खिल जाओ बगिया की कलियों

One of three songs sung by the child performer Baby Alka in Badi Maa (1945), with words by Zia Sarhadi and music by K. Datta. The title is an imperative addressed to flower-buds: open, bloom. Hindigeetmala and Wikipedia differ slightly on its wording — 'bagiya ki kaliyon' (the little garden's buds) against 'bagh ki kaliyon' (the garden's buds) — but the sense is identical, and both point to the film's small stock of untroubled material.

Three of the ten songs in Badi Maa go to a child singer, which is an unusually large share and tells you something about how the film was assembled: a war story that needed periodic relief, built by a composer whose formation was in devotional and Marathi film music rather than in the Punjabi-orchestral idiom that dominated Bombay in 1945. K. Datta scored roughly seventeen Hindi films across nearly three decades and about a dozen Marathi ones, and he was never a fashionable composer; his usefulness to a producer was reliability across registers. Beyond that, the arrangement of this particular side is not documented and is not described here.

The garden is the most worked-over site in Urdu-Hindi poetry, and telling its buds to bloom is deliberately conventional — the point of such a line is not novelty but permission. In a film where a village is under attack and a family is being dismantled by debt, an order for flowers to open is the standard cinematic device for marking a stretch of time in which nothing has gone wrong yet. It is worth noting that the same lyricist, Zia Sarhadi, also wrote the film's screenplay and its bleakest song, 'Diya Jalakar Aap Bujhaya'; the range across one soundtrack is his.

Badi Maa is a home-front war picture: a Japanese spy hidden inside an Indian village, a moneylender's family split between treason and patriotism, a son returning from the London Blitz, and a final battle that kills two of the principals. Master Vinayak made it for his own Prafulla Pictures under pressure from the colonial Information Department, and Filmindia dismissed the result in September 1945 as a 'propaganda social' and 'the year's most rotten show'. The lighter songs are where the picture is allowed to be a film rather than a message.

Songs like this one are the part of a 1945 soundtrack that vanishes first: no famous singer attached, no gramophone afterlife, no anthology to sit in. What keeps it retrievable is that Badi Maa itself survived — the complete film is in the public domain on indiancine.ma and Wikimedia Commons — so the three Baby Alka numbers can still be located inside the picture even though almost nothing is written about them.