मेरे नाक की नथनी

One of four numbers Nirmala Devi sings for herself in Chalis Karod, and the one whose title places it most squarely in the rural-idiom ornament song. The nathni — the nose-ring — is among the most heavily worked objects in North Indian folk and film lyric: it marks a woman as married, it is the most visible thing she wears, and it is therefore the natural pivot for a teasing song about being looked at. Nirmala Devi, a Patiala-gharana vocalist born in Benares and trained in thumri, dadra and kajri, was unusually well equipped to sing that register without condescending to it.

No recording is in circulation, so nothing can be claimed about how this particular number was set. What is documented is Gobind Ram's manner in these years: light melodic writing with a ghazal and thumri inflection rather than a distinctly Punjabi folk one, a small orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi and tabla, and tunes pitched to sit comfortably in the middle of a classically trained voice instead of stretching it. For a song of this kind the period convention was a dholak-led medium tempo and a short, repeatable mukhda built to be picked up by an audience on first hearing; whether Gobind Ram followed it here cannot be verified without the record.

The title announces a whole grammar. In the ornament song the woman's jewellery does the talking she cannot do directly: the nose-ring catches the light, catches a glance, and becomes the excuse for a complaint that is really a boast, or a boast that is really an invitation. The form belongs to the village wedding repertoire before it belongs to cinema, and Hindi films of the 1940s borrowed it wholesale because it let a heroine be flirtatious inside a socially permitted frame — she is not talking about desire, she is talking about her nathni. Pandit Indra, who wrote in this idiom as fluently as in the Urdu one, is credited with the words. The text itself is not reproduced here.

Chalis Karod — 'Forty Crores', the number that stood through the 1940s for the population of undivided India — was directed by Nanabhai Bhatt for Chandra Art Productions of Bombay, a year before Bhatt set up his own Deepak Pictures. Gobind Ram composed, Pandit Indra and I. C. Kapoor were credited with the songs, and the cast paired Nirmala Devi with her husband Arun Kumar Ahuja alongside Yakub, Agha and Gope. No plot summary of the film survives in any source consulted for this entry, so the nine song titles are effectively all that remains of what the picture was about. Nirmala Devi had made her acting debut in 1942 and married her co-star Arun Kumar Ahuja the same year; Chalis Karod is one of the films in which the two appear together, and it falls in the short window before she left acting for the classical concert platform.

The song has no independent afterlife; what it documents is a working practice that was about to end. Within a few years the singer-actress — a woman who both played the part and sang it — would be almost extinct in Hindi cinema, replaced by the division between a face on screen and a voice behind it. Nirmala Devi herself moved to the other side of that line, and her later film work is purely playback: Shama Parwana (1954), Bawarchi (1972), Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985). Nothing of the recording is in general circulation today: there is no known commercial reissue and no print of the film in public availability. Its survival is documentary — a line in the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue and the Cinemaazi credit sheet — which is the ordinary fate of most of the roughly two hundred Hindi films released each year in the mid-1940s.