ऐ जान अपने होंठों के फाटक खोलिये

The one openly comic number in Ghazal (1945), sung by Noor Mohammad Charlie, who was the reigning comedian of Hindi cinema in that year and played the film's hero opposite Leela Chitnis. The joke is built into the title: the singer addresses his beloved with 'ae jaan' — the most exalted vocative in the Urdu love lexicon — and then asks her to open not her lips but the phaatak, the gate, of her lips. Catalogues list the song in the shortened form 'Ae Jaan Apne Honto Ke'.

Comic songs of the mid-forties were written to a different specification from the rest of a score: the melody has to stay out of the way of the diction, because the payload is verbal. Charlie was an actor-comedian rather than a singer, and the surviving practice for his special numbers was a brisk, speech-adjacent line over a light rhythm, with the phrasing shaped around where the laugh falls. Placing it inside a film named after the most refined of Urdu verse forms is the point of the contrast. Gyan Dutt had been Ranjit Movietone's house composer, the man behind Sant Tulsidas (1939) and the fifteen-song Bhakt Surdas (1942) with K. L. Saigal, and across 1937-1965 he wrote some 600 songs for around 58 films. By 1945 he was working freelance for small independents like Raja Movietone, and within a few years the arrival of Naushad, C. Ramchandra and S. D. Burman had pushed him to the margins of an industry he had helped build.

The line is a small, precise piece of parody. 'Jaan' means life, and as a vocative it is what a lover says when no lesser word will do; 'honth', lips, belongs to the same elevated register. 'Phaatak' does not. It is the word for the gate of a compound, a level crossing, a factory entrance — solidly municipal, entirely unpoetic, and impossible to say without deflating the two words in front of it. The technique is the standard one of Urdu comic verse: build a couplet in the high style and then detonate it with a single word from the wrong vocabulary. In a film called Ghazal, the joke also lands on the form itself.

Ghazal was produced and directed by Zahoor Raja for Raja Movietone, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after learning the craft as an editor and assistant at Eastern Pictures. Contemporary accounts describe the picture as a Muslim social with a light comedy touch: Noor Mohammad Charlie — the reigning screen comedian of 1945 — played hero opposite Leela Chitnis, while Raja himself was paired with Radharani. Gyan Dutt composed all eight songs, and the four lyricists are credited collectively, with no catalogue splitting the titles between them. 1945 was the peak of Charlie's career, the year in which he was regularly given a special comedy song of his own in whatever film he appeared in, and in Ghazal he was not the comic relief attached to the plot's margins but the hero himself. That casting is the clearest evidence of what kind of picture Raja Movietone thought it was making.

Charlie's stature has not survived his era: he was among the biggest names in Hindi cinema in the mid-1940s and is now almost entirely absent from popular memory of it, partly because comedy of this kind is the first thing a canon discards and partly because he too left for Pakistan after Partition. This song is one of the few of his special numbers from his best year for which both a title and an attribution survive together, which makes it a useful specimen of a genre — the star comedian's set-piece song — that the standard histories of 1940s film music barely acknowledge.