बहार आई चमन में झूम कर

One of Bulo C. Rani's thirteen songs for Chand Chakori (1945), attributed by the catalogues to Pandit Indra, with the singer column blank. It is the brightest title on the list. Where the rest of the soundtrack works through renunciation, messages that cannot be sent and distances that cannot be crossed, this one simply announces that spring has arrived and is dancing about it, which in the grammar of the 1940s film song usually signals either a moment of fulfilment in the narrative or a deliberate contrast placed just before the story turns.

No recording has been located and no musical description is offered. The title's own rhythm - a phrase that arrives and then keeps moving on jhoom kar, swaying - is the sort of mukhda written to sit on a lifted tempo, but that is an observation about words, not a claim about the setting, and nothing in the sources documents the tempo, the instrumentation or even whether the number was a solo or a chorus.

Bahar is not simply the season; in the Urdu lyric it is the condition of the world when the beloved is present, and its absence is the standard figure for everything that has gone wrong. Chaman, the ornamental garden, is where that condition is observed. The pairing is so conventional that its appearance in a song title tells you the register instantly - this is the Persianate vocabulary of the ghazal rather than the Braj vocabulary that gives the same soundtrack its jogan and its gajra - and the addition of jhoom kar, swaying or reeling, gives the abstraction a body. Spring is not described as having arrived; it is described as having arrived the way a dancer or a drunk arrives. That is the whole of what survives of the poem.

Chand Chakori was directed by Kidar Sharma at Ranjit Movietone and released in 1945 with Mumtaz Shanti and Surendra at the head of the cast. Sharma was himself a lyricist - his first break in films had been the dialogue and songs of the Hindi Devdas (1936) - and he is billed among the picture's three writers of songs alongside Pandit Indra and Wali Saheb, though no individual number is assigned to him in any catalogue. The film finished sixth among the year's Indian earners; its story has not survived in any accessible source.

This title matters most as counterweight. A song list read on its own can flatten a film into a single mood, and Chand Chakori's would flatten into unbroken lament if this entry were dropped for want of evidence. Keeping it, with the singer field honestly empty, preserves the fact that the picture had a bright number in it - and that the composer who is remembered for the melancholy of Jogan (1950) was also, at twenty-five, writing spring songs on the Ranjit lot.