हसीनों से हसीनों को मोहब्बत हो ही जाती है

Along with 'Mana Ki Tum Haseen Ho', this is the Moorti song that has a place in the argument about how the film ghazal was rebuilt. Writing on Bulo C. Rani, Sharad Dutt credits him with bringing back the original style of ghazal singing and cites these two Mukesh numbers from Moorti as the best examples, adding that the composer deliberately kept away from the Parsi-theatre manner of delivery that still dominated much Bombay singing in 1945. The proposition of the title — that beautiful people are bound to fall in love with beautiful people — is a piece of worldly ghazal wit rather than a lover's complaint, and the song is one of the few light-hearted things in a soundtrack otherwise full of waiting and rain.

What Sharad Dutt means by the 'original style' of ghazal singing is audible in the restraint of the setting: a slow tempo, a melody that follows the natural stress of the Urdu line instead of overriding it, harmonium and light percussion, and almost no orchestral commentary between phrases. The Parsi-theatre manner Bulo C. Rani was turning away from projected every syllable to the back of a hall; this is the opposite instinct, a singer at conversational distance from the microphone. It suited Mukesh, whose instrument in 1945 was still narrow and slightly nasal and whose phrasing was openly modelled on K.L. Saigal's — an inheritance shared by most male playback singers of the period.

The line is a maxim, not a plea. Where the standard film lyric of 1945 puts the lover below the beloved and asks for mercy, Pandit Indra's conceit here is sociological: beauty finds beauty, and the speaker states this as a law of the world he happens to be caught in. That move — a general observation standing in for a personal confession — is one of the oldest devices of the Urdu ghazal, and it is what lets the song be charming rather than abject. The diction is Persianised Urdu, noticeably more formal than the Braj-inflected Hindi the same lyricist wrote for Khursheed's songs in the same film.

Mukesh had entered films in 1941 with Nirdosh and in 1945 was still an unproven name; the song of his that would change that, 'Dil Jalta Hai To Jalne De' from Pehli Nazar, was released the same year. Moorti gave him two solos and a share of the trio in a Ranjit picture headlined by an established singing star, which in the studio system of the time was a real promotion for a young male voice. Chaturbhuj Doshi's film has not survived, so how the number was staged is unknown — the archivist who posted it in 2011 wrote plainly that he had no idea about the picturisation and asked readers for help.

Almost nothing else from Moorti entered the historical literature; this song did, twice over. It is one of the two numbers named in Sharad Dutt's account of Bulo C. Rani's ghazal revival, and it is one of the earliest Mukesh sides that later listeners return to in order to hear how much Saigal there still was in him before Anokha Pyar and the Raj Kapoor years remade the voice. As a document of a transition it is worth more now than it was as a hit.