मेरी जानी शराब अरग़वानी शराब

'Meri Jani Sharab Aragvani Sharab' is one of seven documented songs from the 1941 Hindi film Mere Raja, with lyrics by Ishwar Chandra Kapoor and music by Damodar Sharma. The wine imagery — 'aragvani' denoting a deep crimson-purple hue — points to a sensuous, mehfil-style number in the Urdu-poetic register common to the period. The playback singer is not recorded in surviving catalogues, and no audio is presently in circulation.

The compound 'aragvani sharab' — crimson-purple wine — is an image from classical Persian poetry where the precise colour of wine is a recurring object of description and celebration: wine is too beautiful to mention without naming its hue. The Persian-origin word 'aragvani' derives from 'arghavan' (the Judas tree, celebrated for its brilliant crimson-purple blossoms), bringing a botanical specificity that is itself a pleasure of the classical tradition. 'Jani' in 'meri jani sharab' is an intimate address: 'jani' (life, my dear, beloved), applied here to the wine itself, is a transgressive metaphor — treating wine as a companion, a beloved, a person with whom one is in relationship. This is the mey-ghazal tradition in concentrated form: the poet is in a mehfil, addressing the wine as if it were the absent beloved, the drinking glass as a form of companionship. Ishwar Chandra Kapoor's lyric announces itself through the title as belonging to the Perso-Arabic wine-poetry lineage (Hafez, Khayyam and their Urdu heirs) that had been adapted into Hindi film songs from the earliest talkies.

Mere Raja (1941) was a Hindi action film with a cast that included Moti, Kanta, Shankar Vazare and Eddie Billimoria — Billimoria being a veteran of Hindi cinema's stunt and action genre who had been active since the silent era. Damodar Sharma composed the score with lyrics by Ishwar Chandra Kapoor. In the early-1940s action film, it was common to include a mehfil-style song — courtly, wine-themed, sensuous — to provide tonal variation from the action sequences and to draw on the Persianate musical and poetic tradition that audiences recognised as a marker of cultivated elegance. 'Meri Jani Sharab Aragvani Sharab' is exactly such a number: a mey-ghazal (wine-song) of the kind that the Urdu-poetic tradition had refined over centuries, here adapted for the film-song format. The word 'aragvani' — a deep crimson-purple — announces the song's register immediately: this is a language of aesthetic precision, not of street-level romance.