उड़ जाऊँ रे मैं तो तारों की दुनिया में

This is the one Amrapali song for which the film-song catalogues record on-screen artists as well as a singer — Sabita Devi, Prem Adib, Jeevan and Badri Prasad are listed against it — and it draws more listener ratings than any other track from the film, which makes it the soundtrack's best-known number. Amirbai Karnataki sings; the title is a straightforward wish to leave the world for the world of stars.

Medium tempo with a lifting melodic contour — the tune has to enact the flight the words describe, which in 1940s Bombay practice meant an ascending phrase at the head of the mukhda and a wide interval on the word ud ('fly'). Saraswati Devi keeps the accompaniment thin so the rise is audible; Amirbai's open upper register does the rest.

The star-world is one of the most durable escape images in Hindi song, and Pradeep uses the simplest possible construction of it: not heaven, not moksha, just taaron ki duniya — somewhere up there, away from here. Placed in a story about a woman whose worldly position is precisely what she cannot escape, the wish is less a fantasy than a diagnosis. The particle re gives the line the intimacy of speech rather than of verse.

Amrapali (1945) was directed by Nandlal Jaswantlal for Murli Movietone and drew on the legend of Amrapali of Vaishali, the celebrated nagarvadhu of the Licchavi republic who, in the traditional account, renounced her position and gave her mango grove and fortune to the Buddha's order. Sabita Devi, Prem Adib, Jeevan, Arun, Jagdish Sethi, Badri Prasad, Gulab and Sankatha Prasad are the documented cast. Saraswati Devi composed eleven songs for the picture to lyrics by Kavi Pradeep — one of the few soundtracks she wrote after leaving Bombay Talkies.

Of Amrapali's eleven songs this is the one most often carried forward in listings and the only one attached to named on-screen performers, which suggests it was the picture's promoted number. It has not, however, entered the standard 1940s revival repertoire; the film's disappearance took its soundtrack with it.