सुंदर रूप

'Sundar Roop' is the one number in the 1943 Fazli Brothers film Fashion on which the music director Shanti Kumar (credited on the Saregama catalogue as Shanti Kumar Desai) also takes the vocal, to lyrics by Arzu Lakhnavi. A male solo in a score otherwise carried by women's voices, it celebrates beauty of form in the film's romantic register.

As both composer and singer, Shanti Kumar keeps 'Sundar Roop' direct and melody-forward — a flowing mid-tempo line over harmonium, tabla and light strings — the kind of self-sung number common among the multi-tasking music directors of the early-1940s Bombay studios.