अपने न हो सके जो दिल का क़रार हो कर

'Apne Na Ho Sake Jo Dil Ka Karar Ho Kar' is one of the nine songs Shyam Sundar composed for Bhai Jaan (1945) to lyrics by Partau Lakhnavi. MySwar credits it to Zeenat Begum; HindiGeetMala lists it as a Noor Jehan and Zeenat Begum item. English Wikipedia's song list does not carry the title at all, giving 'Jinke Kadam Se Ghar Tha Ghar' in that ninth slot instead — a discrepancy between the two surviving song lists for the film that has not been resolved.

A ghazal built on a long, subordinate opening clause of this kind forces a particular musical shape: the melody has to hold suspension across the first half of the line and only resolve when the verb finally lands. That is a composer's problem as much as a poet's, and it is the reason ghazal settings of the 1940s tend to move slowly and to place their instrumental fill exactly where the sense breaks. Shyam Sundar works here in the sparse Lahore manner he had learned in Ghulam Haider's orbit — harmonium and strings, a restrained rhythmic bed, and no attempt to decorate a line that is already doing complicated work.

'Qaraar' is the word the ghazal reserves for the settled state of a heart at rest — the opposite of beqaraari, the restlessness that is the tradition's default condition. To say that someone became your qaraar and still did not become yours is to describe a completed gift that was never accepted: the beloved supplied the peace and withheld the belonging. The construction is characteristic of the ghazal's fondness for a paradox stated as a plain fact, and it is the kind of couplet that works better sung than read, because the singer can hold the pause before the negation. In Bhai Jaan the sentiment has an obvious application: the film is about a courtesan whom two brothers love and who can belong to neither without destroying the family.

The picture's whole engine is the impossibility this title states. Nawab Afsar has made Benazeer's career and is read by his household as her lover; she treats him as a benefactor owed reverence. His younger brother Anwar, sent to repair the marriage that this arrangement has damaged, ends up attached to her himself. Filmindia's reviewer, summarising the film in November 1945, was blunt about where such a plot could go in the Indian cinema of the day: 'dancing girls have no chance of becoming house-wives in India for another three hundred years', he wrote, and the script duly disposes of Benazeer by poison so that the family may keep its name.

This song's afterlife is entirely bibliographic. It survives as a line in two catalogues that do not fully agree with each other, attached to a film whose print is gone and to a singer whose Indian recordings were never systematically reissued. Entries like this one are the reason the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and the compendia built on it matter: without them a 1945 ghazal by a named lyricist and a named composer would have no trace at all in the record.