हँसो ग़रीबों पे

'Hanso Garibo Pe' is one of the three Sawan songs whose singers are on record: a duet by Hamida Banu and Khan Mastana, composed by C. Ramchandra to I. C. Kapoor's lyric. It is the only overtly social number in a score otherwise given over to romance and consolation, and its title places it in the protest tradition that ran through Hindi film songwriting in the last years of colonial rule.

No recording is in circulation, so the arrangement cannot be described first-hand. The form is legible from the credits, though: a male-female duet on a social theme in 1945 was normally built as alternating verses over a marching or dholak-driven pulse, with the two voices converging on a shared refrain — the musical shape of a collective complaint rather than a private one. Khan Mastana, himself a composer, brought a plain, unornamented delivery well suited to that kind of address; Hamida Banu's voice supplied the lighter counterweight.

The imperative 'hanso' — laugh! — addressed to those who mock the poor is a standard rhetorical move in Hindi and Urdu protest verse: the poet does not plead for pity but dares the comfortable to continue, so that their laughter indicts them. The construction leaves the audience nowhere neutral to stand. Placed in a 1945 'social', the line also carries the weight of its moment: Bengal's famine was two years old, wartime inflation had hollowed out the urban poor, and film songwriting had begun borrowing the vocabulary of the reformist stage. Beyond a few words of the mukhda recorded in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, I. C. Kapoor's lyric is not preserved, so what can honestly be said is limited to what the opening itself establishes — an address to 'the people of the world', an imperative, and a target.

Sawan (1945) was produced by Sanjivan Art Productions of Bombay and directed by Dwarka Khosla, with Motilal and Shanta Apte at the head of the cast. C. Ramchandra wrote all nine songs to lyrics by I. C. Kapoor; no plot summary of the film survives in accessible sources, so what is known of its content comes almost entirely from the song titles preserved in the record catalogues. That a picture named for the monsoon carried a protest duet is itself informative: the mid-1940s Bombay 'social' routinely braided romance with a reformist strand, and producers expected at least one number that spoke about the world rather than about the lovers. Khan Mastana and Hamida Banu were both working freelance across studios in these years, which is how a small production like this one could put two recognisable voices on a single disc.

The song is not in circulation in any form, and neither singer's surviving anthologies include it. It remains useful as evidence: it documents a Khan Mastana–Hamida Banu pairing under C. Ramchandra in 1945, and it shows that even a small, now-lost Bombay production was expected to make room for a song about poverty two years before independence.