मोरी ऊँची अटरिया पे

'Mori Oonchi Atariya Pe' is one of three songs from Sawan (1945) for which a singer credit survives, and the only one that any catalogue lists as a solo: hindigeetmala.net and myswar.co both give it to Amirbai Karnataki alone, while the Hindi Film Geet Kosh adds unnamed additional voices, then one of the most heavily recorded female voices in Bombay. C. Ramchandra composed it to lyrics by I. C. Kapoor. Both hindigeetmala.net and myswar.co, working from the same Hindi Film Geet Kosh-derived listings, agree on the attribution; nothing else about the song's picturisation or placement in the film is documented.

No recording of the song is in public circulation, so its arrangement cannot be described from the sound. What can be said is where it sits in C. Ramchandra's development: in 1945 he was still working mainly in the folk-and-light-classical idiom of the mid-1940s Bombay 'social', years before the alto saxophone, guitar and Latin-tinged rhythms that would make Albela (1951) sound like nothing else in Hindi cinema. A first-person 'atariya' lyric of this period would conventionally have been set to a dholak-led, medium-tempo tune with harmonium and sarangi filling the spaces between vocal lines, and Amirbai's open, slightly nasal, thumri-inflected delivery was one of the reasons composers reached for exactly that setting.

The atariya — the flat upper terrace of a north Indian house — is one of the fixed stages of Hindi and Braj love poetry. It is the height from which a woman can see the road her beloved will come down and, equally, the height from which the whole neighbourhood can see her. The Geet Kosh preserves enough of the mukhda to show the line is an invitation rather than a vigil — the terrace is where the beloved is being summoned, and the summons is paired with a request not to be shy. To open a song with 'mori oonchi atariya pe' is therefore to set up both longing and exposure in a single phrase: the private feeling and the public gaze that will judge it. Hundreds of folk songs, thumris and film lyrics use the image, and I. C. Kapoor is drawing on that shared inheritance rather than inventing a figure. The first-person feminine possessive 'mori' places the speaker in the folk register rather than the Urdu one, which suits a picture named for the monsoon.

Sawan (1945) was produced by Sanjivan Art Productions of Bombay and directed by Dwarka Khosla, with Motilal and Shanta Apte at the head of the cast. C. Ramchandra wrote all nine songs to lyrics by I. C. Kapoor; no plot summary of the film survives in accessible sources, so what is known of its content comes almost entirely from the song titles preserved in the record catalogues. Amirbai Karnataki's presence on this disc is the clearest single fact about the score: by 1945 she was a fixture of Bombay recording, and a producer buying her voice for a song was buying recognisability. Nothing in the surviving material says which actress the song was picturised on, and it is not assumed here that it was Shanta Apte, who sang for herself in other films.

The song has not been reissued, uploaded or anthologised, and it is absent from the compilations that keep Amirbai Karnataki's 1940s work in circulation. Its surviving value is documentary: it adds one more title to the list of what Amirbai recorded in her busiest year, and it fixes C. Ramchandra and Amirbai Karnataki as collaborators in 1945 — a pairing far better known from later, louder films.