सपनों में कोई आया सजनिया

A Shamshad Begum solo from Ratnavali (1945), words by Rammurti Chaturvedi and music by Pt. Gobind Ram. The song is addressed to a sajaniya — a girlfriend, a confidante — and reports a dream in which the beloved came and kept the sleeper company through the night. It belongs to the large family of sleepless-night songs the 1940s produced, but on the happy side of that family: the night is not empty, it is occupied by the dream.

The recording survives as audio and no account of its arrangement exists, so none is invented here. What is on record is the voice: O. P. Nayyar once described Shamshad Begum's tone as the sound of a temple bell, and the quality Hindi listeners call khanakti hui — ringing, metallic, carrying — is what made her the default female voice for composers who wanted a song to cut through a cinema hall. 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 whole situation is carried by one word: sajaniya, the affectionate address to a female friend. The song is not sung to the beloved but about him, to someone else — which is the classic structure of the sakhi confidence in north Indian love lyric, and it changes the tone completely. Confession to a friend permits delight where direct address would require restraint; the speaker can enjoy the dream out loud. Rammurti Chaturvedi keeps the vocabulary domestic and Braj-inflected throughout, in the same register he uses for his other three songs in this film.

Ratnavali was produced by Amar Pictures, Bombay and directed by Surendra Desai, with Surendra, Ratnamala, Usha Mantri, Maya Banerjee, K. N. Singh, Leela Mishra and N. A. Ansari in the cast. The Geet Kosh lists eight songs, divided between three lyricists; this is one of Rammurti Chaturvedi's four. Shamshad Begum sings two numbers in the film — this solo and the duet with Surendra.

The song was written up online in April 2020, on the hundred-and-first anniversary of Shamshad Begum's birth, as part of a series on songs of sleepless nights — which is roughly the only way an obscure number from a forgotten 1945 costume film gets remembered at all: attached to a singer big enough to have an anniversary. Shamshad Begum, born in Lahore in 1919 and first recorded at twelve under Ghulam Haider for the Jenophone label, was by 1945 among the most heavily worked voices in the industry.