मैं क्या करूँ

Two head-strong fathers marry their small son and daughter to each other in childhood, then fall out so completely that they sever the connection altogether; the girl is sent back to her father's house and the two children lose sight of one another as they grow up in separate worlds. Years later they meet as strangers. The young man (Agha) falls in love with the young woman (Suraiya), who holds back because she has been brought up to believe that she is a child widow — and it takes him the length of an act to talk her round. A second thread then tangles the first: his friend is in love with his sister (Hansa Wadkar), who is also the heroine's closest friend, and the four principals spend the middle of the picture at cross purposes in a run of comic misunderstandings. The knot is finally untied to everyone's satisfaction, and the film's title question — what am I to do? — is answered by the discovery that the marriage everybody has been agonising over was solemnised long ago.

Eight recordings, all composed by Ninu Majumdar. D. N. Madhok wrote seven of them; Rammurti Chaturvedi wrote one, 'O Janiya Mano Hamari'. The voices are Suraiya's (five recordings, three of them solos), Hamida Banu's (five), Rajkumari's (one certainly, and a second that is disputed — see below) and the composer's own — Majumdar sang the duet 'Bamna Ki Chhori Dil Le Gayi Ho' with Hamida Banu, one of the twenty-eight Hindi film songs he recorded in his own voice. One number, 'Aaj Hans Hans Ke Do Do Baatein Ki Hain Sanam Ne Hamare', exists in two distinct recordings — a brisk, cheerful Suraiya–Hamida Banu duet and a slower, sadder Suraiya solo — the standard mid-forties device of running one tune twice at opposite emotional temperatures. Two further numbers, 'Mai Gulgoon Hai Jawani Hai' and 'O Janiya Mano Hamari', went to Rajkumari and Hamida Banu rather than to the leads; neither singer is in the cast, so both were sung in playback. The first is indexed by collectors as a bar-dance number; for the second the cataloguer said only that the lyric suggests two women 'perhaps' dancing, so its staging is not established. The film did carry a dance director, billed in its advertisement as 'Prof. More'. The singer credit on 'O Janiya Mano Hamari' is itself disputed: HindiGeetMala, MySwar and a 2021 collector listing give Hamida Banu alone, while the 2024 collector post devoted to the recording gives it as a Rajkumari-Hamida Banu duet. Both singers are carried on the song entity with the conflict flagged there.

Flora Films was a small independent Bombay banner; no other title by it was traced in the sources consulted, and no documentation of its director Sudhir Sen was found beyond catalogue listings. The film's newspaper advertisement billed a dance director, 'Prof. More', in type bolder than that used for supporting actors such as Pahari Sanyal and Shah Nawaz; the collector who reproduced that advertisement identifies him as K. S. More (also spelled Moray or Morey), the dance director who married Cuckoo. Cuckoo appears in the same advertisement's cast list, billed as 'Kukoo'. Filmindia reviewed the picture favourably in its October 1946 issue, some three months after release, commending the dialogue-writer for turning an ordinary marriage-tangle story into a fast-paced narrative. Although the film is catalogued as a 1945 production and appears in the standard lists for that year, the release date recorded for it is 12 July 1946 — a gap of the kind that was common in the mid-forties, when censor certification and actual release could fall a year apart. Ninu Majumdar, who scored it, was the son of the dramatist and silent-film producer Nagendra Mazumdar and had trained under Ustad Faiyaz Khan; he described his own ambition in film music as bringing a classical touch to it by borrowing from the old masters.

Mai Kya Karun matters today chiefly as a Suraiya record and as a Ninu Majumdar record. Suraiya was sixteen when it was made, a few years into her career and still a year or two short of the run of films — Dard (1947), Pyar Ki Jeet (1948), Badi Behen (1949) — that would make her the highest-paid actress-singer in the country; this modest Flora Films social gave her the female lead and five of the score's eight recordings, three of them solos. It is also one of the small handful of complete scores by Ninu Majumdar, the classically trained Gujarati composer who wrote for roughly twenty Hindi films and then left the industry for All India Radio, where he spent more than two decades producing light music and is now remembered above all as a founder of Gujarati sugam sangeet. The album is therefore a rare, self-contained sample of a musician whose reputation rests almost entirely outside cinema. Songs of Yore's retrospective survey of 1945 placed the Suraiya solo 'Aaj Hans Hans Ke Do Do Baatein' among the ten best female solos of that year.

No print of the film is known to be in circulation: the collectors who worked through its soundtrack had only the audio of each side and said repeatedly that they could not establish how any of the songs was picturised. It therefore lives today through eight gramophone sides. Those have kept a modest afterlife among collectors of 1940s film music. Songs of Yore's year-end survey of 1945 listed 'Aaj Hans Hans Ke Do Do Baatein Ki Hain Sanam Ne Hamare' among the year's memorable songs and placed the Suraiya solo version among its ten best female solos; the collector blog Atul's Song A Day worked through all eight numbers between 2013 and 2025, finishing the last of them eighty years after the recording session. For Ninu Majumdar the album is the fullest surviving statement of a film composer who chose radio instead; for Suraiya it is one of the last titles from the years before she became a star.