सैयाँ रे सैयाँ

The last of the nine songs in the film's documented running order, and the one about which least survives. HindiGeetMala lists it as 'Saiya Re Saiyya'; MySwar gives it as 'Man Achha Ki Nain Saajna (Saiyan Re Saiyan)', assigning the composition to Anupam Ghatak alone where HindiGeetMala assigns it to Lachhiram Tamar. No singer is named in either. A short upload attributed to the film circulates, but no 78-rpm collector's transfer of the side has surfaced and nothing carrying it names a voice. The singers array is therefore empty by design.

No recording of the song is in circulation, so its arrangement cannot be described. Both credited composers of the film are listed on it here, following the practice used across this album, because the two catalogues that name a composer name different ones.

'Saiyan' is the village Hindi word for husband or lover, and doubling it into a call — saiyan re saiyan — is the standard way folk song addresses him. The alternate title is more interesting: it sets the heart against the eyes and asks which of the two is the better guide, a question the bhakti and shringar traditions both put and answer differently. Whether the song develops that question or merely opens with it cannot be known — no lyric text survives in any source, and none is invented here.

Champa was made at Shorey Pictures in Lahore for the producer Roop K. Shorey and directed by Barkat Ram Mehra; it opened at the Crown cinema in Lahore in October 1945 with Manorama, Asha Posley, Hari Shivdasani, Majnu, Salma and Zahoor Shah in the cast. No plot summary of the film survives, and no print is known to circulate — the discs, issued on Columbia and now in the Saregama catalogue, are effectively the whole of what is left of it. This song closes the documented list of nine, which is also the number the census of 1945 releases assigns to the film — so the soundtrack as catalogued here is complete, even though five of its nine sides are titles and nothing more.

Nothing of this song survives beyond two catalogue entries that do not agree with each other about its name or its composer. It has no 78-rpm collector's transfer and no lyric text, and it is preserved here only so that the record of Champa's soundtrack is complete rather than convenient.