ये रंग बिरंगी डोर रे

'Ye Rang Birangi Dor Re' is the only duet in Mazdoor (1945), sung by Amirbai Karnataki with Manna Dey — who was then barely three years into his Bombay career and still years away from the recognition Mashaal (1950) and the Raj Kapoor films would bring. Gopal Singh Nepali wrote it, Hari Prasanna Das composed it, and the song takes a coloured thread as its governing image and works outward from it to a wish for a shared future. It runs 3:07 on the Saregama/HMV reissue.

The recording has not been assessed here by listening and no published description of its arrangement has been located, so nothing is asserted about its raag, metre or instrumentation. What is worth noting is the casting: pairing Amirbai Karnataki, one of the busiest and most bankable female voices in Bombay in 1945, with a singer as new as Manna Dey was an unusual balance, and it tells you where Manna Dey stood in the studio hierarchy at the time — good enough to be given the duet and the album's other male solo, not yet a name a producer would advertise. Hari Prasanna Das clearly rated him: two years later he would take Manna Dey on as his assistant on Veeranganaa (1947).

Nepali's controlling figure is a length of coloured thread, and it does double duty in a film set around a textile mill: the thread is the lovers' bond and it is also, unavoidably, the raw material of the place they both work. From that single object the lyric opens into colour — the sense of a world seen as bright and various — and then into an ordinary, unglamorous wish for a life built together. It is a young-love song rather than a virtuoso one; the vocabulary is plain Hindi, the images are drawn from the countryside and the household rather than from Persianate love-poetry, and the whole thing is pitched at the register of two people making a plan rather than two people suffering.

Mazdoor's plot puts a village couple on either side of an industrial divide: the young man goes to the city for work and rises inside the mill, the girl he left behind turns up at the same mill looking for a job, and the labour dispute that follows forces him to choose. The film was Nitin Bose's first at Filmistan and gave Nasir Khan — Dilip Kumar's younger brother — his screen debut, opposite two first-time heroines, Indumati and Veera. As the album's only duet, this is the song that carries the romance the rest of the plot then tests.

The duet's chief interest today is documentary: it is one of the small number of Hindi film recordings that catch Manna Dey before he was Manna Dey. He had begun in 1942 under his uncle K. C. Dey, spent the 1940s singing and assisting rather than headlining, and only broke through at the turn of the 1950s. The Mazdoor tracks sit squarely in that pre-recognition stretch of his career, and they survive because the album was reissued even though the film was not preserved.