जाग ओ सोने वाले

A Suraiya solo from Tadbir (1945), composed by Lal Mohammad to a lyric by Swami Ramanand Saraswati. Among the film's twelve documented sides it is the one that changes mode: everything else in the score addresses God, fate or a beloved, and this one addresses a sleeper and tells him to get up. It is among the earliest solos Suraiya recorded as a leading lady rather than as a child singer, in the year that turned her career.

The imperative in the title sets the pace: a wake-up lyric cannot be sung at the tempo of the film's laments. Suraiya's voice in 1945 was very young and had not yet acquired the low, smoky quality that made her the leading female playback singer of the late forties; what it had was carrying power and clean articulation, and a rousing number is where that shows. The recording's arrangement is not documented anywhere and is not described here.

'Jaag' as the opening word puts the song in a long devotional lineage — the prabhati or morning song, and behind it the whole nirgun tradition in which sleep stands for spiritual unawareness and waking for the recognition of one's real situation. Kabir's poems use exactly this address. Placed in a film called Tadbir, where every other lyric is spoken by someone whom fate has already flattened, the imperative reads as the score's one instruction rather than its many pleas: not ask God for relief, but wake up. No lyric text is quoted here — the poet's dates are unrecorded, so the term cannot be shown to have lapsed.

1945 was the year Suraiya's career changed: she had five releases, and Tadbir was the one that put her opposite K.L. Saigal, on his recommendation, in her first major adult lead. The film became the fifth-highest-grossing Indian release of the year. Her run of solo songs in it — three of the twelve documented sides — is the first substantial body of solo material she recorded as a star rather than as a supporting voice.

It is the Suraiya side from Tadbir that turns up most often in listings of the film's songs, and it belongs to the small group of 1945 recordings that document what her voice sounded like immediately before she became the dominant female playback singer of the following four years.