मेरी बनरी की गोद हरी

The first of Dattaram V. Gadkar's three numbers for Ek Din Ka Sultan (1945) and one of two songs Zohrabai Ambalewali sings in the film. The title belongs squarely to the banna–banri repertoire — the wedding songs of the north Indian household, addressed to the bride (banri, banni) — and its blessing, a lap made green, is the standard folk wish for fruitfulness and plenty. Wali Saheb wrote it, as he wrote all nine songs in the film.

Gadkar's block of three is the folk-and-devotional end of this soundtrack, and this is its wedding song. The banri songs of the north Indian wedding are by convention strophic and dholak-driven, sung in a circle by the women of the household with a lead voice and a repeated refrain; a 1945 film setting takes that shape and hands it to one trained singer. Zohrabai was the obvious choice for it — Ambala-born, trained by Ghulam Hussain Khan and Nasir Hussain Khan and then in the Agra gharana, she had begun at All India Radio at thirteen and cut thumri discs for His Master's Voice before films, and her unusually low contralto was already being used for exactly this folk-classical register in Naushad's Rattan (1944). The recording itself is not in circulation, so nothing can be said here about its actual scoring.

Banri (also banni) is the bride of the banna–banri song cycle sung across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab, and the songs are not love lyrics but blessings and teasing — the household speaking to the girl it is about to send away. 'God hari' — a green lap — is that idiom's compressed wish for children and abundance, the same green that runs through the region's agricultural imagery. What is worth noticing is whose hand it is in: Wali Saheb was an Urdu poet from Bihar by way of Panipat and Lahore, who first came to notice in 1937 when Ghulam Haider set one of his naats to music, and who in the same period was writing ghazals for Noor Jehan. Here he works in a plain Hindi folk register, and the range across this one film's nine songs — folk blessing, Sufi devotional, Urdu ghazal — is his most striking credit on it.

Ek Din Ka Sultan was produced and directed by Sohrab Modi for his own Minerva Movietone, from a story by Agha Jani Kashmiri, and turns on the Mughal anecdote of the water-carrier who saved Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and was given the throne for a day. A domestic wedding song sits naturally inside a period court drama of that kind, but where in the narrative this one falls is not recorded in any accessible source — like most of the film, its picturisation is lost to us. What the listings do preserve is the credit block: Gadkar's music, Wali Saheb's words, Zohrabai's voice.

1945 was the middle of Zohrabai Ambalewali's short peak — Rattan (1944) behind her, Zeenat (1945) the same year, Anmol Ghadi (1946) ahead — and against those this is one of her least-remembered recordings. It survives as an entry in Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived listings and on hindigeetmala, with no reissue and no commercial digital release traced. Zohrabai's career effectively closed in the early 1950s as Lata Mangeshkar and Geeta Dutt shifted popular taste toward lighter voices; songs like this one are what remains of the register she represented.