आओ हम आज चलें

'Aao Hum Aaj Chale' is the female duet of the Kaise Kahoon score, sung by Shamshad Begum and Zeenat Begum to Pandit Amarnath's music and a lyric by Moti B.A. It is the only track on the album that pairs the two women — Zeenat Begum, whom Amarnath had discovered around 1937, and Shamshad Begum, whom Ghulam Haider had discovered a decade earlier and who by 1945 was singing for composers across Lahore and Bombay. A second version of the same title also appears in the film's song register, credited to a different lyricist.

The interest of the record is in the contrast between the two voices, both of which Amarnath had worked with before. Shamshad Begum's is the robust, carrying, folk-rooted instrument that Khazanchi (1941) had made the signature sound of Lahore's film music; Zeenat Begum's is lighter and more classically schooled; Amarnath had discovered her around 1937, when she was still a child. A 'let us go' lyric — a call to set out — invites the two to answer each other rather than blend, and a duet of that shape is the standard way a 1940s composer showed off two contrasting timbres on a single 78-rpm side.

'Aao hum aaj chale' — come, let us go today — is an invitation without a stated destination, and the withholding is the point: in film songs of this kind the going matters more than the place, and the line can be read as an outing, an elopement, or a turn towards something new, depending on the scene. The 'aaj' (today) is what gives it urgency; it marks the day as different from the days before it. Moti B.A., who wrote more of this soundtrack than any other lyricist, is otherwise almost entirely undocumented. No lyric text is reproduced here.

Kaise Kahoon was made at Pancholi Art Pictures, Lahore, directed by Moti B. Gidwani, and released on 16 November 1945. The heroine Ragini — born Shamshad Begum in Gujranwala in 1924, and no relation to the singer of the same name — was one of Lahore's biggest draws; Baby Akhtar is listed in the supporting cast. No source records what part either song of this title plays in the film.

The two singers on this record had opposite futures. Shamshad Begum stayed in India after Partition and became one of the dominant playback voices of the 1950s, still recording into the 1980s; Zeenat Begum went to Lahore and to Radio Pakistan, where she sang ghazals and nazms into the late 1950s and was known there as the Queen of Yesteryear. This duet is one of the small number of records on which their voices are heard together, made in the last full year in which such a pairing was ordinary.