उठो सुलक्षण नार झाड़ू दे ले अँगना

A song from Atre Pictures' 1941 social drama Charnon Ki Dasi, composed by Annasaheb Mainkar to lyrics by Pandit Anand Kumar. HindiGeetMala lists the track but does not specify the singer. Its domestic, dawn-of-day imagery — rising to sweep the courtyard — fits the household setting of the film's saas-bahu story.

'Sulachan' (also 'sulakshana') is a Sanskrit-derived epithet meaning a woman of good qualities, a woman of auspicious signs — the literal opposite of 'kullakshana' (ill-omened). The address 'sulachan naar' (virtuous woman, auspicious woman) invokes the vocabulary of ideal domesticity drawn from Sanskrit-based ethical discourse: the good wife whose daily rituals bless the household. The act of sweeping the courtyard ('jadu de le angna', the 'jadu' here being the broom) is in North Indian domestic practice a foundational act of purification at dawn — clearing dust, chasing away inauspiciousness, readying the threshold for the day. The lyric's call to perform this act at daybreak encodes a complete ethical proposition: the sulachan woman's morning ritual is the household's first blessing. Pandit Anand Kumar's lyric thus uses a simple domestic action to carry a weight of moral and cultural meaning.

Charnon Ki Dasi (1941) was a bilingual Hindi-Marathi production by Atre Pictures, Bombay — released simultaneously as Payachi Dasi in Marathi. The film was directed by Gajanan Jahagirdar, who also appeared in the cast alongside Durga Khote, Vanmala, Master Avinash, Kusum Deshpande, Sadashiv, and Prem Anand. The story centered on a social reform drama: an educated daughter-in-law oppressed by a tyrannical mother-in-law, resolved ultimately through the son's intervention — a domestic-conflict narrative common to the reform-minded Bombay productions of the 1940s. 'Utho Sulachan Naar Jadu De Le Angna' — a call to the virtuous woman to rise and sweep the courtyard — places itself at the dawn of a day defined by the daughter-in-law's domestic labor and the household's moral hierarchy. Music was by Annasaheb Mainkar; dialogue, story, screenplay, and lyrics were all written by Pandit Anand Kumar. Verified sources document Durga Khote and Saraswati Rane as the song's performers, though the recording credited Vanmala.

This song carries a documented and significant footnote: it marked the Hindi film playback debut of Saraswati Rane, even though the recording's label credited Vanmala as the vocalist. Rane, who sang all of Vanmala's numbers in this film, went on to record over 200 songs on 78 RPM discs across classical, light-classical, and film music genres. Her debut here — documented by Atul's Song A Day (2026) — is an example of the early talkie period's common practice of actress-credit over playback-singer credit, which obscured many singer careers from historical view.