Shankar-Jaikishan · Mohammed Rafi · 1965
Jaan Pehechan Ho: the Hindi song a room of Americans can hum
A murder mystery from 1965, a masked dance troupe, and the opening scene of a cult American film thirty-six years later.
Gumnaam is a 1965 suspense film loosely built on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Its opening number has almost nothing to do with the plot: a nightclub, a band, dancers in black eye masks, and Mohammed Rafi singing over a Shankar-Jaikishan arrangement that is essentially Indian rock and roll.
The sound
What makes it work is the restraint. Shankar-Jaikishan built most of their reputation on lush orchestral arrangements; here the band is small and the rhythm section drives everything. Rafi, who could do devotional, ghazal and lullaby with equal authority, sings this one like he is enjoying himself enormously and not thinking too hard.
The second life
In 2001 Terry Zwigoff opened Ghost World with the sequence, playing on a television while Thora Birch dances alone in her bedroom. For a generation of Americans who had never seen a Hindi film, that was the Hindi film song. It has been on club playlists in Brooklyn and Berlin ever since.
The dancers, incidentally, are usually credited to the troupe led by Herman Benjamin, with Laxmi Chhaya prominent among them. If you have only ever seen the four-minute clip, the film around it is worth an evening.