मदभरी मदभरी मतवारी

'Madbhari Madbhari Matwari' is a Kanan Devi solo from Lagan (1941), set to R.C. Boral's music with lyrics by D.N. Madhok. Lighter and more lilting than the film's devotional and longing songs, it shows the playful end of Kanan Devi's range in this New Theatres production.

D.N. Madhok employs 'madbhari' and 'matwari' — two near-synonyms for intoxicated, heady, giddy — in a doubled-word opening, a rhetorical device called yamaka or dvirvacana that goes back to Sanskrit poetry and forward through Braj and Urdu verse into the film song. The repetition mimics the dizzy, circling sensation of the state it describes. 'Madbhari' (filled with intoxicant, perhaps wine or romance) and 'matwari' (drunk, from the root 'matwa', intoxicated one) together build a picture of a woman caught in the pleasurable vertigo of romance. This is the matted register in Hindi poetry — the language of the enchanted devotee or the intoxicated lover — which Madhok could deploy for devotional songs (as in several of his bhajan lyrics) or, as here, for a romantic film number where spiritual and erotic intoxication share vocabulary.

Within Lagan's (1941) soundtrack, 'Madbhari Madbhari Matwari' occupies the lightest register — a welcome counterweight to the film's philosophical Saigal solos and its more tender Kanan Devi longing-songs. Kanan Devi's range in the film was deliberately varied to show her capacity for moods beyond the melancholic and devotional. R.C. Boral set this number at a medium, lilting tempo — not quite fast enough to be dance-driven but with enough rhythmic buoyancy to suggest a woman caught in pleasurable giddiness. The instrumentation would have used the New Theatres' standard ensemble but in a lighter texture, without the bass-heavy harmonic grounding typical of Saigal's slow philosophical numbers.