तूने जायो है राजकुमार

The verb in the title is the giveaway: jayo, from the Braj and Awadhi jaayo — to have given birth — is not standard Khari Boli Hindi and does not belong to the urban film register at all. It belongs to the sohar, the song women sing at the birth of a son in the eastern Hindi belt, in which the newborn is invariably addressed as a prince. A film song built on that phrase is reaching for a whole ritual context in a single line. Catalogued with Pannalal Ghosh as composer; no singer or lyricist is credited.

No recording of the number has surfaced online, so nothing can honestly be said about its scoring beyond who wrote it. What is worth knowing is the hand behind it: in 1945 Pannalal Ghosh was already the leading bansuri player in the country — he had lengthened the instrument to thirty-two inches and added the teevra-madhyam hole to make the lower-octave meend possible — and he came to Bombay film work from New Theatres in Calcutta rather than from the Bombay studio system.

The sohar is sung by women, to the mother, about the child, and its central move is inflation: the ordinary infant of an ordinary household is greeted as a raja or a rajkumar, and the house as a palace. That is not flattery but the form's way of marking that something irreversible has happened. Hindi cinema borrowed the sohar sparingly and usually to signal that a scene is taking place inside a family rather than in the world outside it. Whether Bisvi Sadi used the form straight, or ironically against a story about the twentieth century, cannot be established: the title is all that survives, and the dialect of that title is the only firm evidence about the song's idiom.

Bisvi Sadi — 'The Twentieth Century' — was produced and directed by Mohan Bhavnani for Bhavnani Productions and released in 1945, with Motilal and Nargis heading a cast that also included Mazhar Khan, Gope, Ashalata, Bhudo Advani, Navin and Majumdar. Pannalal Ghosh, the flautist who made the bansuri a Hindustani concert instrument, wrote all fifteen songs; the records went out on Columbia. The dialect form in this title is worth setting against the film's name. Bhavnani's picture announced the twentieth century in its title and then filled its score with Braj and Awadhi registers — a Yamuna-bank pair, a garden song, a Holi song, a wedding song and this birth song. Whatever the plot was, the music was not modern in vocabulary.

Bisvi Sadi is out of circulation and no print is known to be accessible, so the song exists today chiefly as a catalogue line in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived databases. Its claim on attention is that it belongs to one of the very few complete Hindi film scores signed by Pannalal Ghosh, whose reputation otherwise rests entirely on the concert platform.