जिस रंग में तोहे

Catalogued for Chand Chakori (1945) with Bulo C. Rani as composer and Pandit Indra as lyricist, and with no singer named. The entry is unusual in that its title is visibly incomplete: jis rang mein tohe opens a subordinate clause and then stops, so what survives is a fragment awaiting a verb that no source supplies. Titles in the pre-1950 catalogues were taken from record labels and censor listings and were often truncated to fit, which is the likeliest explanation. The song is preserved here as the catalogues hold it, with the truncation stated rather than smoothed over.

There is no recording and no basis for describing the music. What the catalogue does establish is that Bulo C. Rani wrote it, in the same season as the film's other twelve numbers, in his second year of composing on his own account at Ranjit Movietone. Song type, tempo and instrumentation are all undocumented and none is entered.

The fragment still carries information, because rang is one of the most loaded words in the north Indian love lyric. It means colour, but it also means mood, style, manner and - crucially - the state of being dyed, which in the bhakti and Braj traditions is the standard figure for being wholly taken over by another. To be rangi is to have taken someone else's colour so thoroughly that one's own is no longer visible. Tohe is the intimate second person of that same Braj-inflected register. So even truncated, the title places itself: this is a song about being coloured by someone, addressed directly to them, in the vocabulary of devotion applied to love. What the clause was going on to say cannot be recovered, and no attempt is made to supply it.

Chand Chakori was made at Ranjit Movietone under Kidar Sharma's direction, with Mumtaz Shanti and Surendra starring and Bulo C. Rani composing thirteen songs. It was one of the year's biggest earners and is one of its most thoroughly lost pictures. Its song list has come down through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the online catalogues built on it, and entries like this one - partial title, absent singer, no surviving audio - show what that transmission chain does and does not preserve.

There is no legacy to claim for this song and none is claimed. Its function in the record is to hold the thirteenth place in a list of thirteen and to be honest about how little is behind it. A catalogue that quietly dropped its weakest entries would look more authoritative and would be a worse record of what a 1945 Ranjit soundtrack actually contained.