कमली वाले मुझे कमली में ले ले

'Kamli Wale Mujhe Kamli Mein Le Le' is one of two devotional numbers in Shyam Sundar's score for Bhai Jaan (1945), with lyrics by Partau Lakhnavi. No source — Wikipedia, MySwar or HindiGeetMala — records a singer for it, so none is credited here. Wikipedia gives the title in full; HindiGeetMala and MySwar list it in the shortened form 'Kamli Wale'.

Film naats of the 1940s were normally built close to the qawwali and the majlis idiom the audience already knew: a slow, declamatory opening, harmonium and chorus response, and a rhythmic bed that firms up as the piece proceeds. That structural expectation constrains a composer more than a filmi love song does, because a devotional number that departs too far from the congregational sound loses its authority with the listener. Shyam Sundar's plain melodic manner and light orchestration suit the requirement; beyond that, nothing can be said with confidence about the arrangement, since no transfer of the recording has been located.

'Kamli Wale' — the One of the Blanket — is a devotional epithet for the Prophet Muhammad, drawn from the Quranic address al-Muzzammil, 'the enwrapped one', and long naturalised in the Urdu and Punjabi naat repertoire of the subcontinent. Asking to be taken into the blanket is the standard petition attached to that epithet: it asks for shelter, for inclusion among those the Prophet covers, and it borrows the physical image of a cloak thrown over a supplicant. Partau Lakhnavi is therefore working with a wholly conventional devotional formula rather than inventing an image, which is what a film naat requires — the audience must recognise the address before the melody has finished its first phrase. Nothing beyond the title survives of the lyric.

Bhai Jaan is a Muslim social, and the presence of a naat and a prayer in a nine-song album is part of what defined the form: the genre's claim was that it showed Muslim domestic life from the inside, and religious observance was part of what it showed. Filmindia's reviewer, who described the picture's theme as 'orthodox and reactionary' by the standards of 1945 and recommended it as 'quite a good picture to show to ladies both old and veiled', was reacting precisely to that combination of conservative plot and observant milieu. Where the naat falls in the story is not recoverable.

Film naats are among the least catalogued items in the Hindi film song record. They were seldom pressed as commercial singles, they were often sung by uncredited voices, and singer-indexed compilations therefore never picked them up. This one survives as a title in three lists and nothing more — which is itself worth preserving, because it documents that a small 1945 production thought a naat belonged in its score.