अंगड़ाई तेरी याद में आई ओ हरजाई

'Angdai Teri Yaad Mein Aayi O Harjai' is one of the four numbers on the Shirin Farhad (1945) album composed by Pandit Amarnath rather than by his co-composer Rashid Attre, and it is sung by Shamshad Begum, the only female voice named anywhere in the film's song credits. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh and MySwar both give the words to D. N. Madhok, one of the film's two lyricists. Apart from title, singer and composer, almost nothing about the recording is documented: the film has not survived in circulation and the way the song was staged is unrecorded.

Pandit Amarnath — Amarnath Batish of Jalandhar, the senior musician of the Punjabi family that also gave Hindi cinema Husnlal and Bhagatram, and by the mid-1940s a composer for His Master's Voice — worked in the Punjab-school idiom that Lahore's studios had made their commercial signature: direct melody, a rhythm you can walk to, and a vocal line placed high enough to be sung back by anyone who heard it once. A solo of this kind, in an album where one singer carries every side, is written to be carried by the voice rather than by the arrangement. The disc itself is scarce enough that nothing can be said about its actual scoring without inventing it, so nothing is said.

The title turns on two words that carry a great deal in Urdu-Hindi love poetry. An angdai is the involuntary stretch of a body coming out of sleep or out of stillness — a movement the body makes on its own, without permission, which is exactly why the poets use it: it lets desire be reported as something that happened to the speaker rather than something she chose. A harjai is the beloved who belongs everywhere and therefore to no one, the faithless one, and it is an address rather than a description — you call someone harjai to their face, or to their absence. Put together, the title says that memory arrived in the form of a physical movement: the body remembered before the mind agreed to. The reproach is real but it is aimed at an empty room, which is the particular register this kind of song occupies — accusation with nobody present to receive it.

Shirin Farhad was made by Pancholi Art Pictures in Lahore, directed by Prahlad Dutt and led by Ragini and Jayant — a retelling of the Shirin-and-Farhad legend that the Punjab's qissa tradition had been carrying for centuries. The seven-song album was divided between two composers who worked separately: Pandit Amarnath took four numbers, of which this is one, and Rashid Attre took three. It was, by the standard account of Attre's life, the most successful of his eight Indian films; for Amarnath it was one of the last Pancholi assignments he would complete, since he died in 1947.

The song survives as an entry in the film's catalogue listing and little more. No reissue of the disc is known to be in general circulation, no picturisation is recorded, and unlike 'Armaanon Ki Basti Mein' from the same album it has not been written up by the collectors who keep pre-Partition Hindi film music in view. It is included here because the credit is documented and the record demonstrably existed — a 1945 Shamshad Begum solo for Pandit Amarnath — and because an encyclopedia of Hindi film music is worth more when it admits what it has lost than when it quietly drops it.