मोहब्बत में क्या क्या मज़े

'Mohabbat Mein Kya Kya Maze' is the second of the two duets Vanmala and Surendra are credited with in Aarti (1945), the Screen Attractions Corporation social directed by Ramchandra Thakur. Both HindiGeetMala and MySwar list the pair together on it, with music by Ashok Ghosh and Ali Baksh. The title translates roughly as 'what pleasures there are in love' — the exclamatory kya-kya construction that Urdu film lyric uses to enumerate rather than to argue, and the marker of a light number set against the film's heavier titles about a two-faced world and men without cloth on their backs. No recording is in circulation and the film's lyricist is unrecorded, so the enumeration itself has not survived.

The recording is not publicly available, so the arrangement cannot be described; the composers' documented practice can. Ashok Ghosh's surviving reputation rests on Nirdosh (1941), the National Studios film that gave Mukesh both his acting and his playback debut, and on the ghazal from it that is still cited in accounts of Mukesh's beginnings — a composer, in other words, associated with sung poetry in the Urdu register rather than with folk pastiche, which fits a duet built on the word mohabbat. On this film he is billed with Ali Baksh, of whom the archive preserves nothing but the name. Surendra and Vanmala both sang on camera, so whatever the tune was, it had to sit inside two acting voices rather than two trained playback ones — a constraint that in this period generally meant a narrow range and a strong, repeatable refrain.

The title is built on one of the most productive figures in Urdu-Hindi film lyric: kya-kya, the doubled interrogative that stops being a question and becomes an inventory. 'Mohabbat mein kya kya maze' does not ask what the pleasures of love are; it declares that they are too many to list and then proceeds to list them, which is the entire pleasure of the form. Sung as a duet, the figure has an obvious dramatic use — each singer adds an item, and the enumeration becomes a courtship rather than a soliloquy. Whether the film's verse used it that way cannot now be checked: the lyricist is not named in any accessible catalogue and no recording circulates, so only the title's grammar can be read.

By 1945 the singing-actor pairing this duet depends on was becoming an anachronism. Rattan (1944) had just proved, with record royalties, that the future belonged to dedicated playback voices, and Zeenat — the year's biggest film — was carried by Noor Jehan. Aarti went the other way, casting Surendra and Vanmala, both of whom sang their own songs, and giving them two duets. Around them Ramchandra Thakur assembled a strong character cast: Sheikh Mukhtar, Kanhaiyalal and Hansa Wadkar, whose autobiography would decades later become Shyam Benegal's Bhumika (1977).

Nothing of this song is audible today. It has no presence on the streaming services and no YouTube upload, and it is not mentioned in any of the standard retrospectives of 1945 film music. Its only surviving evidence is the pair of catalogue entries that record its title, its two singers and its two composers — enough to prove it was made, not enough to say what it sounded like. Read against the fate of the same year's Zeenat and Rattan songs, which are still in circulation, it is a clean illustration of how selective the survival of 1940s Hindi film music actually was.