तू तार बजा मैं गाती हूँ

'Tu Taar Baja Main Gati Hoon' is the most self-referential title in Albeli's song list: it describes a performance being organised, one person on the strings and another on the voice. In a film whose characters live on the street and earn by selling and performing, a number of this kind has an obvious place. G. A. Chishti composed it, and as with every song in the film neither singer nor lyricist is recorded. No recording has been located; the entry preserves the title and its context.

No recording is available and the arrangement cannot be described. The title does imply a structural choice, though: a song that names an instrument in its first line normally gives that instrument the opening phrase and lets it answer the voice between lines. If Albeli followed the convention, a plucked or bowed string would have carried the introduction and the singer would have entered over it - the cheapest and most effective way to dramatise a street performance on a 1945 sound stage.

The line is a small contract between two performers, and the interest of it is that the voice claims the harder half. The verb is first-person feminine, so the singer is a woman instructing a man to accompany her - an inversion of the usual on-screen arrangement in which a male performer leads and a woman responds. In a film about a street girl who earns her own living, that reversal is likely to be the point rather than an accident. Nothing beyond this first line survives, and the Geet Kosh does not name the writer.

Albeli (1945) was made by Talwar Productions of Calcutta and directed by the company's proprietor R. C. Talwar, who also wrote the story; J. S. Casshyap supplied the screenplay and dialogue. Shooting began in Lahore and was completed in Calcutta, and the picture opened at the Central Cinema in Bombay on 22 December 1945. The plot follows a street girl in love with a gypsy boy who is wanted by two other young women as well; Ramola headed a cast that included the actor-singer Satish, Rooplekha, Manorama, Usha, Sunder and Hiralal. G. A. Chishti composed all twelve songs, and Baburao Patel's filmindia gave the film a hostile notice in its March 1946 issue.

The performance-within-a-performance song was one of the few devices available to a low-budget film for putting music on screen without stopping the story, and Albeli, set among hawkers and gypsies, could use it more naturally than most. That the film contained such a number is now the whole of what is known about it. Its survival as a title in a reconstructed catalogue is typical of the score: twelve songs documented, four heard, the rest waiting for a shellac disc to turn up in somebody's collection.