मोहे फूलों के गजरे ने

Amirbai Karnataki is credited as the singer of this Bulo C. Rani number, the words attributed to Pandit Indra. The title's construction is the interesting part: mohe ... ne is the frame of a sentence in which something is done to the speaker, and the agent named is a gajra - the string of flowers, usually jasmine or mogra, worn around a woman's wrist or wound into her braid. Grammatically the flowers are the doer and the woman is the one acted upon, which is the small comic and erotic engine of a whole family of Hindi film songs. No recording of this one has been located.

The recording has not surfaced and its music is not described here. The title's diction - mohe rather than mujhe, the folk-song weighting of the line - points to the same lighter, Braj-inflected end of the score that Saiyya Tohe Bulbul Kahu occupies, which would make sense of a soundtrack that needed relief between its songs of separation. That is a reading of vocabulary, not of a performance, and no tempo or arrangement is entered because none is documented.

The gajra is one of the few objects in Hindi film lyric that is allowed to have agency. It is worn, so it is intimate; it is scented, so it announces the wearer before she arrives; and it wilts within a day, so it carries a built-in clock. Songs that make it the subject of a sentence use all three properties at once, and the effect is to let a woman describe her own transformation while attributing it to something outside herself - a piece of indirection that the conventions of the period made necessary and that good lyricists turned into an asset. In the setting of Chand Chakori, whose other titles are largely about absence, a song in which the flowers are the ones taking action reads as the soundtrack's moment of physical presence. What the flowers actually did to the speaker is not recoverable; the catalogued title stops before the verb.

Amirbai Karnataki sang seven of the thirteen songs the catalogues record for Chand Chakori, and she is the only singer any of them names. By 1945 she was near the top of her profession: Kismet (1943) had made her a household voice and she was working as much as any female singer in Bombay. Within three or four years Lata Mangeshkar's rise would push her, like most of her generation, out of playback and into character acting. Chand Chakori catches her at full strength, on a soundtrack headed by Mumtaz Shanti - the star of Kismet, the biggest hit of the decade, six of whose eight songs Amirbai had also sung.

The song has left no independent trace, and its value here is as part of a shape. Read across the thirteen titles, Chand Chakori's score divides into a majority of separation songs and a small handful of physical, present-tense ones, and this is the clearest of the latter. Whoever assembled the soundtrack understood that an audience cannot sit through thirteen laments, and the gajra song is where that judgement shows.