सजाई किसलिए जा रही है

The last of the thirteen titles catalogued for Chand Chakori (1945), composed by Bulo C. Rani, credited to Pandit Indra, with no singer named. Its grammar carries almost all of its meaning: the sentence is passive throughout, so the woman at its centre is not adorning herself but being adorned, and the question asks the purpose of an act performed on her by other people. In Hindi film writing that construction has one dominant setting - a bride being prepared - and it is most often used at the moment when the preparation is unwanted. Without a recording or a plot summary none of that can be confirmed for this song, and the entry does not claim it.

No recording has been located and nothing is asserted about the music. The song is documented only as one of the thirteen Bulo C. Rani wrote for this picture; whether it was a solo, a duet or a chorus number, at what tempo and with what accompaniment, is not recorded anywhere, so those fields are left out.

Sajana - to decorate, to adorn, to make ready - is a word Hindi uses for houses, shrines, palanquins and brides alike, and in each case the thing adorned is being prepared for someone else's eyes. Putting it in the passive removes the woman's will from the sentence entirely, and asking kisliye, for what purpose, turns the adornment into a problem rather than a pleasure. The line therefore does something the wedding song ordinarily cannot: it looks at the ritual from the outside and asks what it is for. Whether the speaker is the woman herself, a friend, or someone watching from a distance is not determinable from the fragment that survives, and neither is what answer the song went on to give.

Chand Chakori was a Ranjit Movietone picture of 1945, directed by Kidar Sharma from a story that has not survived, starring Mumtaz Shanti and Surendra, and scored by Bulo C. Rani. It was the sixth highest-grossing Indian release of the year. Its thirteen songs are the only part of it still legible, and six of them - including this one - reached the catalogues with no singer attached, which is why this record leaves those arrays empty rather than filling them from the cast list.

Set beside the film's title, this song completes a pattern worth noting. Chand Chakori names a bird that loves at a fixed distance; its songs include a woman turned renunciant by a departure, a wind asked to carry what cannot be said, a boat going down, and a woman being dressed for a purpose she has to ask about. Taken together the titles describe a film about women whose situations are decided elsewhere. That reading is drawn from the list itself and not from a plot, because no plot survives - but the list is real evidence, and it is what this catalogue can honestly offer.