तेरा मेरा प्यार हो

'Tera Mera Pyar Ho' is the one song of Dharm (1945) credited to Alaknanda, and the only unambiguously romantic title on an album otherwise weighted towards prayer, reflection and separation. Sajjad Hussain composed it, and the Hindi Film Geet Kosh gives the lyric to Shewan Rizvi; the online catalogues repeat both of the film's writers against every track and do not distinguish them. The title is a wish rather than a statement — 'let there be love between you and me' — which is a slightly unusual construction for a 1940s film romance, where the declarative was the norm. No recording has been located and no print of the film survives.

No copy of the record exists in any accessible collection, so the song's melody, orchestration and tempo are unknown and are left unrecorded here. The only musical inference worth making is structural: on an album whose other six titles are a qawwali, two reflective solos, a seasonal duet, an unattributed ensemble number and a song of self-persuasion, this is the light romantic side — the one a 1945 film would place early, before the story turns. Sajjad Hussain's romantic writing in this period is best known through the Noor Jehan songs of Dost (1944), which were the hits that made his name; whether he applied the same approach to a lesser-known voice on a smaller film cannot be established without the disc.

The lyric is not preserved and nothing of it is stored here. What the title offers is a grammatical detail worth noticing: ho is optative, not indicative. The line does not assert that love exists between two people; it asks, or hopes, that it should. Film romance of the 1940s more often worked in the declarative — this is my heart, this is yours — and the conditional wish belongs instead to a situation where love is not yet permitted or not yet mutual. In a film titled Dharm, built around duty, a love that has to be wished for rather than announced would be the natural shape of its romance, though nothing in the surviving record confirms that this is what the song does.

Dharm was produced by Star Productions, directed by Ramnik Desai and released in 1945, with E. Billimoria, Leela Pande, Madhuri, Maya Devi, Jamshedji, Ismail, G. Mohammed, Kumar, Premi and Rattan Bai in the cast. Alaknanda, who sings this song, is the album's third and least documented voice: unlike Rattan Bai she was not in the cast, and unlike the singer credited as Naseem she does not even have a contested identity — the catalogues carry the name and almost nothing attached to it. There is no record of which character the song was picturised on, or of where it fell in a story that itself has left no summary behind.

'Tera Mera Pyar Ho' left no trace in the gramophone market or in later compilations, and Alaknanda's name did not become one that anthologies of 1940s playback singing collect. Its documentary function is precise and limited: it is the seventh and last of the songs that MySwar's HFGK-derived album listing and hindigeetmala's Sajjad Hussain entries both assign to Dharm, and it therefore helps close the boundary of a soundtrack that is elsewhere reported as fifteen songs long. The other eight, all composed by Dada Chandekar to Santokh Nadim's lyrics, belong to Din Raat (1945). Restoring that boundary is, at present, the main thing this song is good for.