माना कि तुम हसीन हो

'Mana Ki Tum Haseen Ho' is the better known of Mukesh's two solos in Moorti (1945), and the one most often named when the film comes up at all. Writing on Bulo C. Rani, the film-music historian Sharad Dutt credits the composer with bringing back the original style of ghazal singing and points to this song and 'Hasino Se Hasino Ko Mohabbat Ho Hi Jati Hai' as the best examples, adding that Bulo C. Rani deliberately kept away from the Parsi-theatre manner of delivery still common in 1945. Mukesh was four years into films at the time — he had debuted as an actor-singer in Nirdosh (1941) — and had not yet had the hit that would make his name — 'Dil Jalta Hai To Jalne De' from Pehli Nazar came out in the same year — so the record catches a voice that is still being assembled, with K.L. Saigal's influence audible in the phrasing.

The setting is deliberately plain: a slow tempo, harmonium and light percussion, a melody that follows the natural stress of the Urdu line rather than overriding it, and almost no orchestral commentary between phrases. That plainness is the point. The Parsi-theatre style Bulo C. Rani was turning away from projected every syllable to the back of a hall; this is a singer at conversational distance from the microphone, which is what allows the words to be heard as speech. It also suited the instrument he had: Mukesh's voice in 1945 was narrow and slightly nasal, without the power to carry a heavily orchestrated line, and a composer who Sharad Dutt says preferred weighty voices seems to have understood that a light one needed uncluttered space instead.

The song is built on the concessive 'mana ki' — granted that, even if — which is one of the most durable openings in Urdu verse because it hands the argument to the other side before quietly taking it back. The speaker concedes the beloved's beauty and her sovereignty over him in courtly vocabulary (ahl-e-shabaab, one in the bloom of youth; nawaab, sovereign) and only then, having established that he is not disputing anything, slips into the intimate address jaane-jaan to make his small request. The movement from formal to intimate register inside a single verse is a standard ghazal technique, and Pandit Indra — who in the same film wrote in plain Braj-inflected Hindi for the women's songs — executes it here in the Persianised register the form expects.

Moorti was a Ranjit Movietone social directed by Chaturbhuj Doshi, the studio's veteran writer-director, with Motilal and the singing star Khursheed in the leads. Bulo C. Rani had become an independent composer only the previous year, with Pagli Duniya (1944), after an apprenticeship assisting Khemchand Prakash and Gyan Dutt at Ranjit; Pandit Indra was the studio's regular lyricist. For Mukesh, two solos and a share of the trio in a picture headlined by an established singing star was a real step up in the studio hierarchy. No print of the film survives, and the reference works preserve its credits without its story, so nothing can be said about how or on whom this song was staged.

The film is forgotten and the song is not quite. It survives in several collectors' transfers and it has a small but genuine place in the written history of the period, as one of the two examples cited when Bulo C. Rani's work on the film ghazal is discussed. Its other value is biographical: it is one of the earliest surviving Mukesh recordings, made before Anokha Pyar (1948) and the long association with Raj Kapoor turned that voice into one of the most recognisable sounds in Indian popular music, and listeners return to it to hear how much Saigal was still in it.