हो हो ख़्वाजा अजमेरी

The second of Zohrabai Ambalewali's two songs in Ek Din Ka Sultan (1945) and the second of Dattaram V. Gadkar's three. hindigeetmala files it under religious songs, and the address is unambiguous: Khwaja Ajmeri is Moinuddin Chishti, the thirteenth-century Sufi whose dargah at Ajmer is the most visited Sufi shrine in South Asia. Wali Saheb wrote the words.

A film devotional to a Sufi saint sits in the manqabat tradition — verse in praise of a wali, sung at shrines in call-and-response with a repeated invocation of the saint's name, which is what the doubled 'ho ho' of the title reads as. Gadkar gives it to Zohrabai rather than to a chorus, which turns a communal shrine form into a single-voice film number, and Zohrabai's Agra gharana training and her years of thumri recording for His Master's Voice were exactly the equipment for a devotional built on sustained melodic line rather than rhythm. The recording is not in circulation and the arrangement cannot be described here.

Wali Saheb's devotional writing was not incidental to him: his first real recognition came in Lahore in 1937 when Ghulam Haider set one of his naats, and he went on writing bhajans as readily as ghazals. The choice of Ajmer for this film is worth pausing on. The historical episode behind Ek Din Ka Sultan is that of Nizam, the bhishti who floated Humayun across the flooded Ganga after Chausa in 1539 on an inflated mashak and was given the throne for a day; Nizam is believed to have been buried in one of the unmarked graves at Ajmer Sharif. A song calling on Khwaja Ajmeri inside this particular film therefore lands on the same ground the story ends on — though whether the screenplay drew that line deliberately is not documented.

Sohrab Modi's Minerva Movietone made this film in 1945 between Parakh (1944) and Manjhdhar (1947), on a 147-minute canvas smaller than the studio's Sikandar (1941) and Prithvi Vallabh (1943). Modi's historicals had always been built around courts and the claims made in them, and a shrine song belongs to that world as much as a durbar scene does. The film's nine songs were split three ways among Gadkar, Rafiq Ghaznavi and Shanti Kumar Desai; this is one of the three Gadkar signed.

The song has not been reissued and no recording has been traced; it survives as a line in the film's song listing, tagged as a religious number. Its interest now is documentary — a 1945 example of the Hindi film Sufi devotional sung by a woman, a decade and a half before the qawwali became a standard set-piece of the mainstream Hindi film, and a reminder that Zohrabai Ambalewali's range in these years ran from wedding folk to shrine devotional inside a single soundtrack.