खींचो न मुँह से नक़ाब

'Kheencho Na Munh Se Naqab' — do not draw the veil from your face — is the most classically literary of the nine titles Roopbani wrote for Alladin (1945), composed by Damodar Sharma for Nanubhai Vakil's Mohan Pictures production. The unveiling of the beloved's face is one of the oldest and most worked-over conceits in Urdu ghazal, and a costume fantasy set in an imagined Arabia was the natural place for a film lyricist to reach for it. No singer credit for the number has survived and no recording is known.

No audio survives in circulation, so the setting cannot be described. It can be said that lyrics in this register — measured Urdu, a single sustained conceit, a line built to be held rather than driven — were conventionally given slow, ghazal-adjacent film settings with sarangi or violin obbligato and minimal percussion, and that Damodar Sharma had been writing in that manner for costume pictures since the early 1940s.

Naqab-kushai — the drawing back of the veil — is a complete poetic machine in Urdu. The beloved's unveiled face is conventionally too bright to be looked at directly: to unveil it is to release something that will scatter the onlookers, ruin the composure of the assembly, or shame the moon. The lover's plea therefore runs both ways at once, and the strongest versions of the conceit ask the beloved not to unveil — a refusal that is really an admission of how much is at stake. Roopbani's title takes exactly that negative form. Written for a film set in a fabulous Arabia, it lets the standard Urdu figure do double duty as costume-drama atmosphere and as the film's most literary moment.

Alladin (1945) came out of Mohan Pictures, Bombay, with Nanubhai Vakil directing — his third film built on the Aladdin story after Alauddin Aur Jadui Chirag (1938) and Alladin Ka Beta (1939), the latter also indexed as Son Of Alladin. The Arabian Nights repertoire had reached Indian cinema through the Parsi theatre's Urdu adaptations, which is why the diction of a song like this one sits so naturally inside a fantasy picture: the stage tradition the films were remaking was itself an Urdu literary tradition.

Nothing survives of the song beyond its catalogue entry. It was not issued on a labelled disc so far as the accessible discographies show, and it is not cited in any history of the period's music. What it does document is that the Urdu ghazal vocabulary was standard equipment even at the bottom of the market in 1945 — available to a B-circuit fantasy score as readily as to the prestige productions of the same year.