सेजिया सोवत मोरी रानी

The lullaby of Nasib (1945), and the third of Rajkumari's three solos in the film. The survey of Gobind Ram's career built on the Hindi Film Geet Kosh classifies it explicitly as a lori — a lullaby — which is the one classification note we have for it, and it distinguishes the song from her two ghazals on the same album. The words are addressed to 'mori rani', my queen, the standard endearment for a small daughter, which places the song inside the mother-and-child scene that almost every 1940s social film contained and that a film titled Nasib would have used to set up whatever fate does to the family later.

A film lori is built to be sung over a cradle, so the tempo is slow, the range is narrow and the melody circles back on itself instead of developing — the musical equivalent of rocking. Gobind Ram would have kept the accompaniment to the minimum the form allows: a soft dholak or no percussion at all, harmonium or a bowed line beneath, and space for the voice. Rajkumari's tone was bright and slightly nasal, which in a ghazal reads as precision and in a lullaby reads as tenderness without sweetness — an unusual and rather clear-eyed sound for the form. It is also a deliberate contrast within the album: the same singer, on the same record label, three sides apart from the Urdu ghazals, in an entirely different linguistic and emotional register.

Rammurti Chaturvedi writes the lori in the eastern-Hindi and Braj-inflected diction the form carries by tradition — 'sejiya' for the bed, 'sovat' for sleeping, 'mori' rather than 'meri' — a vocabulary that in 1945 already sounded old, and was meant to. The lullaby in Hindi cinema is never only a lullaby: it is the form in which a woman is allowed to voice fear about the future without addressing an adult, because the child cannot understand and therefore nothing has to be resolved. Calling the daughter 'rani' — queen — inside a household the plot is presumably about to ruin is the small ironic pressure that makes the form work in a film called Nasib. Chaturvedi wrote four of this album's eight songs, and his range across them, from the marketplace patter of 'Chane Masaledar Babu Le Lo' to this, is the widest of the three lyricists on the film.

Nasib was made by Silver Films, the banner of the actress Pramila and the actor Kumar, and directed by B. D. Vedi. It came out in 1945, when Gobind Ram had six Hindi releases and Rajkumari was one of the most heavily booked singers in Bombay. This side does not appear among the three Nasib recordings that Saregama still carries, so unlike the two ghazals it has no surviving commercial issue and is known only from song indexes and from the account of Gobind Ram's work that names it. Whether it was picturised on Pramila, on another actress, or as a background song is not documented anywhere consulted, and no print of the film is known to exist.

The film lori is one of the most durable song-types Hindi cinema has, running from the 1930s to the present, and its function has stayed remarkably constant: it is where a film puts the tenderness it will later take away. 'Sejiya Sovat Mori Rani' has no independent afterlife — the record does not appear to have been reissued and the film is lost — but it is worth recording precisely as a datapoint about how comprehensive a 1945 programmer's song plan was expected to be. Eight songs, and the producers still budgeted a side for a lullaby, because the audience expected the whole emotional spectrum from a single film.