हिचकियाँ आ रही हैं

A Khan Mastana solo from Laila Majnu (1945), with words by Tanveer Naqvi. Both hindigeetmala and the disc index credit the vocal to Khan Mastana, so the singer is not in doubt; the composer is, since the databases list both of the film's music directors against the title without separating them. The song takes its premise from the folk belief, universal across north India, that hiccups arrive when an absent person is thinking of you — a piece of everyday superstition that Urdu and Hindi lyric writing has been mining for centuries.

The hiccup song is a recognisable minor genre with its own musical habits: a slow or medium tempo, a melodic line that catches and releases rather than flowing evenly, and a structure that keeps returning to the same phrase the way the symptom itself keeps returning. Whether the composer here was Rafiq Ghaznavi or Pandit Gobind Ram is not recorded, and both were capable of the idiom — Ghaznavi from a background that mixed classical training with the stage, Gobind Ram from the Punjab film-song tradition. Khan Mastana's voice, coarse-grained and unpolished by classical standards, gives the conceit a plainness it would lose in a smoother delivery.

The belief is small, domestic and entirely serious to the people who hold it: hiccups mean remembrance at a distance, and the correct response is to guess who. As poetic material it does something a straightforward statement of longing cannot — it moves the evidence of love out of the speaker's control and into the body, so that separation is registered involuntarily, without the dignity of choice. That is a useful move in a Laila-Majnu story, where the lovers are forbidden every deliberate form of contact and are left only with what the body does on its own. Tanveer Naqvi, writing plainly for a listening audience, uses the belief exactly as folk poetry uses it: as fact, not metaphor.

Khan Mastana carries three of the twelve songs on this soundtrack — this one, 'O Jane Wale' and, with Zohrabai Ambalewali, 'Ja Raha Hai Karvan' — more than any other singer credited on the film. Nazir's Hind Pictures was a working banner rather than a prestige studio, and casting a character singer across several numbers was the economical way to fill a twelve-song score. The film was made in Bombay in 1945; two years later Nazir left for Lahore, and Ghaznavi with him.

The song did not outlive the film and does not appear in retrospectives of the year. Its interest is generic rather than individual — it is a datable example of a folk belief being turned into film-song material in the mid-1940s, before the same conceit was used again, far more famously, in later decades of Hindi cinema. Read alongside the rest of this soundtrack it also shows how a small banner staffed its music: one classically pedigreed female voice, one character male voice, a composer who sang the hero, and a lyricist writing all twelve numbers.