बचपन गया जवानी आई

A Suraiya–Hamida Banu duet from Mai Kya Karun (1945), written by D. N. Madhok for Ninu Majumdar's score. The title states a plain fact of growing up — childhood has gone, youth has come — which in this particular film is not a generality at all but the hinge of the plot: the heroine was married as a child, was returned to her father's house when the two families fell out, and has grown into a young woman who believes that youth has arrived too late for her. No print of the film is known to survive, so the song exists only as audio and its picturisation is nowhere documented.

Mid-forties Bombay had a settled shape for the two-girl duet — the heroine and her friend, alternating lines over a medium-tempo rhythm, the voices deliberately contrasted so a listener with only a gramophone and no picture could tell them apart. Here the contrast is unusually wide: Suraiya's light, forward, almost conversational tone against Hamida Banu's fuller, classically trained delivery — she had come to films through Prithvi Theatres and sang ghazal and khayal alongside playback. Ninu Majumdar was a classically schooled composer — a son of the silent-film producer Nagendra Mazumdar and a pupil of Ustad Faiyaz Khan — who described his aim in film music as bringing a classical touch to it by borrowing from the old masters.

Madhok's title is built on the commonest of Hindi antitheses — bachpan against jawani — and the whole force of the song lies in what the second half of the sentence does not say. Youth has arrived: to do what? For a young woman raised in the belief that she is already a widow, the arrival is an embarrassment rather than a promise, and the coming-of-age song, normally a celebration, turns into something closer to an inventory of what cannot now be used. Madhok wrote seven of this film's eight lyrics and worked throughout in this direct, unornamented Hindustani.

Mai Kya Karun was made at Flora Films, Bombay, directed by Sudhir Sen, and turns on a childhood marriage that two quarrelling fathers annulled in practice but never in fact: the grown children meet years later as strangers, the heroine (Suraiya) holding back because she has been raised to believe she is a child widow. The film's second young woman is the hero's sister, played by Hansa Wadkar, who is also the heroine's closest friend and one corner of the four-way misunderstanding that occupies the middle of the picture. A duet about childhood ending, shared between the two friends, fits that structure — but the picturisation is undocumented and no source records which characters sang it on screen.

The song is not among the numbers from this film that later surveys singled out, and it has had no independent life outside the album. Its interest is as a document of a pairing that barely occurs elsewhere: Suraiya and Hamida Banu recorded together on this soundtrack — Hamida Banu's own Wikipedia entry records, with a book citation, that she and Suraiya sang a duet in Main Kya Karun — before Hamida Banu's career moved to Pakistan in 1956 and Suraiya's moved to the top of the industry.