मोहे झूला झुलाने आओ

Listed first in the myswar sequence of the Neelam album, and the odd one out in the score. Where the rest of C. M. Hunar's lyrics for the film sit in the Urdu register of dil, wafa, jadoo and gham, this one is pure eastern Hindi — mohe rather than mujhe — and reaches for the swing song, the jhoola or hindola, one of the oldest fixed forms in north Indian devotional and folk music. No singer is credited in any surviving list.

No recording has been located, so the arrangement cannot be described from the sound. What the form implies is well established: jhoola songs are built on a rocking, cyclical rhythm that imitates the motion of the swing itself, usually in a medium tempo with a strong first beat, and they are among the few film-song types where the rhythm carries as much of the meaning as the melody. Khan Mastana, an Agra-born musician raised on classical and light-classical repertoire, would have had the idiom readily available.

'Come and swing me' is a request, and in this tradition it is almost never a neutral one. The jhoola belongs to the monsoon — to Sawan, the month when women swing in the rain and sing to absent or expected husbands — and it carries a devotional layer as well, since Krishna and Radha on the swing is one of the fixed images of Braj poetry. A film lyricist reaching for that form is importing all of it at once: seasonal longing, licensed flirtation, and a religious memory underneath. The switch from Urdu diction to mohe is the signal that the borrowing is deliberate.

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.

No audio, no disc and no reissue of this song has been traced; it survives as a title with its lyricist and composer attached. Its interest is what it says about the album's design — that even a nine-song score for a small independent picture was expected to cover both the Urdu ghazal register and the Hindi folk-seasonal one, because the 1945 audience for 78-rpm records expected both. That expectation, not any individual hit, is what shaped most soundtracks of the period.