"Jaan ab ja rahi hai," - Khel khilari ka (1977)

Remember the Shabana-gaana feature? Back when I used to update Sounds Like Power obsessively, I reserved Fridays for interesting (for better or worse) song picturizations featuring Shabana Azmi.

This week the feature returns with "Jaan ab ja rahi hai," a qawwali from the 1977 movie Khel khilari ka. I'd never heard of this film before and assume that it's thoroughly forgettable - but the song itself is not half bad. I don't care much for Shabana ji's outfit - there seemed in this era to be a lot of dressing tawaifs and female qawwals in Pepto-Bismol colored suits -but she handles herself with reasonable competence, doing something much closer to real dancing than you usually see from her.



I am not sure who all the men are who join her partway through the song - the video quality is too poor for me to tell for sure. I am pretty sure I spotted Shakti Kapoor. And, with the help of Memsaab's incredible resource, the Artist Gallery, I confidently identified a fellow named Dhruv, whom to my knowledge I have never seen before.