भली निभाई प्रीत रे परदेसी

The second of Hamida Banu's three Moorti solos turns on an irony so old it is almost a folk form in itself: the abandoned woman thanking the man who abandoned her for having kept faith so well. Everything depends on how the line is sung, since the words on their own could be read straight. Pandit Indra sets it in the village register — pardesi, the outsider or traveller, is the standard figure of the man who comes, is loved, and leaves — and Bulo C. Rani gives it a folk-shaped melody to match rather than the Urdu-ghazal treatment he reserved for the Mukesh sides in the same film.

The tune is built from short repeating units in the manner of a village song, with the refrain returning often enough to make its irony land by repetition. Bulo C. Rani's Ranjit arrangements of these years are consistently light — harmonium, dholak or tabla, a shadowing string line — and here that thinness is an advantage: a heavier setting would push the song towards tragedy and lose the sting. Hamida Banu, sixteen or seventeen and with a bright, unforced voice, delivers it without the tremolo weight a Khursheed or an Amirbai would have brought, which keeps it wry rather than mournful.

'Bhali nibhayi' — you carried it through well — is praise language, and using praise language for a betrayal is one of the sharpest moves available in Hindi folk poetry, because it refuses the dignity of open anger. The pardesi is a specific type rather than a person: the man from elsewhere, whose leaving was always structurally implied by his arrival, which means the speaker is also reproaching herself for having believed otherwise. Pandit Indra, who spent much of the 1940s writing in exactly this idiom for Ranjit, does not extend the conceit beyond its natural length.

Moorti was one of the Ranjit socials of 1945, directed by Chaturbhuj Doshi, with Motilal and Khursheed at the head of the cast. Hamida Banu was not on screen; she was a playback voice, which by 1945 was a job that existed but had not yet displaced the singing star. Nothing is recorded about who mimed this song in the film — the blogger who posted it in September 2011 wrote that he had no idea how or on whom it was picturised and asked his readers to fill the gap.

Three separate transfers of the disc circulate online, including Song No. 03 in Mirsa's Vintage Music Collection's 2023 upload of the whole Moorti soundtrack in catalogue order, so the song is in no danger of disappearing; but it has no presence in the written history of the period and carries no raag attribution. It is best understood as a good example of the ordinary competence of the Ranjit house style in 1945 — the level at which a studio with a staff composer and a staff lyricist could work without anyone thinking it remarkable.