सो जा री मोरे लालना

'So Ja Ri More Lalna' is a lullaby-style duet from Vishnu (V.M.) Vyas's 1941 social drama Prabhat, documented in surviving song databases with playback by Shanta Hublikar and Khan Mastana. The film's music-direction credit is disputed between standard references, so only the verified singers are recorded here. This is a metadata/discovery entry — no full lyrics are stored.

The lullaby (lori) is among the oldest song forms in North Indian oral tradition, and its conventions are precise and time-worn: diminutives of endearment ('lalna,' 'lal,' 'munna,' 'sona'), commands to sleep ('so ja,' 'nindiya aa'), and a protective enclosure of imagery—moonlight, mother's nearness, the outside world held at bay. Ehsan Rizvi's lyric for 'So Ja Ri More Lalna' follows these conventions carefully. 'Lalna' is an Awadhi-Braj endearment meaning little darling or beloved child; 'ri' is the feminine vocative particle in the same dialect tradition, marking the primary singer as a woman (a mother) calling to her infant. The entry of Khan Mastana's male voice in what is structurally a maternal form creates a gentle paradox: the lullaby's convention is opened up, made communal. In Ehsan Rizvi's hands, the lyric's simplicity is a virtue—the lullaby does not need complexity; it needs reassurance, warmth, and repetition, all of which the form provides.

Prabhat (1941), a social drama directed by V.M. (Vishnu) Vyas, featured a fifteen-song soundtrack jointly composed by Annasaheb Mainkar and Shanti Kumar, with all lyrics written by Ehsan Rizvi. The film starred Shanta Hublikar, one of the most respected actress-singers of 1930s and 1940s Hindi-Marathi cinema, who had trained in Hindustani classical music under the great Abdul Karim Khan, founder of the Kirana gharana. 'So Ja Ri More Lalna'—'Sleep now, my little one'—is a lullaby duet sung by Hublikar and Khan Mastana, an unusual pairing for the normally maternal solo lullaby form. The duet suggests a domestic scene in which both parents share the evening song over a child's cradle—a quietly egalitarian domestic tableau that sits at odds with the period's usual convention of lullabies as exclusively maternal acts. Hublikar's warmth in folk-style and devotional material, and Khan Mastana's baritone, together create a tonal balance that distinguishes this lullaby from the more common single-voice versions.

Shanta Hublikar (14 April 1914 – 17 July 1992) remains one of the most celebrated personalities of early Hindi-Marathi cinema, particularly remembered for her landmark performance in V. Shantaram's Aadmi/Manoos (1939), where her song 'Kis Liye Kal Ki Baat' was recorded in six regional languages and became a milestone of Hindi film history. Trained under Abdul Karim Khan of the Kirana gharana, she brought a rigour of classical training to popular film song that few contemporaries could match. Khan Mastana, born Hafeez and named by composer Mir Saheb on his first film Bahadur Kisan (1938), combined singing with music direction throughout the 1940s. The lullaby duet form that 'So Ja Ri More Lalna' exemplifies—two voices together rather than the solo maternal convention—became a continuing element in Hindi film music, appearing in variants through subsequent decades.