दिल दिये चले हम दिये चले ऐसे

'Dil Diye Chale Hum Diye Chale Aise' is the only duet in the nine-song score of Begum (1945) and the only number in the film sung by voices from outside the cast. Mohammed Rafi, who had moved to Bombay only in 1944 and whose first Hindi film song had appeared in Gaon Ki Gori, is paired here with Mohantara, a singer whose small surviving discography runs through the late 1940s. Music is by Hari Prasanna Das and the words are by Gopal Singh Nepali, in what his documented filmography records as his first year of film work.

No reissued pressing of this duet is in general circulation, so the arrangement cannot be described from listening; what the credits fix is its shape — a two-voice number scored by a working studio composer in the standard 1945 Bombay idiom, where a harmonium-led melody over tabla or dholak with a small string group was what a mid-budget production could put in front of the microphone. The interest lies in the voices: Rafi at the very start of his career, before the Naushad association that would define him, set against Mohantara's plainer, unornamented delivery.

The title turns on a doubling of the verb: the heart was given, and then the giving simply went on — 'we gave the heart, and kept on giving, like this'. It is a construction Hindi-Urdu film verse uses to describe love as an expenditure rather than an exchange, something spent without an accounting and without an expectation of return. Gopal Singh Nepali came to films from the post-Chhayavaad Hindi poetry movement — his collection Umang had appeared in 1933 — and that background shows in the plainness of the diction here, closer to spoken Hindi than to the Persianised Urdu that dominated the film lyric of the period.

Begum was produced by Taj Mahal Pictures, the banner the actress Naseem Banu ran with her husband Mian Ehsan-ul-Haq, and directed by Sushil Majumdar; MySwar credits the screenplay to Saadat Hasan Manto. Naseem Banu sings six of the nine songs herself and Ashok Kumar sings one, which makes this Rafi–Mohantara duet the film's one piece of outside casting — the producers went to professional playback voices for the number the leads were not going to sing themselves.

The song's standing today rests almost entirely on the Rafi credit. Begum itself is not in circulation and the recording is not among the Rafi numbers that were reissued on LP or CD, so it survives as a catalogue line in the film-song databases rather than as a piece of listening — an entry in the small set of 1945 recordings that document Rafi before he was Rafi. Rafi and Mohantara would meet again in C. Ramchandra's ensemble numbers for Khidki (1948) and Patanga (1949), by which time both were on far more prominent projects.