उपदेश यही है सफ़ाई किया करो

The second of the two songs in Amiree (1945) credited to Ranjit Roy, who is also listed among the film's actors. It is the score's didactic number — the title announces itself as an updesh, a sermon or moral instruction — and it is the one song in the film whose title invites two genuinely different readings. No lyricist is recorded and no audio has surfaced.

No recording is available. The didactic song of the 1940s had a recognisable shape — a marching or lightly comic rhythm, a short repeated refrain that the audience could carry out of the theatre, and a delivery closer to speech than to melody, because the point was the message. Whether Dakshina Mohan Tagore wrote it that way here is not known; the tempo and genre recorded on this entry are conventional expectations, and are flagged as such.

The title turns on the word safai, which in Hindustani carries two quite separate senses. Read one way it is a public-hygiene instruction — the teaching is simply this: keep things clean — which would put the song among the civic-message numbers that Indian films began carrying in the 1940s, when municipal sanitation campaigns and film songs shared an audience. Read the other way, safai dena means to offer an explanation or an excuse, and the line becomes sardonic: the only lesson, it says, is to keep explaining yourself. In a film about wealth and the heedlessness of the comfortable, either reading would land; without the text or a recording, neither can be confirmed, and both are set down here.

Ranjit Roy sings two of Amiree's nine songs and appears in its cast, which in a 1945 Calcutta production usually means he performed them on screen himself. Both of his numbers are on the light side of the score — this sermon and the nonsense-refrain 'Chakai Ke Chakadum' — which together suggest a comic or character part rather than a romantic one, though no cast description survives to confirm the role he played.

Like six of the film's nine songs, this one survives only as a title in a catalogue. It is worth recording nonetheless, because the didactic song is a real and under-documented category of 1940s Hindi film music — the moment when cinema took on the job of public instruction — and each surviving title marks a place where one of those songs once was.