पी और पिला पिला मेरे साक़ी

One of three Amirbai Karnataki songs in Kul Kalank and one of the four sides from the film still held by Saregama. The saqi song — the singer addressing the cup-bearer, ordering the wine to keep coming — is the single most reused situation in Urdu-Hindustani film lyric, and by 1945 it functioned in Bombay cinema as shorthand for a whole setting: the mehfil, the courtesan's room, the moment when a character stops behaving respectably. In a film called 'the stain on the family name', that is unlikely to be incidental.

A saqi number in a 1945 studio score is a rhythm piece before it is anything else: the form wants a swaying, forward-leaning pulse that suggests a room getting louder, and it usually gets one from the dholak or tabla with the melody instruments answering the voice line for line. That is the part of film scoring Allah Rakha was best equipped for — he was, under his own name, one of the finest tabla players alive — and the mehfil numbers are where his film work and his classical training come closest to the same room. Amirbai Karnataki's low, slightly grainy voice was among the most identifiable in Bombay in these years and carried this kind of material without any of the coyness that later playback style would bring to it.

The saqi of the title is not a person so much as a licence. Addressing the cup-bearer lets a lyric say things it could not say directly — about desire, about ruin, about not wanting the night to end — because the whole convention comes pre-loaded from Persian and Urdu poetry, where wine has always doubled as intoxication of every other kind. Roopbani's line is in the imperative throughout: drink, and keep pouring. What makes that interesting on a woman's voice in 1945 is that the demand is hers. The film's title tells us how such a woman's evening was expected to be read by everyone else in the story.

Amirbai Karnataki was in the cast of Kul Kalank as well as on its soundtrack — a common arrangement for her, since she had begun as an actress-singer in the 1930s and only became nationally famous as a voice after 'Dheere Dheere Aa Re Badal' in Kismet (1943). The film was produced by Sunrise Pictures and directed by Nanubhai B. Vakil; its other on-screen names include Shanta Hublikar, Masood, Shahzadi, Dulari, Majid, Pratima Devi and Wazir Mohammed Khan. No print survives and no detailed plot has been recorded, so the songs are effectively the only surviving evidence of what the film was about.

The record outlived the film. It is one of the four Kul Kalank sides in the Saregama catalogue and therefore one of the small number of Allah Rakha film recordings that can still be heard at all — his roughly two dozen scores between 1943 and the mid-1960s are otherwise almost entirely lost, and he himself walked away from film music for the concert stage, where he would become the best-known Indian percussionist in the world. Amirbai Karnataki's own reputation rests elsewhere, on Kismet and on her 1940s solo work; this side is a footnote to it, but a surviving one.