गोरी गागर की गंगा उधार दिए जा

'Gori Gagar Ki Ganga Udhar Diye Ja' is the flirtatious duet of the Kaise Kahoon score, sung by Shamshad Begum and S. D. Batish to Pandit Amarnath's music and a lyric credited simply to Sharma. Collectors who have heard the record classify it as a nok-jhonk — the teasing quarrel duet — and its situation is the oldest one in the north Indian songbook: a man asking a woman carrying a water-pot for a drink, and the request turning into something else. It is one of the two titles that period and later listings put at the head of this score.

The pairing is telling. Shamshad Begum's voice — robust, carrying, folk-rooted, the sound that Ghulam Haider's Khazanchi (1941) had made the signature of Lahore's Punjabi-inflected film music — is exactly the instrument a panghat teasing song wants; nothing about it is coy. Opposite her, S. D. Batish of Patiala brings a classically trained male voice that had already sung three songs in Daasi (1944). The composer, himself a Punjab-school man, is working here in the register that had been paying Pancholi's bills since Khazanchi: folk rhythm, direct melody, a call-and-answer shape that lets the two singers interrupt each other.

The gagar — the round brass or clay water-pot carried on the hip or head — is one of the most heavily loaded props in Indian song, because the walk to the well and back is one of the few socially licensed occasions on which an unmarried woman is out of the house and can be spoken to. Asking her for water from her pot is therefore never only about thirst, and calling the water in it 'the Ganga' raises the stakes further: it turns a everyday request into something with the shape of a devotional plea, which is exactly the joke. The word 'udhar' — on loan, to be repaid — completes it, because what is being negotiated is not a drink but a debt between them. The lyricist is credited in period listings only as Sharma, and no fuller identification could be verified.

Kaise Kahoon was directed by Moti B. Gidwani for Pancholi Art Pictures, Lahore, and opened on 16 November 1945 at Imperial Cinema in Bombay, with Ragini and Najam-ul-Hasan as the leads and Gajanan Jagirdar, Baby Akhtar and Durga Mota in support. In a score otherwise dominated by Zeenat Begum's solos, this duet is the one place where a second female voice takes the front, and the only number built as banter rather than as sentiment. Some period listings misattribute the male voice to S. D. Burman; the HFGK-derived accounts, and the record itself, give S. D. Batish.

The two people singing this record went in opposite directions. Shamshad Begum stayed in India after 1947 and went on to become one of the defining playback voices of the 1950s. S. D. Batish moved to California in 1970 and spent his last decades teaching Indian music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their composer did not get the chance to go anywhere: Pandit Amarnath died in 1947 at thirty-five, and Partition forced Dalsukh Pancholi out of Lahore to Bombay that same year.