बने ना कोई घर जमाई

'Bane Na Koi Ghar Jamai' is the comic number in Albeli's twelve-song list, composed by G. A. Chishti and catalogued without a singer or a writer, as every song in the film is. The title turns on the ghar jamai - the son-in-law who moves into his wife's family home and lives at their expense - a figure Hindi cinema had already been laughing at for a decade by 1945 and would keep laughing at for fifty years more. No recording of the song has been located, so nothing beyond the title and its position in the catalogue can be reported.

The recording is lost to circulation and its music cannot be described. The comic song of the 1940s did have a settled shape, however: a brisk, speech-adjacent melody that leaves room for the words to land, a dholak keeping a bouncing rhythm, and a refrain short enough to be shouted back. Chishti wrote in a Punjabi idiom that suited this sort of thing well, and the same score contains two street-vendor songs built on the same principle - tune subordinated to text.

The ghar jamai joke is about status rather than marriage. A man who lives in his in-laws' house has inverted the direction in which a north Indian household is supposed to move a bride, and the comedy comes from the loss of standing that follows - he is fed, tolerated, and never quite an adult. A song titled 'let nobody become a ghar jamai' is therefore mock-advice, delivered as a warning to other men, and its humour depends entirely on the audience already agreeing with the premise. Nothing of the actual text has been recovered, and the Geet Kosh does not say who wrote it.

Albeli (1945) was made by Talwar Productions of Calcutta and directed by the company's proprietor R. C. Talwar, who also wrote the story; J. S. Casshyap supplied the screenplay and dialogue. Shooting began in Lahore and was completed in Calcutta, and the picture opened at the Central Cinema in Bombay on 22 December 1945. The plot follows a street girl in love with a gypsy boy who is wanted by two other young women as well; Ramola headed a cast that included the actor-singer Satish, Rooplekha, Manorama, Usha, Sunder and Hiralal. G. A. Chishti composed all twelve songs, and Baburao Patel's filmindia gave the film a hostile notice in its March 1946 issue.

The comic song was structural to 1940s Hindi cinema - every film carried one or two, usually pinned to a supporting actor rather than a star, and they were often the numbers that sold records. Albeli's cast included Sunder, who was still a singing performer at this point in his career, which makes the film a plausible home for a number of this kind, though the catalogues attach no name to it. As with the rest of the score, what survives is a title and the shape of an absence.