चकोरी चाँद है कितनी दूर

Of the thirteen songs catalogued for Chand Chakori this is the one that carries the film's title inside it, and it is the closest thing the soundtrack has to a statement of theme. The chakor - and its feminine, chakori - is the bird of Indian poetic convention that is said to spend the night staring at the moon, feeding on its light and never reaching it; asking how far the moon is turns that emblem into a question with no comforting answer. hindigeetmala.net lists the song with Bulo C. Rani as composer and Pandit Indra as lyricist but leaves the singer column empty, and no other catalogue supplies a name, so no singer is recorded here.

No recording of this title has been located and its music cannot be described from the record. What can be said is where it would have sat in Bulo C. Rani's writing for Ranjit in 1945: an unhurried melodic line with the accompaniment held back, harmonium and bowed strings under the voice, and the whole thing shaped so the words come through - the manner he had learnt assisting Khemchand Prakash and would refine into the score for Jogan five years later. Whether this particular number was a solo, a duet or a chorus piece is not documented, so no song type is recorded.

The chakor is one of the fixed images of the north Indian lyric, and its usefulness lies in the exactness of the relationship it describes: the bird's devotion is total, its object is visible every night, and the distance between them is not an obstacle to be overcome but a permanent condition. Poets from the Braj tradition onward used it for the love that is complete and unconsummated at the same time. What the title of this song adds is the question - how far - which is the one thing the convention normally does not permit, because to ask the distance is to admit that it might be measurable, and therefore that the longing might have an end. Placed in a film named for the same pair, the line reads as the score turning its own governing metaphor over and looking at the underside of it. Nothing of the text beyond this phrase has been recovered.

The film took its name from this figure and then, on the evidence of the surviving titles, spent thirteen songs elaborating it. Kidar Sharma directed for Ranjit Movietone with Mumtaz Shanti and Surendra in the leads; Bulo C. Rani wrote the score; Pandit Indra, Wali Saheb and Sharma himself are billed as lyricists. Box Office India's retrospective list makes it the sixth biggest Indian earner of 1945, but no synopsis of the picture survives in any accessible source, so the relation between this song and whatever was happening on screen when it played is not recoverable.

A title song with no singer credit and no surviving recording is a good measure of how much of 1945 has actually reached us. The line is legible, the convention behind it is fully alive in Indian poetry, and yet the performance that mattered - who sang it, at what tempo, over what accompaniment - is simply gone. It is kept here because a film's title song belongs in its catalogue even when almost nothing about it can be verified, and because the honest gap is itself part of the record.