बिच्छू काट गयो

Catalogued in HindiGeetMala as 'Bichu Kaat Gayo' and in MySwar as 'Bicchoo Kaat Gayo', this is one of the five songs of Aarti (1945) for which no singer is recorded. Music is credited jointly to Ashok Ghosh and Ali Baksh, as on the whole score, and no lyricist is recorded for the film. The title is a set phrase from north Indian folk song: the scorpion's bite is the standing figure for a sudden, involuntary, physically felt desire, used across rasiya, lavani and village song long before films borrowed it. Its presence in the score marks the folk-comic register a 1940s 'social' would typically place against its romantic and reformist numbers.

No recording circulates and no contemporary description of the number survives, so its tune, rhythm and scoring are not recorded here. What can be stated is the credit — Ashok Ghosh with Ali Baksh, undivided across all ten songs — and the general practice of the period: a bichhoo-kaat-gayo lyric would conventionally be set to a dance-adjacent folk rhythm on dholak rather than to the slower, harmonium-and-strings treatment given to the film's Urdu numbers. That is a statement about the convention, not about this recording, which nobody has been able to hear for decades.

The scorpion image works because it removes agency. A person who has been stung is not accused of wanting anything; the sting happened to them, and the writhing that follows is involuntary and therefore permissible to depict. Folk singers across the Hindi belt use it precisely for that licence, and film lyricists of the 1940s imported it for the same reason — it allowed a song about physical desire past both the censor and the domestic audience. The word 'gayo' in place of 'gaya' keeps the line in Braj rather than Khari Boli, which is consistent with the two other rural-register titles in this score. What the verse did with the figure is unknown: the film's lyricist is unrecorded and no recording survives.

Aarti was directed for Screen Attractions Corporation by Ramchandra Thakur and filed by Wikipedia's 1945 list under 'Social'. Its ten songs divide into an Urdu romantic strand carried by the singing leads Surendra and Vanmala, and a rural-register strand — this song, 'Bha Gaye Mann Nain Tihare' and 'Guiyaan Sayaas Haan' — on which no singer is recorded at all. That division is typical of the form: the star pair got the ghazal-adjacent numbers and the label credit, while the folk and comic songs went to uncredited or supporting voices and left less documentary trace.

Nothing of the recording survives in circulation, and the song appears in no account of 1945 film music. Its documentary use is as an instance of a pattern: across the 1940s, the folk-register songs of minor films are the first to be lost, because they were rarely pressed with star billing and rarely reissued. Aarti's Urdu numbers by Surendra and Vanmala are equally unavailable today, which makes this film an unusually complete example of the loss rather than a partial one.