मतवारे मनवा ले चल

'Matware Manwa Le Chal' speaks to the heart in the second person and gives it two attributes at once: it is matwara, intoxicated or reckless, and it is the one being asked to lead — le chal, take me along. That construction, in which the singer surrenders direction to their own feeling, is a standing device of Hindi and Braj lyric. S. N. Tripathi composed the song to I. C. Kapoor's words for Bachpan (1945); no singer credit was recorded and no transfer of the disc is known to circulate.

No detail of the setting was preserved. S. N. Tripathi was the composer — by 1945 four years past his first independent score and still a decade from the mythological films that made his name — and the song occupied one side of a shellac 78, which is all that can be said about its length. Catalogues derived from the Hindi Film Geet Kosh record composer and lyricist only; no raag, taal, tempo, instrumentation or voicing was noted, and no recording has surfaced from which any of it could be inferred.

Manwa is the affectionate diminutive of man, the mind-heart, and Hindi song has always treated it as a separate person who can be scolded, coaxed or blamed. Calling it matwara — the word used for someone drunk, and for the swaying walk that follows — puts it beyond reasoning, and asking such a heart to lead is a confession disguised as an instruction: the speaker already knows they will follow it wherever it goes. The construction is common enough that it appears across bhakti verse, folk song and film lyric alike. What I. C. Kapoor did with it here is not recoverable; no text of the lyric has been located.

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.

The song was never reissued, no collector's transfer has appeared, and it is absent from the surviving 1940s repertoire. It is listed first in MySwar's ordering of the Bachpan soundtrack, which suggests it may have opened the film's record sequence, though nothing in the sources confirms that reading. Otherwise it survives only as a title with two credits attached.