आँखों से आँखों का इंतज़ार

'Aankhon Se Aankhon Ka Intezar' is one of the six Naseem Banu solos in Begum (1945), written by Gopal Singh Nepali and composed by Hari Prasanna Das. It is among the least-documented numbers in an already thinly documented score: the song databases carry the title, the singer and the credits, and nothing else — no duration, no raag, no surviving pressing.

Nothing about the recording's sound can be verified, since no accessible copy exists. The one musical inference the record supports is structural: with six of nine songs given to an actress rather than to hired playback singers, the composer had to write a score that stayed inside one voice's comfortable range for most of its length — a very different design problem from the multi-voice albums Naushad and Anil Biswas were building the same year.

The line reverses the usual grammar of waiting: it is not the person who waits but the eyes, and what they wait for is not the beloved but the beloved's eyes. In the Urdu-Hindi convention the meeting of glances is itself the event — the moment where consent is asked and given without a word — so a song titled for the wait before it is a song about the suspended instant just short of contact. Nepali keeps the vocabulary domestic and the syntax simple, which was his manner in this first year of film writing.

The film, directed by Sushil Majumdar for Naseem Banu's own Taj Mahal Pictures, paired her with Ashok Kumar under a screenplay credited to Saadat Hasan Manto. English Wikipedia's list of 1945 Hindi films classifies Begum as a 'Social' — the studio-era label for a contemporary domestic drama, as distinct from the mythologicals, historicals and stunt films that made up the rest of the year's output.

The song is not anthologised, not reissued and not part of any surviving popular memory of 1945. It is preserved because the film's complete song list was recorded in the trade catalogues of the time and carried forward into the modern databases — which is, for a large share of pre-Independence Hindi cinema, the only form of survival there is.