ले लो दाँतों का मंजन ओ बाबूजी

Sung by Zeenat Begum, 'Le Lo Daanton Ka Manjan O Babuji' is a sales cry made into a film song: the singer walks the street offering tooth powder to any babu who will stop. Albeli (1945) is built around a street girl, and this is her trade turned into a musical number - a device that lets a film show its heroine at work, establish her poverty and give the audience a tune at the same time. The Geet Kosh records the song without a singer or a writer; the attribution to Zeenat Begum and to the lyricist Shanti Swarup 'Kaif' comes from later research on the surviving recording. Catalogues also list it under its shorter opening, 'O Babu Ji Le Lo'.

Hawker songs have a built-in musical shape and Chishti uses it directly: the melodic line imitates the long, rising-then-falling call a street seller actually makes, so the tune is at its highest and loudest on the word being sold and relaxes across the rest of the phrase. The rhythm walks rather than dances, which is what keeps the number attached to the picture of someone moving down a street. Zeenat Begum, trained in classical vocal music from childhood, sings it very plainly - the point of the song is the characterisation, not the display.

The lyric works by address. Every line is pointed at a passer-by - the babu, the gentleman with money in his pocket - and the singer's poverty is never stated, only implied by the fact that she is the one calling and he is the one being called. Songs of this kind were a small and distinct genre in 1940s Hindi cinema: the seller's cry, the sharpener's cry, the bangle-seller's cry, each of them a way of putting a working life on screen without a speech about it. Shanti Swarup 'Kaif' keeps the diction at street level throughout, with none of the literary register the same film's love songs use.

Two of Albeli's twelve songs are street cries - this one for tooth powder and another offering grapes - which is a fair indication of how much of the film was set on the pavement. 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.

The hawker song did not disappear with Albeli; it persisted through the 1950s and beyond as one of Hindi cinema's reliable ways of introducing a poor protagonist. What makes this example worth keeping is its date and its authorship: it is a 1945 instance of the form, sung by a fourteen-year-old who would shortly become a Radio Pakistan regular, written by a composer who was two years from leaving the country altogether. Almost nothing else of Zeenat Begum's Indian film work in this vein is easily heard today.