सुन बात किसी मस्ताने की

Listed in full in Pakistan's pre-Partition film records as 'Sun Baat Kisi Mastane Ki, Yeh Raat Nahin Phir Aane Ki', this is one of Pandit Amarnath's four numbers for Shirin Farhad (1945), written by Nazim Panipati. Those same records give it as a duet between Shamshad Begum and Amarnath himself — the composer singing on his own score — but the Hindi Film Geet Kosh marks the number simply '(Female)' and names no singer at all, and neither MySwar nor hindigeetmala breaks out its voices. Since HFGK's marking rules out a male co-singer, the Amarnath credit is not carried here; only Shamshad Begum, whom pakmag.net names, is listed.

A night-song of this kind belongs to the mehfil, and the mehfil has its own musical grammar: a rhythm that keeps moving so the evening does not settle, a melody that can be repeated with each repetition pushed slightly higher, and space for two voices to take alternate lines rather than sing together. Pandit Amarnath came out of the Punjab school and worked comfortably in this semi-classical middle territory — the register between the film song proper and the thumri and ghazal it borrowed from — What the arrangement actually was cannot be established from the surviving paperwork and is not guessed at.

A mastana is one who is intoxicated — with wine, with love, or with a state that the poem declines to distinguish between the two — and the word carries no disapproval; the mastana is the figure whose lack of judgement is precisely what makes him worth listening to. The title's proposition is the oldest one in the language's night poetry: listen to the drunk, because this night will not come again. It is the Urdu-Persian version of carpe diem, but with a difference worth noting — the emphasis falls not on pleasure but on the non-repeatability of a particular evening. That is a genuinely melancholy thought dressed as an invitation, and it is why the form survives: the song is cheerful on its surface and is not cheerful underneath.

Shirin Farhad was Pancholi Art Pictures' 1945 Lahore production, directed by Prahlad Dutt with Ragini and Jayant. Its album is unusual for a film of the period in that Pakistan's pre-Partition records credit all seven sides to one female singer, so the interest of the individual records lies in who joins her — a question on which the catalogues do not agree. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh gives a second voice, S. D. Batish, on two of the seven and marks this one simply as a female number. Nazim Panipati is named as the lyricist on three of the seven songs, this one among them, which makes it one of the better-credited items on a thinly documented album.

No audio of this song is known to circulate and it has not been written about since 1945. It is entered here for the credit it preserves: a Nazim Panipati lyric set by Pandit Amarnath in the last full year of his working life. Amarnath died in 1947, and the Lahore studio he had been working for did not outlast the year after that.