मैं तो गिरधर आगे नाचूँगी

'Main To Girdhar Aage Nachungi' is the bhajan of Bachpan's score, and its title belongs unmistakably to the Meera Bai tradition: Girdhar is Giridhar Gopal, Krishna who lifted Mount Govardhan on a finger, and dancing before him is the specific act by which Meera's devotion is remembered. The credit in every source is to I. C. Kapoor, the film's writer, so this is a film lyric written in Meera's register rather than a Meera pad set to music — a distinction the sources do not resolve further. No singer was credited and no recording is known to survive.

A bhajan was the one place in a 1945 film score where a Bhatkhande-trained composer could write closest to what he had actually studied, and S. N. Tripathi would spend the second half of his career — Rani Roopmati (1957) onward — working almost exclusively in the devotional and mythological space. Whether he took that opportunity here cannot be said: no transfer of the disc is known, and the catalogues record only that he composed it and I. C. Kapoor wrote it. Raag, taal and tempo were never documented.

Meera's bhakti is unusual in that its central gesture is public and physical: not silent contemplation but dancing, in front of people, before an image — an act that in her own century was read as scandal and is now read as the purest form of surrender. A lyric that opens by declaring the intention to dance before Girdhar is therefore doing something specific: it is claiming Meera's defiance, the refusal to be governed by what the community thinks proper. In a film whose entire premise is a man destroyed by community judgement after his son married outside their caste, that vocabulary is not incidental. No text of the lyric has been located, so its actual content is not described here.

Bachpan was made by Homi Wadia's Basant Pictures, a studio then known for Fearless Nadia stunt pictures, and it is a social family drama instead: Bhairav (Mazhar Khan), embittered and living alone on a mountainside after his son married outside their caste, is slowly softened by Madhu (Baby Madhuri), the young niece a relative sends to live with him. Madhu is twice abducted — once by the aunt, who sells her as a companion to the wealthy invalid Kamla (Baby Shakuntala), and once by Kamla's jealous governess — and the film ends with the village schoolteacher Ramesh (B. Nandrekar) and his beloved (Chandraprabha) clearing Bhairav's name at the police station. I. C. Kapoor wrote the story, the dialogue and all ten song lyrics; S. N. Tripathi composed the score.

Meera's poetry has been recorded in Hindi cinema hundreds of times, most famously by M. S. Subbulakshmi in Meera (1945, Tamil; Hindi version 1947) in the very same year Bachpan was made, and later by Lata Mangeshkar. Against that, an uncredited film bhajan in Meera's manner from a Basant Pictures children's drama left no mark: it was not reissued, no transfer is known, and it appears in no bhajan anthology. It survives as a line in a song list.