मुझे चुनने दे

Listed by hindigeetmala under the short label 'Mujhe Chun Ne De' and by pakmag.net with its full opening — 'Mohay chunanay day bagia kay phool, o mali kay chhoray' — this is the garden-bargaining number of the Ragini score, sung by Zeenat Begum and S. D. Batish to a lyric by Nazim Panipati. It is one of only two songs in the film for which pakmag.net records both singers, and one of two for which the Hindi Film Geet Kosh itself names the poet.

A song built on a request and a refusal needs an alternating structure, and in the Punjab-school idiom that Pandit Amarnath worked in that meant a light dholak-driven pulse, a short repeating melodic cell handed back and forth between the two voices, and a chorus-friendly refrain — the shape that had been selling records out of Lahore since Khazanchi (1941). Zeenat Begum's plain, carrying tone is exactly what a bargaining song wants, and Batish's trained male voice supplies the resistance. No disc has been recovered, so this describes the form the lyric implies rather than a heard arrangement.

The situation is one of the oldest in the north Indian songbook and it is never only about flowers. A garden is enclosed and owned; the mali ke chhore — the gardener's boy — is its keeper, and asking his permission to pick is a request to be let into somewhere with a gate. Calling him 'chhore' rather than 'mali' does the social work: it makes him young, subordinate and teasable, which is what converts a trespass into a flirtation. Nazim Panipati, credited here by the Hindi Film Geet Kosh as well as by hindigeetmala and pakmag.net, writes the exchange in the village register rather than in Urdu, which is why the words are Hindi-side plain — the deliberate choice of a poet who could have written it in the other idiom.

Ragini was made in Lahore at Maheshwari Pictures under Shankar Mehta, with music by Pandit Amarnath and songs shared between three lyricists. Nazim Panipati is the only one of those three whose name appears on more than one individual song in the surviving listings — this one and 'Kismat Ne Milaya Hai' — which makes him the most securely attributed poet on the film. Where this number fell in the story cannot be said, because no plot summary of the film has survived.

No reissue, no recovered recording, no later cover. The song's interest today is comparative: it is one of a small group of Zeenat Begum–S. D. Batish duets composed by Pandit Amarnath in 1944-45, the best known of which is 'Daman Na Chod Dena' from Kaise Kahoon — although even there the pairing is contested, since hindigeetmala and pakmag.net list that song as a Zeenat Begum solo and only Atul's Song A Day makes it a duet with Batish.