जाग जाग प्रिया हे मुख कमल (संस्करण 2)

The song indexes list 'Jaag Jaag Priya He Mukh Kamal' twice for Aarti (1945): HindiGeetMala marks the second entry '(Version 2)' and credits Surendra on it, while MySwar files it as 'Jaag Jaag Priya He Mukh Kamal - II' and leaves the singer blank. A double entry of this kind in 78-rpm-era catalogues usually means the melody returned at a second point in the film, often at a different emotional pitch — but no source states what distinguished the two, and no recording of either is in circulation. Music is credited, as on every song in the film, jointly to Ashok Ghosh and Ali Baksh.

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.

In 1940s Bombay a reprised song usually marked a turn in the story — the same melody heard once in happiness and again after a reversal, or sung first by one character and then taken up by another. Aarti's records do not say which pattern applied here, and since the film does not survive in circulation, the question cannot be settled. What is documented is the surrounding production: Screen Attractions Corporation, director Ramchandra Thakur, and a cast led by Surendra with Vanmala, Hansa Wadkar, Sheikh Mukhtar, Kanhaiyalal, Ansari and Harish, in a film Wikipedia's 1945 list files under the 'Social' genre.

Like the rest of Aarti's soundtrack, this version has left no audible trace: nothing on the streaming services, nothing on YouTube, no mention in the retrospectives. Its historical value is narrow but real — it is documentary evidence that the film's makers thought one melody worth using twice, which is the only internal ranking of the score that the surviving record contains. Everything else about the two versions, including how they differed, is lost.