हँसने हँसाने के दिन आ गए हैं

The second of Amirbai Karnataki's three songs in Kul Kalank, and one of the four sides from the film held in the Saregama catalogue. Its title is a declaration of arrival — the days of laughing and making others laugh are here — which in the structure of a 1940s social almost always marks an early scene, before the plot has done its damage. Read against the film's title, the song is the height from which the story falls.

Songs of this type are written to be immediately catchable — a bright, mid-tempo tune with a refrain the audience can hold after one hearing, carried on dholak and a small studio ensemble on a three-minute 78-rpm side. In Allah Rakha's film writing the interest usually lies in the rhythmic frame rather than in melodic ornament, and a celebratory number is where a tabla-player-turned-composer has the most straightforward job: keep it moving. Amirbai Karnataki's voice, low and slightly grainy where the later playback ideal would be high and clear, gives a song like this more weight than its sentiment strictly asks for.

Roopbani's line does something subtler than simply celebrating. It does not say the singer is happy; it says the days for laughter have arrived, which puts the joy outside her and makes it a matter of timing — of a season that has come and can therefore go again. That is a standard device in Hindustani lyric, where happiness is nearly always dated, held against the certainty that the calendar will turn. In a film about a family disgrace it reads as a warning issued in the form of a celebration.

Kul Kalank was made at Sunrise Pictures under Nanubhai B. Vakil and released in 1945 into a Bombay industry that produced more than seventy Hindi films that year. Shanta Hublikar, who had been one of the most talked-about performers in Indian cinema six years earlier for her multilingual song in Prabhat's Aadmi (1939), was the film's lead; Amirbai Karnataki both acted in it and sang three of its eleven songs. Neither a print nor a synopsis of the film has been preserved.

Nothing in the later literature on 1945 discusses this song; it survives because the masters for four Kul Kalank sides reached the Saregama archive. What it documents is the ordinary working level of Hindi film music in the year before independence — competent, quickly made, sung by a first-rank voice for a second-rank production — and one more entry in the short film discography of a musician who would spend the second half of his life being introduced as the greatest tabla player of his generation.