गा गा रे मनवा गा

Feroze Nizami trained in classical music under Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan of the Kirana gharana and came to Bombay from a singer's post at All India Radio; Piya Milan is one of only two scores credited to him in 1945, the other being Sharbati Ankhen. Nizami gives the number to Nirmala Devi, the film's heroine and a Patiala-gharana vocalist who sang her own songs on screen. Of the eleven tracks it is the only one hindigeetmala's listeners have rated more than twice, which makes it — on the thin evidence available — the album's most-remembered song.

The title is an address to the self: manwa is the heart or mind, and the doubled imperative 'gaa gaa' urges it to keep singing. The device of speaking to one's own heart as though to a separate companion is one of the oldest habits of Hindi-Urdu lyric poetry, and it lets a song carry sorrow and resolve at the same time without naming either. M. Naseem is credited with the words by both catalogues consulted.

Piya Milan (1945) was produced by Wadia Movietone and directed by S. M. Yusuf, with Motilal as the male lead and the eighteen-year-old Nirmala Devi as his leading lady. Wikipedia's list of Hindi films of 1945 classes the picture as a social, and the surviving record catalogues agree on an eleven-song album, every number composed by Feroze Nizami. No print of the film is known to circulate, so the songs and their credits are effectively all that survives of it. The song is documented in both hindigeetmala's and MySwar's track listings for the film, which agree on its singer and, where one exists, on its lyricist.

Nirmala Devi (1927-1996) left acting after Jai Mahalakshmi (1951) and built the rest of her career as a Hindustani classical vocalist in thumri and ghazal; she was the mother of the actor Govinda. This track is the one song of Piya Milan that carries any measurable trace of listener memory.