ये मेरे हैं मैं इनकी हूँ

A duet for Naseem Akhtar and Surendra from Ratnavali (1945), written by Vrajendra Gaur and composed by Pt. Gobind Ram. The title is a statement of mutual possession made in the plural honorific — these are mine, I am theirs — which in Hindi carries both intimacy and formality at once. Only the audio survives; Surendra plainly sings for himself on screen, but which actress mimed to Naseem Akhtar's voice has never been established.

The song is known only from its audio and no description of its scoring is on record. Naseem Akhtar was a playback singer of the 1940s whose recorded output is small enough that each surviving credit matters; this is one of a handful of documented duets between her and Surendra, and it is the only song in Ratnavali she appears on. Pt. Gobind Ram is credited with about thirty Hindi films and is remembered chiefly for the singers he advanced: he recorded eighty-six songs with Shamshad Begum across nineteen films, did as much as anyone to establish Zohrabai Ambalewali, brought Zeenat Begum into films and gave early encouragement to Mohammed Rafi. His idiom of these years mixes light music, ghazal and thumri with folk material and a distinct Punjabi tinge.

The line's whole weight sits on the plural honorific ye and inki. Hindi allows a lover to be addressed or described in the plural as a mark of respect, and using it inside a declaration of love produces a particular effect: the beloved is claimed and deferred to in the same breath. It is also, in a costume film set in a royal court, exactly the grammar that a woman of the household would use — so the register does narrative work as well as emotional work. Vrajendra Gaur wrote both of the film's duets, and both of them turn on a small grammatical hinge of this kind.

Ratnavali (1945) was directed by Surendra Desai for Amar Pictures, Bombay, from the Sanskrit play attributed to emperor Harsha. Its cast — Surendra, Ratnamala, Usha Mantri, Maya Banerjee, K. N. Singh, Nand Kishore, Leela Mishra, N. A. Ansari, Jaani Babu and S. Nazir — was deep enough that the film's own chroniclers could not later work out who was on screen for which song. Vrajendra Gaur wrote two of the eight lyrics, both of them duets for Surendra.

Catalogued online in January 2015 as the second of Ratnavali's songs to be documented, with the lyrics transcribed from the audio by a reader. Naseem Akhtar has no substantial biography anywhere in print or online; what exists of her is a scattering of credits like this one, which is why an obscure duet from a vanished 1945 film is worth keeping a record of at all.