आई बसंत रानी

Feroze Nizami trained in classical music under Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan of the Kirana gharana and came to Bombay from a singer's post at All India Radio; Piya Milan is one of only two scores credited to him in 1945, the other being Sharbati Ankhen. Nizami's fourth Nirmala Devi solo. No catalogue records a raag or taal for any Piya Milan track, so none is asserted here.

Personifying the spring as a rani, a queen who arrives, places the lyric in the long line of Hindi seasonal songs - barahmasa, basant and phag - in which the turning year is described as a visitor with a retinue. In a film built around separation and reunion, a spring song is conventionally the hinge on which longing turns into expectation. Tanveer Naqvi wrote the words; how the number was staged is not documented.

Piya Milan (1945) was produced by Wadia Movietone and directed by S. M. Yusuf, with Motilal as the male lead and the eighteen-year-old Nirmala Devi as his leading lady. Wikipedia's list of Hindi films of 1945 classes the picture as a social, and the surviving record catalogues agree on an eleven-song album, every number composed by Feroze Nizami. No print of the film is known to circulate, so the songs and their credits are effectively all that survives of it. The song is documented in both hindigeetmala's and MySwar's track listings for the film, which agree on its singer and, where one exists, on its lyricist.

Untraced beyond the record catalogues. It is listed here to keep the documented album complete rather than because any afterlife attaches to it.