ओ रसीली नींद आ तू

'O Raseeli Neend Aa Tu' — 'O sweet sleep, come' — is the lullaby or sleep song among the nine titles documented for Taramati (1945); HindiGeetMala and MySwar list it identically. The credit line is identical on all nine songs documented for the film: music by Ramchandra Pal and Keshavrao Bhole jointly, lyric by Mukhram Sharma 'Ashant'. No singer is named for any of them. No recording has surfaced, no lyric survives, and nothing is documented about where the number fell in the film.

The lullaby is the most constrained form on any soundtrack: it must be slow, it must be quiet, and it must repeat, because those are the conditions of the thing it is imitating. Composers generally answer that by keeping the melody within a narrow compass and letting the accompaniment thin out to almost nothing. Whether this recording did any of that is unknown — no disc has been traced, no singer is credited, and no description of the performance exists — so nothing about the actual sound of the song is asserted here.

'Raseeli' comes from 'ras' — juice, sap, and in poetics the essence or flavour of an emotion — so the adjective does two things at once: it makes sleep something with taste and weight, almost edible, and it quietly invokes the whole rasa vocabulary of classical aesthetics. Then the line addresses it directly, with 'tu', the intimate second person used for children, gods and things too familiar for formality. Sleep is being coaxed the way a child is coaxed, which is the standard inversion of the lullaby: the singer performs on the listener the very persuasion the song describes. Whether this was sung to a child, to a grieving adult, or by someone unable to sleep at all is not documented, and no lyric text has been found.

The film was directed by Raja Nene for Ramnik Productions and shot, according to Wikipedia's list of Marathi films of 1945, simultaneously in Marathi and Hindi. Nothing of its content can be examined: no print circulates, and no plot summary or contemporary review turned up in any accessible source. A sleep song sits naturally in the Harishchandra story, whose queen spends much of the tale with a small son in her care, but the connection is one the song list suggests rather than one any source states.

No transfer of this recording is known and no singer is attached to it, so the song survives as a title and a pair of composer credits. Its presence in the list is nonetheless informative: a lullaby and a lament in the same nine-song soundtrack indicate a film that gave its heroine and her child real screen time, which is the emphasis the film's title — the queen's name rather than the king's — already implies.