चने मसालेदार बाबू ले लो

The best-remembered number of Nasib (1945) and the only one of its eight songs to pair Zohrabai Ambalewali with Hamida Banu. It is a street-vendor song — the hawker's call to the passing 'babu' to buy her spiced gram — a form that 1940s Hindi cinema used constantly, because it let a poor character sing directly to the audience without the plot having to stop for her. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh-based survey of Gobind Ram's career singles it out as the 'inspirational street song' of the film, which places it in the sub-type where the hawker's patter carries a second, moralising meaning underneath the sales pitch.

A hawking song has to sound like the street, so the setting is rhythm-led rather than melody-led: dholak and tabla in a brisk, walking cycle, with the tune built out of the rising-and-falling shape of an actual vendor's call rather than out of a raag phrase. Gobind Ram was, by the account of the survey of his work, a composer whose particular strength lay in rhythm, beat and orchestration, and the street-song form is where that strength shows most plainly. Pairing two singers on it is the interesting choice: Zohrabai's voice was heavy, chest-toned and trained in the khayal-thumri manner, while Hamida Banu, still in her teens, was lighter and quicker, so the call-and-answer between them gives the sales pitch two different characters instead of one doubled line.

Rammurti Chaturvedi writes the song in the register of the marketplace — the direct address to 'babu', the naming of the goods, the insistence of a person who has to sell today to eat today. What lifts it above a novelty item, and what earns it the description 'inspirational' in the reference account of Gobind Ram's films, is that the vendor's argument is also an argument about work and self-respect: the woman crying her wares is not asking for pity but for custom. That distinction was politically loaded in 1945, when the war economy had pushed enormous numbers of women into street trade and domestic labour, and the Hindi social film was working out how to show them. The vocabulary is plain, spoken Hindi with no Persianate ornament, in deliberate contrast to the Urdu ghazals Rajkumari sings elsewhere in the same score.

Nasib was produced by Silver Films, the banner run by the actress Pramila and her husband Kumar, and directed by B. D. Vedi, in the second of only four talkies he made. Gobind Ram scored six Hindi films that released in 1945, and Nasib is the one that gave him this pairing of voices. Zohrabai Ambalewali was at the peak of her career in 1945 and had also sung two of the standout numbers of his Chalis Karod and Hamara Sansar that same year; Hamida Banu was near the start of hers. No print of Nasib is known to survive, and this song is not among the three sides of the film that remain in the Saregama catalogue, so it exists today mainly as a catalogue entry and a line in the account of Gobind Ram's work.

The vendor song survived the film that carried it: the form Rammurti Chaturvedi and Gobind Ram are working in here runs straight on through post-independence Hindi cinema, from the flower-sellers and toy-sellers of the 1950s onward, always with the same double function of comic relief and social argument. Within Nasib itself this is the number the reference literature reaches for first when it names the film's songs, which makes it the album's de facto title track even though it was not issued as one. For Zohrabai Ambalewali and Hamida Banu it is a rare direct pairing; the two rarely shared a record.