फ़लक के चाँद का हमने जवाब देख लिया

The last of Shanti Kumar Desai's three compositions for Ek Din Ka Sultan (1945) and the second of G. M. Durrani's two songs in it. The title uses jawab in its poetic sense of match or counterpart — the moon of the sky has been shown its equal — which is the standard way Urdu verse pays its highest compliment while pretending to be making an astronomical observation. hindigeetmala records the on-screen performers for this song, the only one of the nine for which it does so: Sadiq Ali, Wasti, Ghulam Mohammed and Mehtab. Words by Wali Saheb.

G. M. Durrani was twenty-six in 1945 and at the centre of his career, a singer who had built his identity by refusing the K. L. Saigal manner that every other male voice of the decade was imitating, and who was equally at home in ghazal, qawwali, bhajan and the plain romantic film song. Shanti Kumar Desai, coming from His Master's Voice broadcasting and trained under Aman Ali Khan, was a composer of the harmonium-and-tabla school, which suits a song whose weight is on a single sustained poetic conceit. Beyond the credits, nothing can be verified — no recording of this number has been traced.

The moon is the most overworked comparison in Urdu love poetry, which is exactly why the good poets stop comparing and start arguing with it. Jawab in this construction is not 'answer' but 'match', 'counterpart', 'the thing that stands opposite and equals' — the same sense in which the Taj Mahal's western mosque has a jawab built on the eastern side purely for symmetry. To say one has seen the sky-moon's jawab is to report a finding: the celestial standard has been met on earth, and the speaker has the evidence. The trick of it is the flat, almost forensic verb — dekh liya, we have seen it, we have checked — which lets extravagant praise arrive as a plain statement of fact. It is a very Urdu piece of understatement, and it is the kind of line Durrani's unornamented delivery was suited to.

This is the only song of Ek Din Ka Sultan whose staging is documented at all: hindigeetmala names Sadiq Ali, Wasti, Ghulam Mohammed and Mehtab on screen for it, which makes it a group scene involving most of the film's principal cast rather than a solo turn. Mehtab had made her acting debut for Sohrab Modi in Parakh (1944) and would marry him in April 1946; Wasti and Sadiq Ali were among the film's leads, and the Ghulam Mohammed listed in this cast is the actor, not the composer of the same name. Modi produced and directed for his own Minerva Movietone, from Agha Jani Kashmiri's story of the water-carrier who was emperor for a day.

No recording has been traced and the song has never been reissued, but of the film's nine titles this is the one with the most surviving documentation attached — singer, composer, lyricist and on-screen performers all recorded. That makes it the natural first target for anyone attempting to recover the soundtrack from 78-rpm sources. G. M. Durrani sang steadily into the 1950s and then very little; he died in Bombay on his sixty-ninth birthday in 1988, by which time the male voice he had helped make possible belonged entirely to the generation that came after him.