सावन की बदली ने

The last of Kanan Devi's seven solos in the Ban Phool listing, and the film's monsoon song. Sawan — Shravan, the height of the rains — is the most heavily coded month in the North Indian song calendar: it is the season of the swing, of women's festivals, and above all of virah, the separation of a woman from an absent man. A title that begins with 'the monsoon cloud has…' is a title that has already told its audience what emotional territory it is in. Dhiren Mitra composed the score; Pandit Madhur is the credited lyricist.

No recording is in circulation and no description of the music survives, so nothing is asserted about its melody, tempo or instrumentation. The album-level observation is that Dhiren Mitra ends Kanan Devi's run of songs on the seasonal register rather than the dramatic one — a monsoon number is a durable gramophone item in a way a plot-specific song is not, and composers of the period routinely built one into a score precisely so that the record could outlive the film. In this case it did: the record listing is now more complete than anything else that survives of Ban Phool.

In the barahmasa reckoning that Hindi film lyric inherited from folk poetry, Sawan is not weather but a legal fiction of feeling: the month when the rains make travel impossible, when the man who left has definitively not returned, and when a woman's longing is socially licensed to be sung aloud. The badli — a passing cloud, lighter than the full ghata — is the standard trigger object; it arrives, it darkens, it is watched, and it makes the absence measurable. Ban Phool sets this against 'Hai Phagun Ki Raat' at the other end of the year, so that the score carries both of the seasonal poles between which the Hindi love song has always moved.

The film places Kanan Devi's Champa in a village ordered by a zamindar's household — Devi Mukherjee as Narendra, Ahindra Choudhury as Ramlal, Rajmohan as Ramesh Chacha — with Krishnakant as Kishore. No plot summary of Ban Phool has survived in the filmographies and databases consulted, so it is not known whether this song accompanies a separation in the story or simply supplies the seasonal set-piece such films were expected to contain. The production was P. R. Productions, Calcutta; Niren Lahiri directed and P.N. Roy produced.

The song was not reissued and has not been written about. What it leaves behind is a shape: a 1945 Calcutta-made Hindi score that carefully assembled the north Indian seasonal repertoire — Phagun, Sawan, the garden, the flower-seller — around one Bengali star's voice, in order to sell to an audience a thousand miles away. Ban Phool's soundtrack is a better record of what that market demanded than of what the film was.