ये कौन हँसा किसने सितारों को हँसाया

A Noor Jehan solo from Gaon Ki Gori (1945) pitched at the night sky, with the stars cast as an audience laughing at the singer rather than shining on her. MySwar classifies it under the film's lighter, non-folk material, and it belongs to the strand of the album — along with 'Kis Tarah Bhoolega Dil Unka' — where Wali Saheb's Urdu diction and Noor Jehan's trained ghazal delivery take over from the village register of the harvest songs.

Shyam Sundar writes the line in long, held phrases that ask the singer to sustain rather than decorate, which is where Noor Jehan's breath control shows. The arrangement stays in the album's characteristic light frame — harmonium, a sarangi figure between phrases, and percussion kept low enough that the vocal can float above it. The effect is nearer to a non-film ghazal recording of the period than to a village picture's playback, and it is the reason listeners who know only the film's folk songs are surprised by this one.

The image is a small inversion with a long tradition behind it: the stars, which in Urdu poetry usually keep vigil with the sleepless lover, are here laughing — either at the speaker or with someone else, and the question of which is the whole point. Asking 'who' twice, once about the laugh and once about its cause, turns a night scene into an interrogation. Wali Saheb was a lyricist who also composed, and his lines tend to be built for singing rather than for reading; this one gives the singer two open vowels to hold at exactly the places where the question hangs.

Noor Jehan was nineteen when Gaon Ki Gori was released and already carrying three of the year's biggest films. Her training was Punjabi classical, from Lahore, and it gave her a command of sustained line that the Bombay industry had no equivalent for until Lata Mangeshkar. Shyam Sundar, who came out of the same Lahore music world, wrote for that capacity rather than around it — the reason his Gaon Ki Gori songs for her ask more of a singer than most 1945 film music does.

The song did not enter the standing repertoire the way 'Baithi Hun Teri Yaad Ka' did, and it is absent from the Songs of Yore shortlist of the film's remembered numbers. It survives in the MySwar album listing and in collector discussion of Shyam Sundar's score, which a reader of Songs of Yore nominated as the best of 1945.