किसी के कूचे में गर्दन कटाने जाते हैं

The first of Rafiq Ghaznavi's three numbers for Ek Din Ka Sultan (1945), and the first of two songs G. M. Durrani sings in the film. The title is a straight statement of the classical Urdu conceit of the lover as willing victim: the beloved's lane is where necks are offered, and the plural present tense makes it a habit rather than an event. Wali Saheb wrote it.

The interest of this credit is the relationship behind it. Rafiq Ghaznavi, born in Rawalpindi in 1907 and trained by the Patiala gharana ustads Ashiq Ali and Asif Ali, was the composer G. M. Durrani openly called 'my guru'. Durrani, born in Peshawar in 1919, a Pashto speaker who had come to films from All India Radio's Lahore, Delhi and Bombay stations, made a deliberate point of not singing in the K. L. Saigal manner that dominated the male playback voice of the period — a decision that gave the next generation, Mohammed Rafi included, an alternative model to work from. So this is the pupil taking a ghazal-manner song from the teacher, at the point where the teacher had already scored Modi's Sikandar (1941) and Mehboob's Taqdeer (1943). The recording has not been traced, so the setting itself cannot be described.

Kucha — the lane, the quarter where the beloved lives — is one of the fixed places of the Urdu ghazal's imagined geography, and it is routinely also the maqtal, the place of execution. The lover who goes there does not go to be loved; he goes to be killed, and the going is the whole point. What Wali Saheb adds with 'jaate hain' is repetition and the first person plural: this is not one heroic walk but a standing practice, something the speaker and his kind do, a procession rather than a martyrdom. That plural drains the line of self-pity and gives it a dry, almost sociable irony — the tone Urdu poetry reaches for when it wants devotion to sound like a job of work. It is a register Durrani, who was known equally for sad songs, ghazals and qawwalis, was well placed to carry.

Sohrab Modi's Ek Din Ka Sultan turns on the Mughal anecdote of a water-carrier who saved Humayun's life at Chausa in 1539 and was given the throne for a single day — a story about a neck risked in a river rather than in a lane, but a story about willing sacrifice all the same. Rafiq Ghaznavi's block of three songs is the film's most Urdu-inflected, which is consistent with a Minerva production: Modi's historicals were built on declamatory Urdu dialogue and he had used Ghaznavi before, on Sikandar (1941). Where this song sits in the film is not documented.

No recording of this song has been traced and it has never been reissued; it exists in the film's documented song list and nowhere audible. Its value now is as evidence of the Ghaznavi–Durrani line of transmission at work in 1945 — the Patiala-trained composer writing for the AIR-trained singer who was, at that moment, building the deliberately non-Saigal male voice that the post-1947 industry would inherit. Ghaznavi moved to Pakistan after Partition and ended his career at Radio Pakistan; Durrani stayed, sang steadily through the 1950s and then very little, and died in Bombay in 1988.