आँखें तो हुईं बंद मगर दर्द जगाए

'Aankhein To Hui Band Magar Dard Jagaye' is the one song in Begum (1945) sung by Ashok Kumar, who had become the biggest star in Indian cinema two years earlier with Kismet (1943). Ashok Kumar belonged to the generation of Hindi screen actors who sang on the soundtrack themselves — a practice already being displaced by professional playback singers by the mid-1940s — which makes this an example of the older method surviving into a year when it was nearly over. Music by Hari Prasanna Das, lyrics by Gopal Singh Nepali.

No circulating pressing of the song has been located, so nothing can be said about its orchestration from listening. The relevant musical fact is the voice: Ashok Kumar sang in an untrained, conversational baritone with a narrow range and no classical ornament, and composers who wrote for him — Saraswati Devi in Achhut Kanya (1936), Anil Biswas in Kismet (1943) — built simple, closely-spaced melodies that worked with that limitation rather than against it. A composer setting him in 1945 would have been working to the same brief.

The title sets up a small paradox and lets it stand: the eyes have closed, but that is exactly when the pain wakes. Sleep is offered as the obvious refuge from grief and then withdrawn — closing the eyes does not end the seeing, it removes the distractions that were holding the ache down. It is a familiar movement in the Hindi-Urdu lyric of the sleepless night, and Gopal Singh Nepali states it without decoration, which is the register he keeps throughout the Begum score.

Begum was directed by Sushil Majumdar for Taj Mahal Pictures and, according to MySwar, written by Saadat Hasan Manto. Manto had joined Filmistan in 1942 and formed a close friendship with Ashok Kumar there; he had already written Chal Chal Re Naujawan (1944), in which Ashok Kumar and Naseem Banu played opposite each other, and Begum brought the same star pairing and the same writer together again. Ashok Kumar's other 1945 release was Mehboob Khan's Humayun.

Ashok Kumar's self-sung songs — 'Main Ban Ki Chidiya' from Achhut Kanya (1936) with Devika Rani, and 'Dheere Dheere Aa Re Badal' from Kismet (1943) — are the ones that survived; this one did not, and Begum is not in circulation. It matters mainly as a data point: by 1945 the star who sang his own songs was already an anomaly, and within a few years Ashok Kumar, like every other Hindi lead, would be lip-syncing to a professional voice.