पिया की बांसुरिया हुयी कलेजे पार

The most highly rated of the surviving Chhamia songs, 'Piya Ki Bansuriya Huyi Kaleje Paar' is a duet built on the oldest image in the Hindi devotional-romantic vocabulary: the flute of the beloved, which does not charm so much as wound. Zohrabai Ambalewali sings it; the catalogues disagree about the second voice, hindigeetmala naming Shyam Kumar and the BollySwar compendium naming Amirbai Karnataki, so this entry credits only the voice both agree on. Around the flute image the lyric assembles the whole Braj apparatus of crossing water — the deep river, the drowning, the boat that reaches the far bank only because the beloved is the one at the oar.

The recording does not circulate and the catalogues carry no description of the arrangement, so the setting of this particular number cannot be characterised. What the credit establishes is that it is a two-voice number, and that it was written by a composer whose decade at Ranjit Movietone — his largest success there being the fifteen-song Bhakt Surdas (1942) — lay squarely in the folk-devotional register this title's imagery belongs to. Zohrabai Ambalewali, the voice both catalogues agree on, was by the mid-1940s among the most in-demand female playback singers in the industry, having brought khayal and thumri training with her from Uttar Pradesh.

The image at the heart of the song — the flute that pierces the heart rather than delighting the ear — is the Braj bhakti tradition's central paradox, and Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari use it exactly as the tradition does: the wound is the proof of love, and the wounded party has no wish to be healed. What follows is the second great Braj figure, the river crossing. The deep water will drown the reckless; the speaker's boat will nonetheless reach the far shore, because the oarsman is the beloved himself. Placed inside a Pygmalion comedy, this is a striking piece of writing: the devotional register, which in 1945 was the most respectable idiom available to a Hindi film song, gets handed to a story about a street girl learning to talk like a lady, and it lends her a spiritual seriousness the comic frame would not otherwise have given her.

Chhamia (1945) was produced and directed by Protima Dasgupta for her own company, P.D.G. Pictures, from an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with Begum Para in the lead and a supporting company that included the comedian David, the dancer Azurie and Dixit. Gyan Dutt supplied eleven songs to lyrics by Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari. The picture was a commercial success and remained the high point of Dasgupta's short career behind the camera; it is not in circulation today, so its songs are known chiefly through catalogue listings and surviving 78-rpm discs. It carries one of the two highest user ratings among the film's songs on hindigeetmala (tied with the ghazal 'Vehshat Mein Apne Haathon'), on a handful of votes.

Zohrabai Ambalewali was, in 1944–46, the most in-demand female voice in Bombay — the singer of Rattan, and the standard against which the next generation was measured until Lata Mangeshkar's arrival reset the field. Chhamia belongs to that peak stretch, and 'Piya Ki Bansuriya' is the film's best-preserved song: rated, transcribed and still findable in text, even though the disc itself has not been reissued. The disagreement between catalogues about who sings the second part — a male voice by one account, a second female voice by another — has never been resolved, and is a fair illustration of how thin the documentation for independently produced 1940s films can be.