रैन अँधेरी बादल गरजे

Zohrabai Ambalewali's solo on the Chalis Karod soundtrack, and the title that best suits her instrument. Her voice — a rich, slightly husky contralto carrying real classical weight — was the one composers of the mid-1940s reached for when a song needed gravity rather than sweetness, and a dark-night-and-thunder lyric is exactly that kind of song. Gobind Ram had been among the composers who brought her into Hindi film music in the first place, some years before Naushad's Rattan (1944) made her the most talked-about female voice in the industry.

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. The rain song had its own conventions by 1945 — a low, rolling accompaniment standing in for thunder, and a melody that sat deliberately in the darker part of the singer's range — but nothing about this particular arrangement can be confirmed without the disc.

The barsaat lyric is one of the few places in this poetry where the weather is not decoration. A dark night and thunder are the conditions under which the beloved's absence becomes unbearable rather than merely sad, because the storm is what a person is supposed to be sheltered from and being alone in it is the whole argument. The figure runs from the Ashadha of classical Sanskrit poetry through the kajri and malhar traditions of the monsoon into film song, where it became one of the most reliably productive song situations in Hindi cinema. Pandit Indra's title places this song squarely in that line. The text is not reproduced here, and no claim is made about the raag.

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. Zohrabai Ambalewali sings two of the nine songs here — this solo and the duet 'Jago Jago Savdhaan Ho' with Khan Mastana — in the same year that Rattan's success had made her the busiest female voice in Bombay.

Zohrabai Ambalewali's reputation rests on her Naushad recordings and not on work like this, which has fallen out of the record entirely. But the bulk of her output was exactly this: solid, professional, uncelebrated songs for composers across the industry during the seven or eight years when hers was the standard female voice, before the lighter Lata-era idiom displaced it. 'Rain Andheri Badal Garaje' belongs to that unread majority of her catalogue. 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.