आओ मन बहलायें साजन

One of nine songs Dakshina Mohan Tagore composed for P. C. Barua's Amiree (1945), and the second of only two from the film to resurface publicly, when the researcher Sadanand Kamath posted it on Atul's Song A Day in September 2021. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh names no singer for it; the Saregama-derived MySwar catalogue credits Neelima Banerjee, and Kamath, comparing the voice with her Bengali recordings, found the attribution convincing. The lyricist, as for every song in the film, is unrecorded.

The song is built on a gentle, mid-tempo melodic line that stays close to the speaking voice and resolves without ornament — the transparent, singable manner of the Calcutta light-song school rather than the raag-elaborated Bombay style of the same years. Listeners have consistently remarked that both the tune and the orchestration carry a distinctly Bengali flavour, which is unsurprising: Dakshina Mohan Tagore came to this, his only film score, from a life as a Kolkata instrumentalist and radio-orchestra player, and he wrote the way that world sang.

The lyric is an invitation rather than a lament. The speaker asks her companion to set the mind's own veena sounding so that the two of them can sing something beautiful together; she describes the inner garden as green and unblemished, and proposes that they pick the flowers of hope rather than go walking among thorns. The closing image is seasonal — buds stirring, an intoxication settling over the flowers, the wind swaying — so that the mood of the natural world is offered as the argument for the mood the singer wants. It belongs to a small and appealing category of 1940s film verse: the consolation song addressed not to a departed lover but to a present one who is downcast, in which distraction is proposed as a moral good rather than an escape.

Amiree was P. C. Barua's only release of 1945 and his last significant collaboration with Jamuna, made six years after he had left New Theatres. The film was a social drama, it failed commercially, and no plot summary of it survives in the reference literature — so this song has to stand largely on its own, without the scene it once belonged to. Its picturisation is unknown; when the recording was first published online in 2016 the blog's readers were explicitly asked, and could not say, how any of the film's songs had been staged.

The song's afterlife is entirely archival. It reached a modern audience only because a single mp3 of it came into the hands of a researcher who was writing about Dakshina Mohan Tagore's taar shehnai and used the recording as the occasion for the piece. That is now the standard route by which a 1945 flop's music survives at all: not through reissue or radio, but through a collector's transfer and a blog post. Along with 'Aayi Suhani Ritu Aayi', this is one of only two Amiree songs of which any audio is known to be publicly available.