मेरा चौदहवीं का चाँद

'Mera Chaudhvi Ka Chand' is one of the ten songs Pandit Amarnath composed for Ragini (1945), the Maheshwari Pictures production made in Lahore and directed by Shankar Mehta. pakmag.net catalogues it in Urdu numerals as 'Mera 14vin ka chand' and hindigeetmala as 'Mera Chaudhvi Ka Chand'; both refer to the same number. No singer and no lyricist are recorded for it by the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, by hindigeetmala or by pakmag.net, and no recording has been located, so this entry carries only what the catalogues actually document.

No disc of this song has been recovered, so its arrangement cannot be described. What is known is the hand behind it: Pandit Amarnath, born in Jalandhar in 1912, a Punjab-school composer who worked in a folk-inflected idiom of direct melody over dholak and harmonium, and who was scoring several films at once in 1945. No claim is made here about how this particular number was set.

Chaudhvin ka chand — the moon of the fourteenth night, the night it is exactly full — is one of the fixed comparisons of Urdu love poetry, and the reason it recurs is that it is a compliment with a deadline built into it: the fourteenth night is the single night of perfection, and every night after it is a diminishment. To call the beloved that is therefore to praise them and to date the praise at the same time. The possessive 'mera' sharpens it further, turning a public standard of beauty into a private claim. The image was old when this song used it in 1945 and would still be current when Guru Dutt built a film around it in 1960; no text of this particular lyric survives, and no lyricist is credited for it.

Ragini was made at Maheshwari Pictures in Lahore in 1945, directed by Shankar Mehta from a screenplay by M. R. Kapur, photographed by Harcharn Singh Kwatra, and led by Smriti Biswas and Najm-ul-Hassan with Pran in support. No print and no plot summary of the film survive, so the dramatic placement of this song cannot be stated. It is one of the five numbers in the score for which no accessible catalogue — the HFGK, hindigeetmala or pakmag.net — records either a singer or a poet.

There is no documented afterlife for this song: no reissue, no recovered disc, no cover version, no contemporary notice. It survives as an entry in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh song list for Ragini and in the two online catalogues that carry the same list, hindigeetmala and pakmag.net. That is the whole of the record, and this catalogue does not add to it.