जाग जाग प्रिया हे मुख कमल

'Jaag Jaag Priya He Mukh Kamal' is credited to Surendra in both HindiGeetMala and MySwar, with music by Ashok Ghosh and Ali Baksh. It is the one song of Aarti (1945) that the catalogues record twice — this entry is the first of the two versions, listed as 'Version 1' or simply as the unnumbered title. Its language is not the Urdu of the film's romantic duets but the Braj-inflected Hindi of devotional verse, and its subject is the awakening of a sleeper addressed as 'priya' and praised as 'mukh kamal', lotus-face. In a film named after the lamp-offering ritual, that is the closest thing the surviving song list offers to a devotional centre.

The recording is not publicly available and no notation or review of it survives, so nothing can be said about its raag, taal or scoring. What the credits establish is the working relationship behind it. Ashok Ghosh had been setting songs for Surendra since 1936 — Deccan Queen, where he shared the credit with Pransukh Nayak, and Manmohan, which he composed alone, both Mehboob Khan films at Sagar Movietone — and one Manmohan number sung by Surendra with Bibbo is listed in raga-identification compilations as built on Abheri/Bhimpalasi, which places Ghosh among composers who worked from classical frames. A dawn-awakening lyric of this kind would sit naturally in that practice, since the prabhat song is one of the few film forms with a direct classical antecedent. Ali Baksh shares the billing and nothing else is recorded of him.

The title works entirely in the vocabulary of the prabhat or jagran — the awakening song. 'Jaag jaag' is the doubled imperative used to rouse a sleeper; 'mukh kamal' (lotus-face) is a compound that belongs to Braj devotional poetry, where it is the standard epithet for the face of Krishna or of a beloved described in Krishna's terms. The word between them, 'priya', is deliberately unfixed: it can address a human beloved or a deity, and Braj poetics exploits that ambiguity rather than resolving it. In a film titled Aarti — the name of the Hindu lamp-offering performed at dawn and dusk — the doubled reading is available and probably intended, but the surviving record does not settle it. The film's lyricist is unnamed in every accessible catalogue and no recording circulates, so nothing past the opening line can be read.

Aarti was a Screen Attractions Corporation production directed by Ramchandra Thakur, filed by Wikipedia's 1945 list under 'Social' and cast with Surendra, Vanmala, Hansa Wadkar, Sheikh Mukhtar, Kanhaiyalal, Ansari and Harish. Surendra carries five of its ten songs — three solos and two duets with Vanmala — and this is the only one of his solos written in a devotional register rather than an Urdu romantic one, which suggests it was placed to do specific narrative work rather than to be another love number. Nothing further about its screen situation is recoverable: the film does not circulate and no synopsis of it survives in the accessible record.

No recording of the song is in circulation, on the streaming platforms or on YouTube, and it does not appear in any published account of 1945 film music. Its one distinction inside the film's own record is that it was issued or catalogued in two versions, which is the only sign the surviving documents give that any number in Aarti was thought worth repeating. Beyond that, its legacy is the same as the rest of the film's: a title, two composer names and a singer, preserved by song-index compilers working from the Hindi Film Geet Kosh.