वहशत में अपने हाथों मुश्किल को ढूँढ़ते हैं

The one unambiguous ghazal in Gyan Dutt's Chhamia score, and tonally the furthest thing in it from the comedy the film is remembered as. The title states the whole argument: in vehshat — madness, the wildness of the desert, the state of the classical Urdu lover after reason has gone — the speaker goes out and looks for difficulty deliberately, with her own hands. The BollySwar compendium credits the song to Parul Ghosh, sister of the composer Anil Biswas and one of the most classically secure female voices of the period; hindigeetmala lists the title without a singer.

A ghazal in a 1945 Hindi film meant a particular set of choices, and the song appears to make them: slow tempo, minimal rhythm, the melodic weight placed on the couplet's second line so that the rhyme-word lands cleanly, and enough space left between phrases for the words to be heard as words. Gyan Dutt was not primarily an Urdu-ghazal composer — his reputation rested on bhajans, folk numbers and the Ranjit Movietone house style — so this is the score reaching outside its own habits, and the presence of a classically trained voice on the disc suggests he wanted the reach to be audible.

The ghazal's method here is the classical one of insisting on agency in one's own destruction. The speaker is not a victim of hardship; she seeks it out — apne haathon, with her own hands — which is the difference between grief and vehshat, and it is the boast of the Urdu lover rather than the complaint of the abandoned one. The transcribed text runs through the standard furniture of that mode: exhaustion with every place one has been, the sword held over the head, the search not for a rescuer but for the killer, the sardonic question of whether wasting away has ever actually got anyone what they wanted. What makes its presence in Chhamia interesting is placement — this level of Urdu diction sits at the opposite end of the film's linguistic range from the street-hawker's cry of 'Mera Chana Masaledaar', and a film about a woman being taught to change how she speaks is precisely the film in which that distance is the subject.

Chhamia (1945) was produced and directed by Protima Dasgupta for her own company, P.D.G. Pictures, from an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with Begum Para in the lead and a supporting company that included the comedian David, the dancer Azurie and Dixit. Gyan Dutt supplied eleven songs to lyrics by Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari. The picture was a commercial success and remained the high point of Dasgupta's short career behind the camera; it is not in circulation today, so its songs are known chiefly through catalogue listings and surviving 78-rpm discs. Of the eleven titles, this is the only one the catalogues classify as a ghazal, and the only one attributed to Parul Ghosh.

The recording does not circulate; the song survives as a catalogue entry, and is one of the minority of the film's eleven titles carried with a named singer and a user rating on the reference sites. Parul Ghosh's filmography of the 1940s is largely associated with her brother Anil Biswas and with Ramchandra Pal; a Gyan Dutt credit is unusual enough that it is worth flagging, and it is the single attribution in this film that only one catalogue makes.