किसको ग़म का गीत सुनाएँ

One of the six Neelam songs for which no singer is recorded. The title poses the question that organises the whole lyric: not whether to grieve, but whether there is anyone to grieve to. Written by C. M. Hunar and composed by Khan Mastana, it belongs to the slow, ghazal-inflected half of a score that also carries lighter numbers.

No audio of the song survives, so nothing is claimed here about its actual setting. Structurally, a line of this shape — a rhetorical question with a caesura in the middle — invites a slow tempo and a two-part melodic phrase, the question posed in the first half and left hanging in the second, and that is the standard treatment Khan Mastana and his contemporaries gave such lines in 1945.

The device is displacement. A song of sorrow ordinarily has an addressee — the beloved, a friend, God, the night itself — and the address is what makes grief bearable by making it communication. Hunar removes the addressee and makes the absence the subject, so the song becomes about the failure of the very form it is written in. That is a more sophisticated move than the title's plainness suggests, and it is one of the recurring ideas of 1940s Urdu film verse: the isolated speaker who cannot find a listener worthy of the confidence.

Neelam (1945) was a social picture from A. H. Productions, Bombay, directed by Ahmed Essa, with all nine songs written by C. M. Hunar and composed by Khan Mastana. The cast was led by Harish and Meena, with Jagdish Sethi, Yashodhara Katju, Kanhaiyalal, Kalyani, Satyarani, Mehdi Raza, Sayani and Abdul Hussain in support. No plot summary of the film survives anywhere, and no print is known to circulate; the songs were issued on the indigenous Young India label rather than on HMV, and it is those shellac discs that carried the film's music into the present.

Nothing of this song circulates — no record, no transfer, no reissue. It is preserved as a title and a set of credits in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and in the online catalogues built from it, and that is the whole of its afterlife. Recording it accurately, with its lyricist and composer named and its singer honestly left blank, is the only form of preservation now available to it.