माता तेरे चरणों में

'Mata Tere Charnon Mein' is the bhajan Lata Mangeshkar sings in Badi Maa (1945), made by Master Vinayak under his Prafulla Pictures banner. Wikipedia credits it to Lata Mangeshkar with Ishwarlal, the film's leading man; hindigeetmala lists Lata alone and files it under devotional songs. Zia Sarhadi wrote the words, K. Datta the music. It is not the best song in the film and it is not sung by the film's star — and it is the one that history has kept, because it is one of the earliest surviving Hindi film recordings of a voice that would go on to dominate the medium for half a century.

K. Datta was raised on devotional music in Sawantwadi — his mother was a respected bhajan singer and he sang at Ganesh-festival gatherings before he ever wrote for film — so the bhajan is the register of this score he was most at home in. In 1945 a film bhajan was a fairly settled form: a simple, mostly stepwise melody kept inside a comfortable range, a plain rhythmic cycle, and a refrain designed so that an audience could join it. That form also suited a fifteen-year-old singer who had trained under her father Master Dinanath and was, at this point in her career, still being cast as much for her presence on screen as for her voice.

The lyric addresses a mother and lays something at her feet — the oldest gesture in Indian devotional verse, where 'charnon mein' (at your feet) marks the complete surrender of the claim to be right. What gives the phrase a second edge in this film is that Badi Maa's mother is not only the goddess: the title's 'elder mother' is India, and the plot is about defending her from invasion. A prayer placed at a mother's feet inside a 1945 war-effort picture is doing devotional and patriotic work at the same time, and Zia Sarhadi — who wrote the screenplay as well — would have known exactly how the two readings were meant to fold together.

Master Vinayak was a close friend of the Mangeshkar family. When Master Dinanath Mangeshkar died in 1942 and left the family without income, Vinayak took charge of them; he had already cast the thirteen-year-old Lata in the Marathi Pahili Mangalagaur (1942) and kept giving her work in his productions. Badi Maa was made under his Prafulla Pictures banner, and both Lata and her younger sister Asha Bhosle appear in it in minor on-screen roles — Lata with this bhajan. In 1945 the company moved its headquarters from Kolhapur to Bombay and the Mangeshkars moved with it, which is the shift that put Lata within reach of the Bombay music directors who would soon make her career.

Lata Mangeshkar's first Hindi song was 'Mata Ek Sapoot Ki Duniya Badal De Tu' for the Marathi film Gajaabhaau (1943); 'Mata Tere Charnon Mein' is the song she sang in a Hindi film, and it is routinely the first Badi Maa entry in any account of her early years. Her breakthrough was still three years away — Ghulam Haider took her to producer Sashadhar Mukherjee for Shaheed (1948), was told her voice was 'too thin', and answered that producers would one day beg her to sing; then gave her 'Dil Mera Toda' in Majboor (1948). Badi Maa preserves what that voice sounded like before anyone was certain. It also puts her, on a single soundtrack, alongside Noor Jehan — the singer whose position in Hindi film music she would inherit after Partition took Noor Jehan to Pakistan.