चंद्रमा के मुखड़े से

'Chandrama Ke Mukhde Se' is the second track of Rahat (1945) and one of just two songs in the film carrying a singer credit: Vatsala Kumthekar, who also appears in the cast. Words by Pandit Phani, music by S. Dutt. Kumthekar belonged to the generation of performers who acted and recorded their own songs, and Rahat is one of the films in which she does both.

No transfer of the disc has been traced, so the setting cannot be described from the recording itself. The one musical fact on record is the pairing: S. Dutt's composition written for Kumthekar's voice, which in her surviving 1940s recordings is light and forward rather than heavily ornamented.

The title turns on chandrama ka mukhda, the moon-face — the most conventional comparison in Urdu-Hindi love poetry, and one a lyricist of Pandit Phani's period would normally deploy in order to move past it: the beloved's face is measured against the moon and the moon loses. Since no text of the song is preserved, only the figure the title announces can be discussed; nothing of the lyric is reproduced here.

Vatsala Kumthekar's screen and recording career ran through the early-to-mid 1940s, and her documented catalogue is small — which makes each attributed track, including this one, part of a limited surviving record. In Rahat she is credited both in the cast alongside Sardar Akhtar and P. Jairaj and on two of the ten songs.

With the film lost, the two Kumthekar credits are the strongest thread connecting Rahat to anything still identifiable in 1940s Hindi film music. HFGK, HindiGeetMala and MySwar all carry this track with her name attached, which is why the attribution can be stated at all.