मोरी गलियों की पीपल निशानी

'Mori Galiyon Ki Peepal Nishani' is a Snehprabha Pradhan solo written by D. N. Madhok and composed by Bulo C. Rani. MySwar lists it as the third track on the album and files it as Filmi.

A song organised around a remembered place tends to be written slower than its tempo marking suggests, because the singer has to leave room between phrases for the thing being remembered. The folk-Hindi diction of the title points the setting the same way the melody would: towards the village-song register Bulo C. Rani uses across much of Preet rather than towards the ghazal manner he reserves for the Wali Saheb lyrics. Nothing about the actual arrangement is documented.

Nishani is a token, a mark, the thing left behind by which something is identified later — and Madhok gives that job to a peepal tree. The choice is not decorative. The peepal is the tree villages are organised around: it is where the panchayat sits, where women gather, where a lane can be located from a distance. To say that the peepal is the nishani of my lanes is to give directions and to grieve at the same time, and to assume that the person being addressed will one day need to find the place again without her in it. The full text is not reproduced on this page.

HindiGeetMala and MySwar both credit 'Mori Galiyon Ki Peepal Nishani' to Snehprabha Pradhan, with D. N. Madhok as lyricist and Bulo C. Rani as composer. Preet was made at Krishin Movietone, the Bombay banner Ram Daryani had set up with his brother K. S. Daryani in 1938, and Daryani directed it himself. Bulo C. Rani composed all thirteen songs; D. N. Madhok wrote ten of them and Wali Saheb the other three. MySwar records the discs as a Columbia Records release. Cinemaazi and the Wikipedia list of 1945 Hindi films give the cast as Snehprabha Pradhan, Chandra Mohan, Nazir Ahmad, Pahari Sanyal, Swarnalata, Gope, Miss Gulab and Majid. No plot summary of the picture survives in any source that can be consulted without a paywall, and the film has no Wikipedia article of its own, so nothing is asserted here about what happens in it.

Snehprabha Pradhan (1915-1993) is credited as the singer on seven of Preet's thirteen tracks — more than any other voice on the record — while also playing the film's female lead. She belongs to the generation of Hindi and Marathi actress-singers whose own voices went onto the discs, in the years just before dedicated playback singing hardened into a separate profession. She later published an autobiography, Snehankita, in the 1970s. Preet itself survives today only as a catalogue: a thirteen-song list preserved through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the databases built on it, with no print known to circulate and no plot summary in open circulation.