सैयाँ तोहे बुलबुल कहूँ

Amirbai Karnataki is credited as the singer on this Bulo C. Rani composition, with the words attributed to Pandit Indra. The title's grammar is worth noticing: it is a question, not a statement - shall I call you a bulbul? - which makes the song an act of naming in progress rather than a finished compliment, and that shape has a long history in the Braj-inflected love lyric, where the lover works through a series of possible epithets and finds each one inadequate. Nothing of the recording has surfaced, so this entry records the credits, the film context and the sense of the title, and stops there.

The recording has not been located and its setting cannot be described. The title's diction - saiyyan, tohe, kahu - is the vocabulary of thumri and of the folk-derived film song rather than of the ghazal, which suggests the number belonged to the lighter end of a soundtrack otherwise weighted towards separation, but that is an inference from words alone and no musical claim is made here. Bulo C. Rani's documented practice at Ranjit in 1945 was a spare accompaniment built on harmonium, light strings and dholak or tabla, with the melody carried by the singer.

The bulbul is the standard bird of Persian and Urdu love poetry, where it sings all night to a rose that cannot answer, and by 1945 it had been thoroughly absorbed into Hindi film lyric as shorthand for a beautiful, restless, singing thing. What makes the title interesting is the direction of the compliment. In the inherited convention the bulbul is the lover and the rose is the beloved, so a woman calling her saiyyan a bulbul quietly reverses the standard casting: she puts him in the position of the one who sings and pines, and by implication takes the rose's place herself. Whether the song develops that inversion or simply enjoys the epithet cannot be known, because nothing beyond the opening phrase has been recovered, and the sources do not settle which of the film's three billed lyricists wrote it.

Kidar Sharma directed Chand Chakori for Ranjit Movietone in 1945, between Mumtaz Mahal (1944) and Dhanna Bhagat (1945). Mumtaz Shanti, two years past Kismet and among the biggest draws in the country, took the female lead opposite the singer-actor Surendra. Bulo C. Rani supplied thirteen songs. Only Amirbai Karnataki is named as a singer anywhere in the film's catalogue record, on seven titles including this one; the picture finished sixth among 1945's Indian earners and then vanished almost completely from the record.

Read alongside the rest of the soundtrack, this title does useful work: it is the evidence that Chand Chakori was not thirteen laments. A score that contains a jogan song, a wind-as-messenger song and a sinking-boat song also contained at least one number in the lighter, teasing register of the thumri, which is how commercial soundtracks of the period were actually balanced. That balance is the kind of thing that disappears first when only a couple of recordings survive, and the song list is now the only place it can be read at all.