मेरा पिया ट्राम चलावे

The second of Meera's two songs in Ji Haan, and the most interesting thing the film left behind. The premise is in the title: the singer's beloved drives a tram, and the song is built out of that fact. It is also the eighth song — Saregama's album page lists only seven tracks, and this is the one missing from it; the count of eight comes from the HFGK-derived song lists and from the archival blog Atul's Song A Day, which recovered the recording and published it on 17 July 2022 as the second Ji Haan comedy number it had brought back. Credits are consistent across sources: Meera singing, Pt. Indra writing, S. N. Tripathi composing.

The comic song of the 1940s B-circuit was engineered for legibility: a dholak pattern that establishes itself in two bars, a melodic phrase short enough to be caught whole on first hearing, and a vocal line placed low and conversational so the singer can act inside it. Meera was an actress singing her own number rather than a trained playback voice, and that is exactly the placement this material wants — the effect depends on sounding like a woman telling her neighbours something, not like a soloist. S. N. Tripathi, classically trained at Marris College and credited by Songs of Yore with real command of folk idiom on this film, wrote the lighter register without condescension; a novelty subject like a tram driver needs a tune that behaves normally so the joke can carry.

The joke is the noun. Hindi film lyrics of the period placed the beloved in a repertoire of settled roles — the soldier, the boatman, the cowherd, the traveller — each carrying its own inherited imagery. A tram driver carries none. Pt. Indra drops a modern municipal trade into the slot where the tradition expects a pastoral one, and the whole song follows from that substitution: the woman's boast and complaint are about a man on a fixed route and a timetable, which is a comic idea in a form whose lovers are normally free to wander. It is also a small act of documentary. Very few Hindi film songs name Bombay's trams at all, and this one is written from inside a tram driver's household. No text of the lyric beyond its opening line, preserved as the title, is documented, and none is reproduced here.

The tram the song describes was a real and ubiquitous piece of the city. Bombay's tramway opened with horse-drawn cars in 1874, went over to electric traction in 1907, added double-deckers in 1920, and ran until the last car pulled out on the night of 31 March 1964 — so in 1945 a tram driver was an entirely ordinary Bombay husband, of the same social rank as the film's audience. That is the point of the casting as much as of the lyric: Ji Haan was made by Gautam Chitra for the working-class circuit on a budget of about a lakh, with Bhagwan and Agha at the head of the bill and actresses singing their own songs to save the cost of playback. A comedy about a tramwayman's household is exactly the kind of material such a film could sell, and exactly the kind the prestige studios were not making.

This is the Ji Haan song with the strongest claim on anyone's attention today, and the claim is historical rather than musical. Songs about the Bombay tram are rare; the system it takes for granted has been gone since 1964, and a comic number sung from the point of view of a tram driver's woman is a fragment of the city's transport history preserved by accident inside a stunt film's soundtrack. Its recovery is itself part of the story: absent from Saregama's seven-track listing, the song survived in the HFGK-derived catalogues as a title until Atul's Song A Day published the recording in July 2022 — seventy-seven years after it was pressed, and fifty-eight after the last tram ran.