सो जा मेरे प्यारे

A Rajkumari solo composed by Khurshid Anwar to Zia Sarhadi's lyric, catalogued as a lullaby by its title's own form of address. It is one of the four Yateem songs with a documented singer.

No commercially reissued recording of this track has been located, so its melody and arrangement are not described here from listening. Khurshid Anwar, who composed five of Yateem's eight songs, came to films from All India Radio Delhi, where he had been Programme Producer (Music) from 1939, and from formal training under Khansahib Tawakkal Hussain begun in 1934; Naushad publicly rated him among the finest composers in the subcontinent.

'So ja mere pyare' — sleep, my dear one — is the standard opening move of the Hindi film lorī, an address downward from an adult to a child. In a picture titled Yateem, the lullaby form carries a charge it would not have elsewhere: the genre presumes exactly the protective adult presence the film's title says is missing. Whether the film exploited that tension cannot be established, because no plot summary survives. Zia Sarhadi wrote the lyric. Unusually for a director, he was a practising film lyricist in his own right — credited with the words for Kokila (1937), Hum Tum Aur Woh (1938), Teen Sau Din Ke Baad (1938), Ladies Only (1939), Sajani (1940) and later Anokha Pyar (1948) — so on Yateem he was writing the songs of a picture he was himself directing. No lyrics are reproduced here.

Yateem (1945) was directed by Zia Sarhadi at Central Studios, Bombay, produced by C.L. Divan and photographed by Keki Mistry, with Yakub, Chandraprabha, Lalita Pawar, David Abraham, Bhudo Advani and the young Suraiya in the cast. No plot summary for the film survives in the accessible record; the title, Urdu for 'orphan', is the only clue to its subject. It is one of Khurshid Anwar's five compositions for the film and one of Rajkumari's three vocals in it.

The lullaby is one of the oldest continuously used song-types in Hindi cinema, and the 1940s produced several that outlived their films. Rajkumari's Yateem lorī did not — it survives as a catalogue line rather than as a recording — but it belongs to the same working practice that a few years later gave the form its enduring examples.