सुनो मोरे राजा

A Suraiya solo, D. N. Madhok's lyric, Ninu Majumdar's tune. The title is a direct address — listen to me, my raja — using the affectionate raja that Hindi film lyric borrowed from village speech for a husband or a lover. Collectors class it as an actor-singer number of the 'feelings of the heart' kind: the singer is on screen and is stating her own case rather than commenting on somebody else's. No print of the film is known to survive, so the song exists only as audio and its picturisation is nowhere documented.

Nothing about the arrangement is documented beyond the recording itself, so what can honestly be said is generic to the form: a mid-tempo heroine's solo of 1945 was built as a single melodic line in the middle of the voice over harmonium, light strings and a soft rhythm, with brief instrumental fills between the antaras and no orchestral introduction to speak of, because a three-minute 78-rpm side left no room for one. Ninu Majumdar was a classically schooled composer — a son of the silent-film producer Nagendra Mazumdar and a pupil of Ustad Faiyaz Khan — who described his aim in film music as bringing a classical touch to it by borrowing from the old masters. Suraiya at sixteen was the ideal instrument for that economy: a light, forward, unforced tone that needs no volume to be heard against a small ensemble.

The whole song is a request for a hearing, which in the Hindi film lyric of the period is a distinct and slightly unusual posture. Most heroine's solos of 1945 either declare a feeling or reproach a lover; this one asks first for the right to speak. Madhok's choice of raja rather than balma or sajan places the address in the domestic register — raja is what a wife calls a husband — which for a film about a marriage nobody remembers is a pointed word to put in the title. The vocabulary is village Hindi throughout: more rather than mere, the form that carries the sound of spoken affection rather than of written verse.

Mai Kya Karun was made at Flora Films, Bombay, directed by Sudhir Sen, and turns on a childhood marriage that two quarrelling fathers annulled in practice but never in fact: the grown children meet years later as strangers, the heroine (Suraiya) holding back because she has been raised to believe she is a child widow. The collector who catalogued the recording observed that, on the strength of the cast list, the number was certainly picturised on Suraiya herself — she is the only woman in the film who sings on the soundtrack. Beyond that, its position in the story is unrecorded. It was the second song of the film to be written about by collectors, in April 2014.

The song has no independent afterlife and does not appear in any retrospective list of 1945. Its value is as one of the three Suraiya solos on this soundtrack, which together form an unusually complete sample of how she sounded at sixteen — before Dard (1947) and Pyar Ki Jeet (1948) turned her into the most expensive actress-singer in the industry and before her voice acquired the settled poise of the later records.