मेरा चना मसालेदार

Sung by G.M. Durrani, this is the street-vendor song of the Chhamia score — the hawker's cry, chana garam, worked up into a full number. Gyan Dutt composed it to lyrics by Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari, and both catalogues consulted credit Durrani as the sole voice, making it one of the few firmly attributed songs in the film. Durrani, whose light and highly articulate delivery made him the leading male playback voice of the early 1940s and the acknowledged model for the young Mohammed Rafi, was well placed for a song that lives on diction.

The recording is not in circulation, so the arrangement cannot be described. The song type, however, has a well-established shape in 1940s Hindi cinema: the vendor song borrows its melody from the actual sung cries of Indian street selling — pitched to carry, built on a short repeating phrase, ending on a rising call — and the film composer's job is to keep that shape recognisable while giving it a fixed metre and an accompaniment. Gyan Dutt, whose Ranjit Movietone years had been spent adapting folk and popular material for the gramophone, was working in familiar territory.

A vendor song is a boast in miniature: the whole text is a claim about the goods. Masaledaar — spiced, and by extension anything with heat and character in it — is doing double duty from the first word, since the same adjective that sells roasted gram in a Bombay lane is also how Hindustani describes a person who is lively, forward and not quite respectable. That is exactly the meaning of chhamiya, the film's title. A Pygmalion adaptation is a story about a woman whose way of speaking is treated as a defect to be corrected, and a street-selling cry is the purest specimen of that way of speaking — the voice of the market pitched at full volume. The song's placement in the film is not documented and this connection is an editorial reading, but it is a reading the title and the film's premise invite.

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. G.M. Durrani is credited as the sole voice on this title by both catalogues consulted.

G.M. Durrani's 1945 was a busy year in a career that would be largely displaced within five years by Mohammed Rafi — a singer who had openly modelled himself on Durrani and who ended up inheriting his territory. Chhamia belongs to that late peak, and this song has not been reissued: it is absent from the Durrani compilations, which draw on the better-distributed studio films. It survives as a title, a composer credit and a singer credit, which for an independently produced 1945 film is more than most songs manage.