बामना की छोरी दिल ले गई हो

The one number on the soundtrack that the composer sings himself: Ninu Majumdar in duet with Hamida Banu, to a D. N. Madhok lyric. It is a tete-a-tete between two lovers, half teasing and half argument. The boy admits that his heart has gone to a brahmin's daughter; the girl answers that hers has been taken by a baniya's son. They compare what did it — the eyes, the fairness, the smile — and then arrive at the obstacle, which is not each other but their two families. The girl's position is that mutual love is what actually constitutes a marriage, caste and household notwithstanding. No print of the film is known to survive, so the song exists only as audio and its picturisation is nowhere documented.

Majumdar sang twenty-eight Hindi film songs in his own voice over his career, and this is one of them — a composer's voice rather than a professional playback voice, which for a rustic teasing duet is an advantage: the delivery stays conversational and lets Hamida Banu's trained tone carry the melodic weight. The arrangement drew specific praise from the one collector who has written about the recording, who singled out the extra interludes placed after the opening lines of each antara — a small structural device that breaks the monotony of a repeated line and is exactly the sort of detail a classically trained composer adds. 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 writes the song in village Hindi rather than in the Urdu-inflected register he uses elsewhere on this soundtrack — bamna for brahmin, chhori for girl — and the diction is the argument. Naming the two lovers by their castes in the very first line makes the obstacle unavoidable before any feeling has been described, and everything that follows is spent dismantling it. A 1945 Hindi film could not stage an inter-caste marriage as a thesis, but it could put the case into a light duet where two young people simply talk each other out of the objection, and the audience is allowed to agree with them without anybody making a speech. The girl gets the closing position in the argument, which in this genre is where the film's own view is usually placed.

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 whole comic engine is a marriage that two households will not permit and a couple who do not know they are already married, so a duet arguing that families are the obstacle and mutual consent the substance sits close to the centre of the story. Whether it is sung by the leads or by a subsidiary pair is not documented — the singers are Hamida Banu and the composer, and neither is in the cast.

The song had no independent career, but it is the most useful single track on the album for anyone interested in Ninu Majumdar, because it is the only one where he is audible as a performer rather than inferable as an arranger. The collector blog that has worked through this film's catalogue posted it in 2021 as the sixth of the eight, and commented at length on its orchestration — which for a 1945 record from a long-defunct studio is close to the whole of its critical reception.