कलियों का रस पी ले

'Kaliyon Ka Ras Pee Le' belongs to the garden vocabulary that ran through Hindi film lyrics from the 1930s onward: buds, nectar, and the bhanwra who comes to drink. It is one of the twelve G. A. Chishti songs listed for Albeli (1945), and like the others it is catalogued with no singer and no lyricist. No recording has been found, so the description offered here works from the title and from the conventions the title belongs to rather than from anything heard.

The recording has not surfaced and no claim is made about its arrangement. Songs on this image were conventionally light and lilting - a swinging rhythm, a melody that rises on the invitation and settles on the object being offered - and Chishti's writing elsewhere in Albeli suggests he would have kept the accompaniment to harmonium, dholak and perhaps a solo string line, with the refrain repeated at pitch rather than varied.

The kali-bhanwra pair is the most heavily used figure in the whole of Hindi film lyric: the bud stands for a young woman not yet approached, the bee for the man who approaches, and the nectar for whatever the censors of a given decade would allow the exchange to mean. An imperative - drink - puts the song on the invitation side of that convention rather than the warning side, which is the less common of the two and usually marks a song of open flirtation rather than of caution. That is the extent of what the title supports; no line of the text has been recovered, and no lyricist is recorded.

Albeli (1945) was made by Talwar Productions of Calcutta and directed by the company's proprietor R. C. Talwar, who also wrote the story; J. S. Casshyap supplied the screenplay and dialogue. Shooting began in Lahore and was completed in Calcutta, and the picture opened at the Central Cinema in Bombay on 22 December 1945. The plot follows a street girl in love with a gypsy boy who is wanted by two other young women as well; Ramola headed a cast that included the actor-singer Satish, Rooplekha, Manorama, Usha, Sunder and Hiralal. G. A. Chishti composed all twelve songs, and Baburao Patel's filmindia gave the film a hostile notice in its March 1946 issue.

Nothing about the song's reception is recorded and it has no independent afterlife. Its documentary value lies in showing that a Calcutta B-picture of 1945 was drawing on exactly the same lyric stock as the year's prestige productions; the difference between Albeli and the films that are remembered from 1945 was not the vocabulary available to its writers but the resources, the stars and the distribution behind them.