ओ जाने वाले मतवाले

"O Jaane Wale Matwale" is a Zohrabai Ambalewali solo from Sanyasi (1945), music by Naushad and lyrics by Pandit Madhur. It is credited to her alone in both the hindigeetmala listing and the Wikipedia soundtrack table, and survives in at least two transfers on 78-rpm collector channels, running between two and three quarters and three minutes.

The tune moves at a walking medium tempo, which suits an address to someone in the act of leaving, and Naushad keeps the accompaniment thin enough that the voice stays the only thing in the foreground. Zohrabai attacks the opening vocative squarely rather than sliding into it — a hallmark of singers trained on the concert stage rather than the microphone — and the melody returns to its opening phrase often enough to work as a refrain a listener could pick up on one hearing, which is how songs travelled in the 78-rpm market.

'Matwala' is an untranslatable compliment: literally intoxicated, it is used for someone carefree to the point of heedlessness, and it carries admiration as much as reproach. Applied to a figure walking away from the speaker, it makes the departure a matter of temperament rather than of rejection — he goes because that is what he is, not because of anything she did. In a film whose title character is a sanyasi, a renunciate who by definition leaves, that word does a great deal of work. The full text of Pandit Madhur's verse is not documented and no line of it is reproduced here.

The film's story and dialogue were by Azm Bazidpuri, the camera was Dwarkadas Diwecha's and the cutting M. Moosa's, all working at Kardar Studios — a plant Kardar had built up after buying out Circo Productions in 1939, and reputedly the first in Bombay with air-conditioned make-up rooms. No plot summary of Sanyasi survives in the accessible reference literature, so the songs and the character names are most of what can be reconstructed of the film: Radha, Mohan, Kiran, Tulsi, Chetan, Ramdas, Banke and Chobe, around a nameless sanyasi.

The song's afterlife is entirely archival: it exists because private collectors digitised their shellac and put it on video-sharing channels, which is how most of the pre-1950 Hindi film repertoire outside the famous titles has survived at all. Sanyasi has never had a commercial soundtrack reissue.