जागो जागो सावधान हो

The duet at the centre of the Chalis Karod soundtrack, sung by Zohrabai Ambalewali and Khan Mastana. Its title is a summons — 'wake, wake, be alert' — and in a film named for the forty crore people of undivided India, in the last full year before the transfer of power, a summons of that kind is hard to read as purely domestic. That reading is an inference from the two titles, not a documented fact: no synopsis of the film and no description of this song's context survives in the sources consulted. What is certain is the pairing of voices — Zohrabai's weighty contralto against Khan Mastana's more direct, declamatory delivery — which was a combination composers of the period reached for when a song had to carry force rather than sweetness.

No recording is in circulation, so nothing can be claimed about how this particular number was set. What is documented is Gobind Ram's manner in these years: light melodic writing with a ghazal and thumri inflection rather than a distinctly Punjabi folk one, a small orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi and tabla, and tunes pitched to sit comfortably in the middle of a classically trained voice instead of stretching it. A summoning song of this kind conventionally sat on a march-like or heavily accented rhythm with the two voices trading phrases rather than blending them, but no recording is available to confirm what Gobind Ram actually did.

'Jago' is one of the most heavily loaded words in the Hindi lyric of these years. It belongs at once to the devotional dawn song, the prabhati that wakes a sleeping deity or a sleeping devotee, and to the political address that had been telling Indians to wake since Bharatendu. Adding 'savdhaan ho' — be on your guard — pushes it away from the temple and toward the second sense: one does not warn a sleeper to be careful unless there is something to be careful of. Pandit Indra had written for the stage before he wrote for films, and the public, hortatory voice was one he could produce on demand. Beyond the title the argument of the song cannot be traced; the text is not reproduced here.

Chalis Karod — 'Forty Crores', the number that stood through the 1940s for the population of undivided India — was directed by Nanabhai Bhatt for Chandra Art Productions of Bombay, a year before Bhatt set up his own Deepak Pictures. Gobind Ram composed, Pandit Indra and I. C. Kapoor were credited with the songs, and the cast paired Nirmala Devi with her husband Arun Kumar Ahuja alongside Yakub, Agha and Gope. No plot summary of the film survives in any source consulted for this entry, so the nine song titles are effectively all that remains of what the picture was about. Gobind Ram is credited in his own artist record with having helped bring Zohrabai Ambalewali into Hindi film music in the first place, and this is one of two songs he gives her on this album; Khan Mastana, a composer in his own right as well as a singer, is the only male voice on the soundtrack.

The song is lost to circulation, but the type it belongs to was not. Three years later Khan Mastana would sing the decade's most famous version of exactly this register — 'Watan Ki Raah Mein Watan Ke Naujawan Shaheed Ho' from Shaheed (1948), composed by Ghulam Haider, alongside a young Mohammed Rafi — and that song is now the single thing he is remembered for. 'Jago Jago Savdhaan Ho' sits three years upstream of it, in a film whose title made the same appeal to the same audience. Nothing of the recording is in general circulation today: there is no known commercial reissue and no print of the film in public availability. Its survival is documentary — a line in the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue and the Cinemaazi credit sheet — which is the ordinary fate of most of the roughly two hundred Hindi films released each year in the mid-1940s.