हँसी चाँद की आज निराली

One of the three Binota Bose solos in Hamrahi, and the score's lightest number: a moonlight song in which the singer notices that the moon's smile is different tonight — the standard Hindustani way of saying that the change is in the person looking, not in the sky. In the Songs of Yore survey of 1945 the commentator Raunak J files it under a single phrase: 'Romancing the moon, RC Boral style!!' Munshi Zakir Hussain wrote the lyric; R.C. Boral composed and, as everywhere on this soundtrack, wrote a shapely instrumental introduction to it.

The setting is medium-paced and open — this is the one place in Hamrahi where Boral lets a melody simply be pretty, without a prelude that argues for itself or a hymn's gravity. The line moves in short, rounded phrases with a slight lift at the end of each, the shape that makes a tune singable on first hearing, and the accompaniment is thinned out to leave space around the voice, which is standard practice for a night-time picturisation. Binota Bose sings it lighter than she sings the film's ghazal — less chest, more surface — and the contrast between her three solos is the clearest evidence that Boral was writing to a character rather than to a voice type.

The moon is the most heavily worked object in Urdu-Hindi lyric, and almost every use of it is a comparison — the beloved's face, the unreachable, the witness. Zakir Hussain's title takes a lighter road: it does not compare the moon to anyone, it reports that the moon is behaving unusually, that tonight its laughter is nirali, singular, not like other nights. The pleasure of the conceit is that the listener knows immediately what has actually changed. Nothing has happened to the moon. Set inside a film about a wealthy woman drifting away from her class and towards a poor writer, the song's small private observation is also the first sign of a much larger defection.

Binota Bose plays Gopa, the industrialist's sister, and Baburao Patel's Filmindia review of October 1945 singled her out: 'Binota is an artiste of very high calibre. All the while, she knows what she is doing and she acquits herself with suitable dignity and poise through numerous situations.' Filmindia gave Hamrahi four stars and called it 'a picture for intellectuals' — Bimal Roy's direction was described as 'an excellent beginning to his new profession'. Songs like this one are the reason the film reads as a romance at all; without them Hamrahi's plot is a straight line from a public humiliation to a broken strike.

The Hamrahi songs never entered the standing Hindi-film repertoire the way the year's Noor Jehan and Naushad records did, and this one is remembered by collectors rather than by the public. Its interest now is as a sample of what R.C. Boral sounded like in his last significant year: the man who had built playback singing at New Theatres in the early 1930s, writing an unhurried, well-made moonlight tune while Bombay's new composers were rewriting the rules of the form around him. Within a couple of years the centre of Hindi film music had moved decisively west, and New Theatres itself was in decline.