पी गोरे गोरे हाथों में

The second of Suraiya's three solos in Samrat Chandragupta, catalogued in the variant forms 'Pee Gore Gore Haathon Me' and 'Pee Gore Gore Haathon Mein'. Against 'Piya Piya Raat Ke', which is a night song of absence, this one works in the brighter half of the same vocabulary — 'pee' is another form of piya, the beloved, and the image is of hands rather than of longing.

A medium-tempo solo for a young female voice was, in 1945, the most commercially reliable item on any soundtrack, and the arrangement conventions were correspondingly settled: dholak or tabla keeping a walking pulse, harmonium and strings doubling the melody, the singer forward in the mix. C. Ramchandra's later reputation rests on how far he pushed away from exactly this template, which makes his 1945 work useful evidence of what he was pushing away from.

The line works by synecdoche: the beloved is named not directly but through a part — the fair hands — which is the commonest move in Braj and folk love-lyric and the reason so many film songs of the period begin with an eye, a wrist, a bangle or a veil. 'Gore gore', doubled, is affectionate and slightly teasing rather than descriptive. It is worth noting that this vocabulary belongs to the north Indian village song, not to any imagined Mauryan court; the historical film of the 1940s dressed its images in period costume but kept its songs in the language its audience already sang in.

Samrat Chandragupta (1945) was produced and directed by Jayant Desai for Jayant Desai Productions, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after fourteen years at Ranjit Studios. It is a large-scale historical about Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan empire, built around the legend of his break with Alexander's Macedonians and his marriage to the daughter of the Greek general Seleucus Nicator. Ishwarlal, Renuka Devi, Suraiya, Nayampalli, Sulochana Chatterjee and Mubarak headed the cast; the screenplay was by Mohanlal G. Dave, Shaheed Latif and Sagar Hussain, and Dronacharya photographed it. C. Ramchandra — signing himself Chitalkar Ramchandra at this stage of his career — composed all ten documented songs to lyrics by Buddhi Chandra Agrawal 'Madhur', two years before Shehnai (1947) made him a household name.

The song survives as a catalogue entry with a firm Suraiya attribution, which is more than two-thirds of 1945's film songs can claim. Its value now is as part of the documented three-song block that establishes Suraiya as the singing lead of this production — the clearest single piece of evidence about how Jayant Desai's banner intended the film's music to be sold.