बरखा की रुत है

'Barkha Ki Rut Hai' opens by naming the season the film is titled for, but the Hindi Film Geet Kosh preserves enough of its mukhda to show that the song is a Raksha Bandhan number: the lines that follow speak of sisters' happiness, of brothers beside them, and of the beauty of the day of the rakhi. The Geet Kosh is also the only source that preserves a voice credit for it — C. Ramchandra, Kusum Mantri and Hamida Banu, plus unnamed others — where hindigeetmala.net and myswar.co list the title with no singer at all. C. Ramchandra composed it to I. C. Kapoor's lyric.

No recording circulates, so the setting can only be placed in its idiom. What the Geet Kosh entry does establish is the shape of the number: several voices — a male lead, two credited women and unnamed others — which in a mid-1940s Bombay score points to a festival ensemble piece rather than a solo, the kind of song built on a refrain the whole group can return to. C. Ramchandra in 1945 was writing inside the conventions of the period; the innovations he is remembered for — saxophone, whistling, Latin percussion — belong to the Filmistan years still ahead of him. Nothing about tempo, raag or instrumentation is documented and none is asserted here.

The title sets up a seasonal expectation that the rest of the mukhda quietly redirects. Barkha and sawan carry a fixed charge in Hindi film poetry, inherited from folk song and the barahmasa tradition of seasonal verse — rain as the season of union for those who have their beloved and of separation for those who do not. Here, though, the season is being used to place a festival rather than a romance: sawan is the month of Raksha Bandhan, and the surviving lines turn from the weather to the bond between sister and brother. That is a well-established move in the Hindi song tradition, where the rakhi song borrows the monsoon's imagery to frame a domestic and unromantic love. Out of respect for copyright no lines are quoted; the above is a paraphrase of what the Geet Kosh entry records, not the text.

Sawan (1945) was produced by Sanjivan Art Productions of Bombay for the producer Madhav Kale and directed by Dwarka Khosla, with Motilal and Shanta Apte at the head of the cast. C. Ramchandra composed to lyrics by I. C. Kapoor; no plot summary of the film survives in accessible sources, so what is known of its content comes almost entirely from the song titles preserved in the record catalogues. This one is more informative than most, because the Geet Kosh preserved its mukhda: a film named for the monsoon month opened its score with the festival that falls in it. How the number was staged, and on whom, is not recorded.

The song has left no trace beyond its catalogue entries — no recording, no reissue, no citation in the retrospectives that keep other 1940s songs alive; hindigeetmala.net holds no lyrics and no video for it. Its documentary value is twofold: it is the only Sawan song for which the Geet Kosh preserves both a mukhda and a full voice credit, and it adds an early Raksha Bandhan number to the record of what C. Ramchandra wrote in 1945.