नाचो छनन्नन छम

Ghulami's dance song: a three-and-a-half-minute duet for Renuka Devi and Masood Parvez, written by Bharat Vyas and composed by S. K. Pal. The title is built out of 'chhananan chham', the standard Hindi onomatopoeia for the sound of ghungroos — ankle-bells — struck by a dancer's feet, attached to an imperative to dance. It is the fastest and most extroverted number on an album otherwise weighted toward prayer, longing and political address.

A dance song in 1945 Hindi cinema had one non-negotiable requirement: the percussion had to be legible enough that a dancer on screen could be seen hitting it. Pal writes to that constraint, with the rhythmic syllables of the refrain doing double duty as both lyric and beat-marker — a device drawn straight from the bol-based vocabulary of Indian classical and folk dance, where the drum syllables are themselves the text. Giving it to two voices rather than one turns the number into a shared celebration instead of a solo performance piece.

Bharat Vyas writes here in the mode that most separates him from Ghulami's Urdu lyricists: this is sound before sense, a lyric whose opening gesture is a noise rather than an image. That approach belongs to Hindi folk and to the nritya-geet tradition, where onomatopoeic syllables carry the emotional charge directly. Set beside Majaz's lament and Josh's address to the nation on the same album, it shows how wide a single 1945 soundtrack was expected to range — and it is the one song on Ghulami whose pleasure is entirely physical.

The film was directed by Mohan Wadhwani for Shalimar Pictures and starred Renuka Devi and Masood Parvez, who sing this together. Renuka Devi was one of the last generation of actress-singers in Hindi cinema — performers who rendered their own songs on screen before playback fully displaced the practice — and a fast dance duet is exactly the kind of number that required that arrangement, since the voice and the body had to match. Neither the choreography nor the scene is documented; no plot record of Ghulami survives.

Like the rest of the album this song survives only as a recording — the film is gone — and it has had no independent afterlife. What it preserves is a type: the pre-Independence filmi dance duet in its plainest form, before the elaborate orchestrations of the 1950s changed what such a number sounded like. On an album whose reputation rests on its lyricists' names, this is the track that shows S. K. Pal working as a purely functional film composer, meeting a scene's demands, and it is a useful corrective to reading Ghulami as only a literary artifact.