सखियो हो गयी आज परायी

The one song in Ghazal (1945) whose title places it unmistakably in a specific ritual: the bidaai, the moment at the end of a Hindu wedding when the bride leaves her father's house. Addressed to the 'sakhiyaan', her companions, it announces that she has 'become another's' from today. Against the Urdu ghazals that dominate this score it sits in a different linguistic and cultural world entirely. No singer credit for it survives in any catalogue or collector source consulted.

No recording of this song is accessible, so nothing can honestly be said about its arrangement. What is documented is the hand behind it. Gyan Dutt had been Ranjit Movietone's house composer, the man behind Sant Tulsidas (1939) and the fifteen-song Bhakt Surdas (1942) with K. L. Saigal, and across 1937-1965 he wrote some 600 songs for around 58 films. By 1945 he was working freelance for small independents like Raja Movietone, and within a few years the arrival of Naushad, C. Ramchandra and S. D. Burman had pushed him to the margins of an industry he had helped build. A score of eight songs split between Urdu ghazals and folk-register numbers is consistent with his practice of building tonal range across a soundtrack rather than repeating one successful manner.

'Paraya' is the key word and it has no clean English equivalent: it means belonging to another, and by extension not-one's-own, outsider, no longer of this household. Applied by a bride to herself on her wedding day it is devastating precisely because it is the correct legal and social description — she is not complaining of injustice, she is stating her new status. The address to 'sakhiyo' rather than to parents or husband keeps the song inside the world of women, which is where the bidaai tradition lives; these are the friends who will remain in the village she is leaving. The vocabulary is Braj-inflected and folk, not the Urdu of the film's title, which suggests Gyan Dutt was deliberately building tonal range across the eight numbers.

Ghazal was produced and directed by Zahoor Raja for Raja Movietone, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after learning the craft as an editor and assistant at Eastern Pictures. Contemporary accounts describe the picture as a Muslim social with a light comedy touch: Noor Mohammad Charlie — the reigning screen comedian of 1945 — played hero opposite Leela Chitnis, while Raja himself was paired with Radharani. Gyan Dutt composed all eight songs, and the four lyricists are credited collectively, with no catalogue splitting the titles between them. No print of Ghazal survives in public access and no plot summary of it has been published, so where this song fell in the story, and which character sang it, cannot be established.

No recording of this song has surfaced in the digitised record: it is not on the commercial reissue catalogues, and unlike three of its companion numbers it has not been posted with a singer attribution by the collector-blogs that have worked through the 1945 output song by song. What survives is the title and the composer credit in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh-derived song tables. That is a real piece of information rather than a gap to be filled in: it measures precisely how much of 1945's recorded music passed through the gramophone companies without ever being attributed to a voice.