बसंत ऋतु आई रे छाई है हरियाली

The ensemble number of Ratnavali (1945): Zohrabai Ambalewali and Moti B. A. with a chorus, words by Rammurti Chaturvedi, music by Pt. Gobind Ram. It is a ritu-geet, a season song announcing the arrival of spring, and the only place in the score where the film opens out from solo and duet into a crowd. In a costume picture set in an ancient court, a spring festival is the obvious pretext for a big set-piece, and the song reads as written for exactly that.

No description of the arrangement is documented, so none is offered. The credit itself is unusual for this score: two named voices plus chorus, where the other seven songs are solos and duets. Moti B. A. appears nowhere else in the film. Pt. Gobind Ram is credited with about thirty Hindi films and is remembered chiefly for the singers he advanced: he recorded eighty-six songs with Shamshad Begum across nineteen films, did as much as anyone to establish Zohrabai Ambalewali, brought Zeenat Begum into films and gave early encouragement to Mohammed Rafi. His idiom of these years mixes light music, ghazal and thumri with folk material and a distinct Punjabi tinge.

Rammurti Chaturvedi builds the song out of the standing furniture of the Braj basant-geet: greenery spreading over the land, some singing and some dancing with clapped hands, swings hung in the groves and the swinging girl losing all sense of herself, drums sounding somewhere, colour being played somewhere else, and Kamadeva loosing his flower-tipped arrows so that king and pauper alike are struck. The last turn is the sharpest: green spreading even across the dried-out fields. In 1945 — after the Bengal famine, in a country three years into wartime shortage — a line about green returning to parched fields is not only decorative, and a season song written for a court fantasy quietly acquires a second address.

Ratnavali was made by Amar Pictures, Bombay — Chimanlal Desai's own banner, named after his grandson — and directed by his son Surendra Desai. Zohrabai Ambalewali sings twice in the film, on this chorus number and on the opening duet; she and Shamshad Begum were the two singers Gobind Ram did most to establish, and Shamshad Begum, who by her own account kept strictly to herself at the studios, later named Zohrabai Ambalewali as her one real friend in the profession — their daughters were friends too.

Written up song-by-song only in December 2025, eighty years after release and twelve years after the first song of this film was covered — the seventh of eight, leaving one more before the blog's run through the soundtrack was complete. The delay is the point: a full-scale festival ensemble from a mid-1940s studio picture can sit entirely unheard for four generations simply because no print survives and no reissue was ever worth a label's trouble.