आई सुहानी ऋतु आई

The seasonal song of Amiree (1945) and the first from the film to be published online, in December 2016. It is a straightforward welcome to the arriving season, framed by the two oldest signals of the north Indian monsoon lyric — the call of the papeeha and the movement of the easterly purvaai — and it ends where such songs almost always end, in a garden with a swing. Neither singer nor lyricist is named in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh; the singer attribution used here comes from the Saregama/HMV catalogue and remains contested.

The melody opens with the title phrase repeated and stretched into free vocalise before the rhythm settles, a device that lets the singer establish the season's mood before the song proper begins. What follows is light and buoyant, pitched high, with the refrain returning often enough to work as a chorus — the shape of a folk swing-song translated into studio arrangement. Dakshina Mohan Tagore keeps the accompaniment thin and lets the voice carry the piece, which is characteristic of the two surviving numbers from this score.

The verse works entirely through inherited monsoon signs. The papeeha's cry, the swaying purvaai, the invitation to a sakhi to come to the garden and swing: each of these is a fixed counter in the north Indian seasonal repertoire, and the lyric uses them without irony or elaboration. The one line that turns inward is the admission that a restlessness has taken hold of the heart — the standard emotional payload of the barsaat song, where the season's arrival is never merely weather but the return of longing. Because the words are undocumented as to authorship, the verse can only be described, not credited.

This was the song with which Amiree (1945) and its composer both made their first appearance in the modern online record of Hindi film music, when only its audio — no picturisation, no film print — could be produced. The film was directed by P. C. Barua for a Calcutta company, with Barua and Jamuna in the lead and a large supporting cast that included Ramola, Ahindra Choudhury, Molina, Maya Banerjee and Ranjit Roy. Readers were invited at the time to identify the voice or explain how the song was staged; two years later a first answer arrived, and it did not settle the question.

The identification dispute around this recording is itself a small case study in how pre-Partition film music is reconstructed. The Saregama/HMV listing credits Neelima Banerjee. Later, a specialist in voice identification proposed Suprabha Sarkar instead, and the researcher Sadanand Kamath — who had earlier passed on the Saregama credit — said he agreed with the revision. Both attributions are recorded here, with the catalogue name retained in the credits and the dispute noted, because no primary disc label evidence has been produced either way.