मैं क्या हूँ भला ये बताओ तो जानूँ

'Main Kya Hoon Bhala Yeh Batao To Jaanoon' is one of the three Shirin Farhad (1945) numbers composed by Rashid Attre, set to words by Nazim Panipati. The catalogues agree that it is a duet led by Shamshad Begum but disagree on the second voice: the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and MySwar both name S. D. Batish, while Pakistan's pre-Partition film records give a singer listed simply as Barkat Ali. The Geet Kosh is followed here. All the listings agree on the composer and the lyricist.

Attre's writing in this period leans towards the ghazal's discipline rather than the dholak-driven Punjabi swing that Pancholi's biggest hits ran on, and a duet built on a question is a structure that rewards that restraint: one voice has to ask and the other has to be given room to answer, which rules out a busy accompaniment and a crowded melodic line. Beyond that structural observation nothing about the record's arrangement can be established from the surviving documentation, and nothing is invented here. The male voice is the point of interest — the Geet Kosh puts a second singer on only two of the album's seven sides — but the recording is scarce and the credit contested.

The title is a question about identity rather than about love, which is rarer in the 1940s film songbook than it sounds. 'What am I, tell me and then I shall know' hands the definition of the self over to the person being addressed — the speaker declares that she has no standing from which to answer her own question. In the Urdu lyric tradition that move belongs to the vocabulary of ishq as self-effacement: the lover has no independent existence, and asks the beloved not for affection but for a verdict. Read against the Shirin-Farhad legend, in which a stonecutter's entire identity dissolves into a love that has no possible outcome, the question is a good deal less abstract than it first appears.

Nazim Panipati is one of the two lyricists credited on Shirin Farhad, and he is named individually on three of its seven songs — this one, 'Sun Baat Kisi Mastane Ki' and 'Yeh Dil Yeh Mere Pyar Ka Ghar Tere Liye Hai'. The film was Pancholi Art Pictures' Lahore production of 1945, directed by Prahlad Dutt, and the album's division of labour was clean: three songs for Attre and Panipati or Madhok, four for Pandit Amarnath. The names on this side make it the album's most contested major credit: it is the one song whose second voice the catalogues cannot agree on.

Nothing has been written about this song since its release, and no audio of it is known to be in circulation. It is recorded here for what it does establish — that Rashid Attre wrote a question-duet for Shamshad Begum in his most successful Indian film, to words by Nazim Panipati — and for the disagreement it preserves about the male credit. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh and MySwar name S. D. Batish, who also sings the album's other duet; pakmag.net alone gives 'Barkat Ali', and whether that would be the thumri and ghazal singer Ustad Barkat Ali Khan cannot be established from any source available. No such identification is made here.