आजा सलोने सिपहिया

'Aaja Salone Sipahiya' is the sixth song on the Parinde (1945) record listing and the film's song of waiting: with Ashok gone to the Burma front, it is the heroine left behind who sings. HindiGeetMala credits Srimati Ghosh; MySwar lists it under the title 'Aaja Aaja Salone Sipaiyya' and credits Vanmala, who is the actress it is picturised on; Sadanand Kamath, writing on Atul's Song A Day after seeing the film, states that the voice is Parul Ghosh, credited in the film's own titles as Shrimati Ghosh. It was the second Parinde song ever posted on that blog, on 17 December 2016, and one of the few for which video as well as audio was available.

This is a call-song, built on a repeated summons that returns after each turn of the verse — the shape Hindi film music used through the 1940s whenever a woman had to be shown waiting. The female line carries it alone, unhurried, in the light folk-tinted manner the period used for songs of this kind, and Gobind Ram keeps the setting behind it rather than over it. The blogger who transcribed it from the surviving copy could not make out every word, which says as much about the condition of the source as about the singing. Nothing about its raag, taal, tempo or instrumentation is documented, and none is asserted here.

The address is the whole point of the song. The woman does not call to a lover in the abstract but to a sipahiya — a soldier — and the affectionate salone attached to it turns a wartime rank into a household endearment. That single compound is what makes this a 1945 song rather than a timeless one: the man who has not come home is not away on trade or exile, as in the older poetry of separation, but in uniform. Rammurti Chaturvedi then works the plea against monsoon imagery, the gathering dark clouds that Hindi poetry has used to sharpen absence for centuries, and mixes the soldier's title with the older devotional-romantic names for the beloved, so that the same voice can sound like a village wife and like a woman addressing an absent god. No lyric text is reproduced here.

By this point in Parinde, Ashok has enlisted, trained as a pilot and gone to the Burma frontier, leaving Shyama behind; what she does not know is that he has rescued a girl, Neela, at the front, and that her own father's business partner — a doctor who wants Shyama for himself — is about to use that rescue to convince her the engagement is over. The song belongs to the interval before that manoeuvre lands: she is simply waiting, and Kamath, who has seen the print, describes the picturisation as a straightforward missing-the-beloved number on Vanmala.

This is one of the four Parinde songs to have reached Atul's Song A Day, and the post drew a run of reader comments — a small measure of attention for a film that has otherwise disappeared. Its lasting interest is the credit question it raises: the film billed its female playback simply as Shrimati Ghosh, and it took a listener decades later to put the name Parul Ghosh — Anil Biswas's sister and the flautist Pannalal Ghosh's wife — to the voice. Kamath also recorded his surprise that Vanmala, herself a trained singer, was given playback at all in this film. The song's own popularity never extended beyond that circle of collectors.