रुत ये सुहानी आई गुइयाँ

'Rut Yeh Suhani Aayi Guiyan' is the seasonal song in the Bhai Jaan (1945) score, composed by Shyam Sundar to a lyric by Partau Lakhnavi. Both English Wikipedia and MySwar record it as a group performance — 'chorus' and 'various artists' respectively — and HindiGeetMala names no singer at all. No individual voice is therefore credited here: the singer field is left empty rather than filled with a guess.

Seasonal songs in Hindi cinema of this period sit on folk metre rather than on the ghazal's long lines, which changes everything about the setting: a shorter phrase, a stronger downbeat, and a refrain designed to be answered by a second group of voices. Shyam Sundar's own folk vocabulary was Punjabi — he had come to Bombay from Lahore and had scored four Punjabi films before this — and the melodic simplicity that is a constant in his work suits an antiphonal seasonal number as well as it suits a ghazal. In a nine-song album that Filmindia found oppressively full of ghazals, this is one of only two numbers that break the pattern.

'Guiyan' — also written gujiya or guiya — is the Awadhi and Bhojpuri word for a girl's close companion, the sakhi to whom the seasonal songs of north India are addressed. Its presence in an otherwise Urdu album is significant: Partau Lakhnavi steps out of the Persianate register of the ghazals and into the eastern Hindi of the women's folk repertoire, where the arrival of a season is announced to a friend rather than lamented to a beloved. The 'suhani rut' formula — the sweet or pleasant season — belongs to the same tradition and typically signals spring or the coming of the rains. The film is lost and no song booklet survives, so the specific season named in the verses cannot be established from the title alone.

Bhai Jaan is a household drama, and the ensemble numbers in it — this one and the godbharai song — are the places where the household appears as a household rather than as a set of colliding individuals. Filmindia's synopsis describes a home 'where love and harmony had ruled once' before a ward's malice split the brothers apart, and a communal seasonal song is one of the few devices available to a 1945 screenplay for showing that earlier state directly. Whether it opens the picture or comes as a flashback cannot be determined; the print is lost.

This is one of the entries where the honest catalogue is a thin one. The title, the composer, the lyricist and the year are documented; the voices are not, and no source names them. Group songs from lost 1940s films are the most common casualty of this kind — sung by uncredited ensembles, rarely pressed as singles, and therefore invisible to the singer-indexed compilations that preserved so much else from the decade.