इक पंछी प्यासा आया

The first of Shanta Patel's five songs in Ji Haan, and the one whose title reaches furthest back into literary convention. What is documented is the credit line — Shanta Patel singing, Pt. Indra writing, S. N. Tripathi composing — and the fact that the side was pressed and still sits in Saregama's catalogue eighty years later. No writer has taken the song up since; there is no commentary on it, no transcription of its text, and no print of the film in which it was staged. This entry therefore stays close to what the title and the credits will honestly carry.

Songs of Yore, reviewing Tripathi's vintage years, credits him with a real mastery of folk idiom on this particular film — the judgement was made about Ji Haan's songs as a group, and a lyrical solo of this kind is where that idiom usually shows most plainly: a melody built on a small number of notes, carried on sarangi or harmonium over a light dholak or tabla, with the singer allowed to stretch the line rather than decorate it. Tripathi had come to Bombay from Bhatkhande's Marris College in Lucknow and had spent his first years in the Bombay Talkies orchestra, and the discipline of that training is audible across his 1940s work even at this budget. The specific arrangement of this side has not been auditioned for this entry.

The thirsty bird is a fixed figure of the north Indian lyric. In the Braj and Awadhi repertoire it is usually the chatak or papiha, the bird that is said to refuse every water on earth and drink only the raindrop that falls under the Swati asterism — an image for a longing that will accept no substitute, and one that migrated intact from bhakti verse into thumri, into folk song, and from there into the film lyric of the 1930s and 40s. Whether Pt. Indra invokes that whole tradition here or uses the plainer picture of a wanderer arriving thirsty at a stranger's door cannot be decided from the title alone, and no text of the song is documented. What can be said is that the register is lyrical rather than comic, which places it among the three non-comedy songs in a score where five of eight were written for laughs.

Shanta Patel sang five of Ji Haan's eight songs, the largest share by a distance, which makes her the film's musical lead as well as one of its billed players — Wikipedia's index of 1945 Hindi films names her first in the cast, ahead of Agha, S. Nazir, Meera and Gulab. Her later credits, as catalogued by IMDb, stay inside the same circuit the film belongs to: Veer Ghatotkach (1949), Aurat (1953), Baghdad Ka Jadu (1956) — mythologicals, stunt pictures and Arabian-nights fantasies, the working repertoire of Bombay's second tier. Ji Haan itself was made by Gautam Chitra and directed by Babubhai Mistry with a second director recorded variously as R. Vaidya and Ramnik Bhatt.

This song has no documented afterlife. It was not among the two Ji Haan numbers Atul's Song A Day recovered, nor the one Songs of Yore discussed; it has been reissued digitally by Saregama and otherwise left alone. That is the ordinary fate of the 1940s B-circuit soundtrack, and it is worth recording plainly rather than dressing up: most of the songs written for these films were heard for a season and then survived only as a line in a catalogue.