रुनक झुनक चपल चरण नाच

Amrapali of Vaishali was, in the traditional accounts, the rajnartaki — the court dancer — as much as she was the nagarvadhu, and this is the soundtrack's dance number. 'Runak Jhunak Chapal Charan Naach' opens with pure onomatopoeia: runak-jhunak is the sound of ghungroos, chapal charan the quick, restless feet, and naach the imperative to dance. Amirbai Karnataki is the credited singer.

A fast, rhythm-led composition — the one place in this score where Saraswati Devi's percussion has to lead rather than support. Songs of this type in mid-1940s Bombay were built on tabla and dholak with a repeating tuned figure over the top, engineered so that the on-screen footwork and the recorded rhythm could be cut together. The title's opening syllables function as a rhythmic cue as much as a lyric.

Kavi Pradeep writes here in almost pure Braj-flavoured sound rather than statement: runak jhunak is not a word with a meaning so much as a noise with a shape, and chapal ('nimble', 'restless') is a classical epithet for feet in Sanskrit and Braj dance poetry. The line asks nothing and argues nothing — it simply names the sound the scene is making, which is what a filmed dance needs from a lyric.

Amrapali (1945) was directed by Nandlal Jaswantlal for Murli Movietone and drew on the legend of Amrapali of Vaishali, the celebrated nagarvadhu of the Licchavi republic who, in the traditional account, renounced her position and gave her mango grove and fortune to the Buddha's order. Sabita Devi, Prem Adib, Jeevan, Arun, Jagdish Sethi, Badri Prasad, Gulab and Sankatha Prasad are the documented cast. Saraswati Devi composed eleven songs for the picture to lyrics by Kavi Pradeep — one of the few soundtracks she wrote after leaving Bombay Talkies.

The dance songs of the mid-1940s costume pictures are the part of that cycle least likely to survive, because they depend on the visual sequence they were written for — and the film is not in circulation. What the entry preserves is the shape of the soundtrack: a score that had to cover a court dancer's world and a renunciant's, and this is the former.