डोरिये की ओढ़नी में मलमल धोऊँ री

The one song on Champa built for more than a single voice: Zeenat Begum and Munawwar Sultana share it with a chorus, and it is the number the sources agree least about and preserve best — HindiGeetMala carries a full text, MySwar names both singers, a 78-rpm transfer names them plus chorus, and Saregama's digital reissue lists it under 'Chorus'. It works in the panghat idiom that Punjab and the western Gangetic plain had in common, which is why a Lahore studio and a Bengali composer could both reach for it without strain.

The setting is the standard folk one for this kind of number: a repeating refrain the chorus can join, verses that stay inside a narrow melodic range so untrained voices in the film's crowd can carry them, and a walking pulse suited to the mime of washing and wringing cloth. HindiGeetMala's text shows the refrain returning after every verse, which is the shape a group song needs; the two lead voices trade the verses between those returns. That structure is why it survives as the album's most obviously picturised song even though no footage of the picturisation does.

The image the song is hung on is a washing scene: a woman rinsing a thin, lace-corded veil again and again, and the repetition of that small domestic act standing in for the length of a separation. The verses set the memory inside it — eyes met at the village well, and after that meeting the heart was no longer her own. The man is a pardesi, gone to another country, and the song addresses him in his absence rather than mourning him: It makes three requests of him: that he let himself be seen, that his arrival finish what his absence left unfinished, and that if he genuinely cannot return he reach her at least in sleep. A third verse pushes the flower image further, putting spring inside the garden of youth, which is how folk poetry of this register talks about desire without naming it. The whole thing is bright rather than heavy, and the chorus keeps it that way — a village song that carries loss without letting it settle.

Champa was made at Shorey Pictures in Lahore for the producer Roop K. Shorey and directed by Barkat Ram Mehra; it opened at the Crown cinema in Lahore in October 1945 with Manorama, Asha Posley, Hari Shivdasani, Majnu, Salma and Zahoor Shah in the cast. No plot summary of the film survives, and no print is known to circulate — the discs, issued on Columbia and now in the Saregama catalogue, are effectively the whole of what is left of it. This is the one Champa song that two different collectors' channels and the commercial reissue all carry, and the one for which a full lyric text survives online — which, for a Lahore programme picture of 1945, is an unusually complete paper trail.

Sources conflict on who sings it, and the conflict is worth recording: pakmag.net gives the song to Shamshad Begum and Zohrabai Ambalewali, while MySwar and both surviving 78-rpm transfers give it to Zeenat Begum with Munawwar Sultana and chorus. The second attribution is followed here because it is the one carried by the disc transfers themselves and by the film-music compendium, and because a Shorey production of 1945 was drawing on the Lahore voices rather than the Bombay ones.