दुनिया दोरंगी है

'Duniya Dorangi Hai' is listed in both HindiGeetMala and MySwar among the ten songs of Aarti (1945), with music by Ashok Ghosh and Ali Baksh and no singer credit. No lyricist is recorded for the film. The title belongs to the duniya song — the fixed Hindi film category in which the singer indicts the world itself rather than any individual. Dorangi, literally 'of two colours', is the Urdu-Hindi word for duplicity: a world that shows one face and holds another. Together with 'Nange Badan Vastra Bin Phirate', it is the strongest textual evidence that Aarti carried the reformist charge implied by its 'Social' classification.

The recording is not in public circulation and no review of the score has been traced, so the melody, tempo, raag and orchestration are left unrecorded here rather than reconstructed. The credit is joint, Ashok Ghosh with Ali Baksh, as on all ten songs, and the archive gives no way to separate their contributions. Ghosh's other work of the period — Nirdosh (1941), Sharafat (1943), Miss Devi (1944), Gunjan (1948) — is documented only as a list of titles; almost none of it is audible today either, so even a comparative reading of his style is closed off.

The duniya song is one of the durable forms of Hindi film lyric, and its rhetorical trick is displacement: by arraigning 'the world' the singer can say things about a specific injustice that would be unsayable if aimed at a named person or class. 'Dorangi' sharpens that further — the charge is not that the world is cruel but that it is two-faced, which makes hypocrisy rather than misfortune the subject. In a film catalogued as a social, that is precisely the accusation the genre existed to make. What the verse went on to name cannot be recovered: no lyricist is recorded for Aarti in any accessible source and no recording of the song survives in circulation.

Wikipedia's list of Hindi films of 1945 assigns Aarti the genre 'Social', the trade category for contemporary films with a reform argument, and this title is the plainest confirmation of that label in the surviving material. The film was produced by Screen Attractions Corporation and directed by Ramchandra Thakur, with Surendra and Vanmala leading and Hansa Wadkar, Sheikh Mukhtar, Kanhaiyalal, Ansari and Harish in support. Which of them sang or was pictured in this number is not recorded; the catalogues give the song a composer credit and nothing else.

The song is absent from every streaming catalogue and from YouTube, and it appears in no published history of 1945 film music. It is preserved only as a line in the song indexes derived from the Hindi Film Geet Kosh. That is worth recording rather than skipping: the reform songs of minor 1940s socials are the part of the period's output that vanished most completely, and a database that lists only the surviving hits reproduces a false picture of what the decade actually sounded like.