सावन आया साजन नहीं आया रे

Hamida Banu takes three of Moorti's ten songs, and this is the most immediately recognisable of them — a sawan song, built on the standing contract between the monsoon and the returning traveller. She was about seventeen when it was recorded, only two years past her first film work, and would go on working in Bombay for another decade before moving to Pakistan in 1956. Bulo C. Rani gives her a folk-shaped tune rather than a classical one, which is the usual register for this subject: the sawan song belongs to the courtyard and the village, not the concert platform.

The melody moves in the short, repeating phrases of a folk kajri rather than in the long arcs of a raag exposition, and the accompaniment stays where Ranjit's music always stayed in these years — harmonium, light percussion, a string line shadowing the voice. Hamida Banu's instrument was lighter and less imposing than Khursheed's, and the composer uses that: this is the album's least weighted track, sung almost conversationally, so that the point of the song arrives by statement rather than by force.

Sawan and sajan rhyme, and the whole Hindi tradition of the rainy-season song lives inside that rhyme. The monsoon is the season by which absence is measured, because it is the season in which travellers were expected home before the roads became impassable; a sawan that arrives without the sajan is therefore not merely disappointing but calendrically wrong. Pandit Indra adds no ornament to the figure, and the restraint is the point — the line works because it has worked for several centuries.

Hamida Banu was born in Lahore in 1928 and had begun recording for films around 1943, when Bhagwan Dada recommended her to C. Ramchandra. By 1945 she was working steadily in Bombay, and Moorti gave her the second-largest share of a soundtrack after Khursheed. She moved to Pakistan in 1956, where she worked at Radio Lahore, and died in Lahore in 2006 — one of the several careers of this period that were cut in half by Partition and its aftermath. The song itself survives only as audio; the archivist who posted it in 2011 wrote that it was impossible to guess how or on whom it had been picturised.

It is a small song and it has stayed small, but it has stayed. Four separate transfers of the disc are in circulation among collectors of 1940s shellac, and Atul's Song A Day, posting it in September 2011, concluded that despite the film's obscurity 'listening to this song is a nice experience' — which for a Ranjit programme picture of 1945 is a fair summary of what survives.