आशा को हँसाए

'Asha Ko Hansaye' is a duet by Bulo C. Rani and Amirbai Karnataki. Both HindiGeetMala and MySwar name Wali Saheb as its lyricist, one of only three Preet songs not written by D. N. Madhok.

The three Wali Saheb songs are the record's Urdu corner, and a composer working in 1945 handled that repertoire differently from the Hindi folk material: a more measured line, more space around the words so the diction can be heard, and a debt to the ghazal's habit of letting a phrase finish before the accompaniment moves. Pairing the composer's voice with Amirbai Karnataki's much more experienced one is a choice the record makes twice. No arrangement detail is documented.

Asha ko hansaye — to make hope laugh — is a small piece of syntactic misdirection, because hope is normally the thing that consoles rather than the thing that needs consoling. Wali Saheb turns it into a person: something fragile enough to need cheering up, which quietly concedes how badly the situation is going before a word of complaint is spoken. The device of personifying an abstract noun and then treating it tenderly is standard Urdu practice, and it is what separates these three lyrics on the record from Madhok's plainer Hindi. The full text is not reproduced on this page.

HindiGeetMala and MySwar both credit 'Asha Ko Hansaye' to Bulo C. Rani, Amirbai Karnataki, with Wali Saheb as lyricist and Bulo C. Rani as composer. Preet was made at Krishin Movietone, the Bombay banner Ram Daryani had set up with his brother K. S. Daryani in 1938, and Daryani directed it himself. Bulo C. Rani composed all thirteen songs; D. N. Madhok wrote ten of them and Wali Saheb the other three. MySwar records the discs as a Columbia Records release. Cinemaazi and the Wikipedia list of 1945 Hindi films give the cast as Snehprabha Pradhan, Chandra Mohan, Nazir Ahmad, Pahari Sanyal, Swarnalata, Gope, Miss Gulab and Majid. No plot summary of the picture survives in any source that can be consulted without a paywall, and the film has no Wikipedia article of its own, so nothing is asserted here about what happens in it.

Amirbai Karnataki (1906-1965) sings on three of Preet's thirteen songs. She had been one of the most heavily recorded female voices of the first half of the 1940s — she sang six of the eight songs of Kismet (1943) — and 1945 catches her in the last stretch of that dominance, before Lata Mangeshkar's rise after 1947 redrew the map of female playback singing entirely. Preet itself survives today only as a catalogue: a thirteen-song list preserved through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the databases built on it, with no print known to circulate and no plot summary in open circulation.