repertoire. Its interest today is as part of the documented output of a hit film directed by a woman in 1945 — a body of work that the reissue market has never gone back for.