हम किसके हैं साजन है कौन हमारा

'Hum Kiske Hain Sajan Hai Kaun Hamara' is one of seven documented songs from the 1941 Hindi film Mere Raja, with lyrics by Ishwar Chandra Kapoor and music by Damodar Sharma. The reflective title — asking to whom one belongs — suggests a melancholic, philosophical number. The playback singer is not recorded in surviving catalogues, and no audio is presently in circulation.

The title 'Hum Kiske Hain Sajan Hai Kaun Hamara' (Whose are we, beloved, who is ours?) poses the double question of belonging that cuts to the centre of Hindi film's sentimental repertoire. The question 'Hum kiske hain?' — not simply 'where do I belong?' but 'to whom do I belong?' — frames the speaker in relational rather than spatial terms: identity is constituted entirely by attachment, and loss of attachment creates an ontological void. The inversion that follows, 'Hai kaun hamara?' (who is ours?), shifts from the first person's claim on another to asking who claims the speaker — mapping loneliness as a reciprocal impossibility. Lyricist Ishwar Chandra Kapoor was among the working lyricists of the 1940s who developed this register of philosophical longing — distinct from the Urdu-literary ghazal mode in its vernacular Hindi directness, yet philosophical in scope. The repetition structure embedded in the title ('hum' and 'hamara' sharing root) creates a rhetorical and affective circularity that mirrors the emotional loop of unanswered belonging.

Mere Raja (1941) was directed by T.S. Mani for Paramount Film Company with music by Damodar Sharma and starred Mazhar Khan and E. Billimoria. The film's seven documented songs suggest a full social-drama soundtrack — the questioning title of 'Hum Kiske Hain Sajan Hai Kaun Hamara' points to a film involving loss, longing, or displacement as central themes. E. Billimoria (Eruch Billimoria), one of the lead actors, was a well-known figure in Hindi cinema from the early sound era, active in stunt and action films as well as social dramas — a performer whose career symbolized the cosmopolitan, multi-community nature of early Bombay film production. Damodar Sharma's role as composer points to the generation of music directors working for smaller studios in the early 1940s, many of whom have left sparse documentation. The philosophical questioning of the song fits the pattern of 1941 Hindi films produced in the shadow of World War II, when displacement, loss, and the ethics of belonging were increasingly present in both social reality and its cultural reflection.