पिया पिया रात के

Suraiya's principal solo in Samrat Chandragupta and the highest-rated of the film's ten titles on the catalogue sites that still list it. The title repeats the vocative 'piya' — beloved — and places it in the night, the standard setting of the viraha or separation song. Suraiya turned sixteen in June 1945 — the film was certified that February — and appeared in five releases that year; this is from the middle of that run.

C. Ramchandra in 1945 was still writing within the harmonium-and-tabla grammar of the wartime Bombay studio rather than the brass-and-clarinet idiom he would invent after Shehnai (1947). A slow night-song for a young female voice in this period would be carried on a light rhythmic bed with room left for the singer to hold the line, which is exactly the space Suraiya's still-forming voice needed; the qualities that made her the decade's most bankable singer-actress — clarity, restraint, an unforced upper register — are the ones this kind of setting rewards.

'Piya' is the Braj-derived word for the beloved that Hindi film lyric inherited from the thumri and the folk song, and doubling it — piya piya — is the sound of calling rather than describing. Attaching it to 'raat ke', of the night, puts the song in the oldest compartment of the tradition: the woman awake after dark with the beloved elsewhere. Madhur was writing for a historical set in the fourth century BCE, but the vocabulary here is entirely that of the living folk-lyric register, not of period pastiche — which is how almost all 1940s historicals handled their songs.

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.

Of the film's ten titles this is the one that has retained the most visibility, carrying the highest listener rating on the catalogue sites that preserve the soundtrack. It belongs to the stretch of Suraiya's career — 1945, five films in a single year — in which she stopped being a child performer and became simultaneously a leading lady and one of the two or three most recorded female voices in Bombay, a position she held until the Lata Mangeshkar era.