रतियाँ गुज़ारूँ कैसे हाय राम

The opening song in the Geet Kosh listing for Ratnavali (1945), words by Rammurti Chaturvedi and music by Pt. Gobind Ram. It is a night-of-separation number: the nights will not pass, sleep will not come. Every printed catalogue derived from the Hindi Film Geet Kosh gives the singers as Shamshad Begum and Zohrabai Ambalewali, but the surviving audio has a male voice in it, and the researchers who have listened to the disc identify the pair as Zohrabai Ambalewali and Surendra — the reading followed here.

Only the audio of this number circulates and no description of its scoring is on record, so nothing is claimed here about the arrangement. What the credit does establish is the shape: a male-female duet placed at the head of a score otherwise built on female solos, with Surendra — an actor who sang for himself throughout his career — opposite the most classically grounded of Gobind Ram's regular voices. Pt. Gobind Ram is credited with about thirty Hindi films and is remembered chiefly for the singers he advanced: he recorded eighty-six songs with Shamshad Begum across nineteen films, did as much as anyone to establish Zohrabai Ambalewali, brought Zeenat Begum into films and gave early encouragement to Mohammed Rafi. His idiom of these years mixes light music, ghazal and thumri with folk material and a distinct Punjabi tinge.

The title works entirely in the Braj-inflected Hindi register rather than in Urdu: ratiyan for nights, the helpless exclamation haay Ram, and the diminutive nindiya for sleep. That choice of register is not neutral in a 1945 film — it locates the speaker in the folk-devotional idiom of viraha, the songs of a woman counting nights, rather than in the courtly Urdu lament of the ghazal. For a story drawn from a Sanskrit court drama it is a deliberately homely voice, and it is the register Rammurti Chaturvedi returns to in three of his four songs for this film.

Ratnavali was made by Amar Pictures, Bombay — Chimanlal Desai's own banner — and directed by his son Surendra Desai, not to be confused with the film's leading man, the singer-actor Surendra, who appears in this duet. The story is taken from the Sanskrit play attributed to the emperor Harsha: a princess of Lanka with a prophecy attached to her hand in marriage, a king of Kaushambi who falls in love, and a first queen who blocks the match until the last reel. Filmindia's Baburao Patel reviewed the picture harshly and predicted a flop; it recovered its cost and made a profit instead.

This is the song that best shows how fragile the record of 1945 is. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh and MySwar both credit it to Zohrabai Ambalewali with Surendra, while hindigeetmala lists Shamshad Begum with Zohrabai Ambalewali and no male singer at all — a straightforward disagreement between catalogues over who is audible on a shellac disc eighty years old. The Geet Kosh reading is followed here. It was also the first of Ratnavali's eight songs to be written up online, in May 2013; the remaining seven took another twelve years to follow.