राखी का दिन आया

'Rakhi Ka Din Aaya' announces the arrival of Raksha Bandhan, the day on which a sister ties a thread on her brother's wrist and he accepts a lifelong obligation to protect her. In a film built around two child characters — Madhu, who is passed from household to household, and Kamla, the wheelchair-bound girl who becomes attached to her — a festival song about a bond that is chosen rather than inherited is a natural fit. No singer was credited, and no recording is known to survive.

Festival songs of this period are written to be picked up and repeated, and the 78-rpm side that carried them left about three minutes for a refrain plus two short verses. S. N. Tripathi, who had absorbed both the classical training of Bhatkhande's Lucknow college and the practical working idiom of a Bombay Talkies orchestra player, was equipped for either the folk-festive or the classical approach; which he used here is not recorded, because no transfer of the disc is known and the catalogues note only composer and lyricist.

Raksha Bandhan gives a lyricist a ready-made grammar: a thread, a wrist, a promise, and the annual return of all three. What makes it useful in a story like Bachpan's is that the bond it celebrates is contractual rather than biological — the thread can be tied by any woman on any man she chooses to call brother, which is precisely how the festival has always been used across caste and community lines in north India. I. C. Kapoor was writing for a film whose plot turns on a man who is not the child's father protecting a child who is not his daughter, and on caste rejection as the wound that starts the story. Beyond the title no text of this lyric has been located, so nothing is claimed about its actual words.

Bachpan was made by Homi Wadia's Basant Pictures, a studio then known for Fearless Nadia stunt pictures, and it is a social family drama instead: Bhairav (Mazhar Khan), embittered and living alone on a mountainside after his son married outside their caste, is slowly softened by Madhu (Baby Madhuri), the young niece a relative sends to live with him. Madhu is twice abducted — once by the aunt, who sells her as a companion to the wealthy invalid Kamla (Baby Shakuntala), and once by Kamla's jealous governess — and the film ends with the village schoolteacher Ramesh (B. Nandrekar) and his beloved (Chandraprabha) clearing Bhairav's name at the police station. I. C. Kapoor wrote the story, the dialogue and all ten song lyrics; S. N. Tripathi composed the score.

The song did not enter the small canon of Hindi film Raksha Bandhan numbers that later became annual radio fixtures; those came from bigger films of the 1950s and 1960s. No transfer of the Bachpan disc is known to circulate. What survives is the entry in the film's song list — evidence that a Basant Pictures children's drama in 1945 built a festival number around the sibling bond, in the same score as a patriotic song and a Krishna song.