मैं चाँद को क्यूँ देखूँ

'Main Chand Ko Kyun Dekhoon' is another of the six Sawan songs whose singer is unrecorded. C. Ramchandra composed it to I. C. Kapoor's lyric. The title performs a familiar poetic manoeuvre — the beloved's face is praised by refusing to look at the moon — and does it in the first person, which makes the compliment an argument the speaker is having with themselves.

No recording is available. The rhetorical shape of the title — a question that is really a statement — usually went with a conversational, mid-tempo setting in this period, sung close to speech rhythm so the argument stays audible. C. Ramchandra's 1945 songs sit in that unfussy Bombay light-melodic manner throughout; the orchestral colour and rhythmic invention that later defined him belong to the years after he joined the Filmistan orbit.

The moon is the default unit of beauty in Urdu-Hindi poetry: chand, chehra-e-mahtab, chandni — an entire vocabulary rests on the comparison. Because it is the default, the interesting poems are the ones that refuse it, and this title takes exactly that route. Asking 'why would I look at the moon' implies without ever stating it that something nearer is brighter, and by leaving the comparison unfinished the line flatters more efficiently than a direct simile could. The first-person framing adds a second layer: the speaker is not describing the beloved to us, they are explaining their own indifference to the sky, which turns a compliment into a small act of loyalty. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh preserves the mukhda, which completes the refusal by claiming the speaker's own moon outshines the one in the sky; beyond that the verses' development is unknown.

Sawan (1945) was produced by Sanjivan Art Productions of Bombay and directed by Dwarka Khosla, with Motilal and Shanta Apte at the head of the cast. C. Ramchandra wrote all nine songs to lyrics by I. C. Kapoor; no plot summary of the film survives in accessible sources, so what is known of its content comes almost entirely from the song titles preserved in the record catalogues. Sources differ slightly on the title's transliteration: hindigeetmala.net lists 'Mai Chand Ko Kyun Dekhu' and myswar.co 'Main Chand Ko Kyun Dekhoon'. The fuller spelling has been used here; both refer to the same disc.

The song is unavailable in any form and appears in no compilation. It survives as a title in the specialist listings, and its residual interest is as one more instance of a durable poetic move — praise by refusal — appearing in an ordinary commercial film score of the mid-1940s.