क्या ख़ूब है जादू ये

One of the nine songs C. M. Hunar wrote for Neelam, set by Khan Mastana. It matters out of proportion to what is known about it, because it is the A side of the single Young India 78-rpm disc from the film that has been physically documented: MP 672, matrix NG 244, with 'Inhe Ghere Hue Sab' on the reverse. No singer is credited for it in any surviving list, and none is guessed at here.

Nothing can be said about the arrangement from a recording, because no audio of the song has surfaced. What can be said is where it sat in the album's architecture: Khan Mastana built the Neelam score as nine short film songs rather than as classical showpieces, and the fact that the label chose this title for the A side of the disc suggests the producers thought it the more saleable of the pair — usually a sign of a lighter, brisker number rather than a slow ghazal.

The title is an exclamation rather than an address: how fine this magic is. Jadoo in the film lyric of the 1940s is rarely literal sorcery — it is the standard word for an attraction that the speaker can feel working on him but cannot account for, and it carries a note of helpless approval. Hunar leaves the enchanter unnamed in the title line, which is the convention: the song's subject is the effect, not the person. Beyond that the lyric is not recoverable, and nothing further is asserted here about its content.

Neelam (1945) was a social picture from A. H. Productions, Bombay, directed by Ahmed Essa, with all nine songs written by C. M. Hunar and composed by Khan Mastana. The cast was led by Harish and Meena, with Jagdish Sethi, Yashodhara Katju, Kanhaiyalal, Kalyani, Satyarani, Mehdi Raza, Sayani and Abdul Hussain in support. No plot summary of the film survives anywhere, and no print is known to circulate; the songs were issued on the indigenous Young India label rather than on HMV, and it is those shellac discs that carried the film's music into the present.

This song's survival is entirely material. A copy of the Young India disc, contributed by a collector in Hyderabad, was scanned and catalogued through the network of Indian record collectors and is now publicly documented, label text and matrix numbers included — which is more than exists for most of Neelam's soundtrack. The audio itself has not been digitised or published, so the song is currently known by its label and not by its sound. That is the ordinary condition of the Young India catalogue, which was never reissued after the company's Wadala plant closed in 1955.