छनननन छुम छनननन

The one song in Badi Maa (1945) written by Raja Badhe, and one of three in the film sung by the child performer Baby Alka. The title is pure onomatopoeia — chhananan, chhum — the sound of ghungroos, the ankle-bells worn by a dancer. Nothing in the accessible record documents the scene it accompanies, but a title assembled from bell-sounds and given to a child singer in a film that also features the Kathak dancer Sitara Devi belongs unambiguously to the film's light, movement-driven material rather than to its war plot.

K. Datta gave three of Badi Maa's ten songs to Baby Alka, which is a lot of a soundtrack to hand to a child voice and suggests a deliberate lightening strategy in a film otherwise built on invasion and betrayal. A song titled in bell-syllables sits in the Hindi film tradition of the bol-based dance number, where the vocal line borrows the rhythmic syllables of the tabla and the dancer's footwork and treats them as lyric. The specific arrangement of this recording is not documented in the accessible sources and is not described here.

Raja Badhe was a Nagpur poet who worked at All India Radio before he wrote for films, and his lasting fame in Marathi is 'Jai Jai Maharashtra Majha', now the state song of Maharashtra. Here he is doing something at the opposite end of his range: a lyric whose title carries no lexical meaning at all, only rhythm. Bol-syllables like chhananan and chhum are a legitimate poetic resource in Indian song — they encode a dance pattern in sound before any word arrives — and giving that assignment to a Marathi poet inside an Urdu-dominated soundtrack is a small sign of how mixed the Prafulla Pictures workshop was.

Badi Maa was made by Master Vinayak under his own Prafulla Pictures banner, made in Kolhapur and Bombay in the last year of the Second World War, and its cast crosses Marathi and Hindi cinema throughout — Vinayak himself, Meenakshi Shirodkar, Damuanna Malvankar, the Mangeshkar sisters, alongside Bombay names like Noor Jehan, Yakub and Sitara Devi. Raja Badhe's single lyric is part of that crossing. Nothing further about the picturisation of this song appears in the sources consulted, and the film's surviving print would be the way to establish it.