अलबेली सहेली बता दे

Shama's one solo in Prabhu Ka Ghar (1945), and one of five songs in the film credited to Bulo C. Rani rather than Khemchand Prakash. Both hindigeetmala and myswar agree on the credits: Shama singing, Bulo C. Rani composing, Pandit Indra writing. The title is a sakhi song — a young woman putting a question to her friend — one of the oldest and most durable devices in north Indian women's song. Nothing beyond the credits and the title is documented, and no recording circulates.

This is early independent Bulo C. Rani. He had joined Ranjit in 1939 as Khemchand Prakash's assistant, worked on Chandni, Dukh Sukh, Tansen and Shahenshah Babar, and got his own break on Ranjit's Pagli Duniya (1944); Prabhu Ka Ghar is from the following year, when he was composing under his own name on a picture his former chief was still working on. His writing in these years favoured light, singable melody in a folk register over classical elaboration, which is the mode a sakhi song would call for. The arrangement itself is not documented.

'Albeli' means singular, striking, a little wayward, and used for the saheli it marks her out as the friend who is not conventional — which is the whole point of the device. In the sakhi convention the friend is the permitted confidante, the one to whom a woman can say what she cannot say to her family, and 'bata de' — just tell me — is the formula that opens the confession disguised as a request for advice. The listener is meant to understand that the speaker has already decided; the asking is how the decision gets spoken aloud. Pandit Indra writes it in plain Hindi rather than in filmi Urdu, consistent with his work across this soundtrack.

Prabhu Ka Ghar was a Ranjit Movietone social-religious drama directed by Wajahat Mirza, starring Khursheed and Trilok Kapoor. Shama sings three of its eleven songs — this solo and two duets with the classical vocalist Feroze Dastoor — making her the second most used voice on the soundtrack after Khursheed. No print of the film survives, so which character she sang for is unknown.

The song has not been reissued or written about and no audio of it is available; it survives in the song catalogues and the Saregama listing. Its documentary value lies in the composer credit — it is one of the five Prabhu Ka Ghar numbers attributed to Bulo C. Rani, and therefore part of the small body of work from the first two years of his independent career, before the Jogan (1950) score that made his name.