हुई दिल की दुनिया झिलमिल रे

'Hui Dil Ki Duniya Jhilmil Re' is Binapani Mukherjee's second solo in Mazdoor (1945), and the one that sits on the bright side of the score against her lament 'Aabad Dil Ki Duniya Barbad Hui Hai'. Gopal Singh Nepali wrote the lyric and Hari Prasanna Das composed it, as with all six songs of the film. It runs 3:02 on the Saregama/HMV reissue of the album, which is where the recording survives — the film itself is not in general circulation.

Nothing beyond the credits and the running time is documented for this track, and it has not been assessed here by listening, so no claim is made about its raag, metre or orchestration. What can be said is structural: Hari Prasanna Das gave Binapani Mukherjee both of his sorrow-and-recovery pieces on this album, and placing a jhilmil — glimmering — song opposite a barbad — laid waste — song by the same voice is a deliberate pairing rather than an accident of casting. Three minutes flat is short even by 78-rpm standards, which suggests a compact, single-idea song rather than an extended one.

Jhilmil is a sound-word before it is a picture-word — the flicker of many small lights, or of light on moving water — and Nepali uses it as the exact reversal of the ruin image he gives the same singer elsewhere in the film. There, the heart is a settlement emptied out; here it is a place suddenly full of small lights. Neither state is explained or argued for; the lyric simply reports the change, which is the ordinary grammar of the film love song of the period. Nepali's Hindi in these Mazdoor lyrics stays close to speech and avoids Persianate ornament, a choice that suits both a poet with a strong Hindi-literary identity and a film about working people.

The song belongs to Filmistan's Mazdoor, Nitin Bose's first film for the studio, a mill-and-labour story fronted by three debutants — Nasir Khan, Indumati and Veera. Six songs were written for it, split between Amirbai Karnataki, Binapani Mukherjee and Manna Dey. Where this one falls in the narrative is not documented; the film's own situations have not been recorded song by song in any source located, so no picturisation claim is made here.

Like the rest of the album, this track outlived the picture. It is preserved on the Saregama/HMV reissue and is one of a small handful of Binapani Mukherjee recordings still reachable by an ordinary listener, at a time when most of the singers who worked around the edges of the 1940s Bombay industry have left no accessible trace at all.