बैरिन बन गई निंदिया हो

Sung by Amirbai Karnataki for Gyan Dutt's score for Chhamia (1945), 'Bairin Ban Gayi Nindiya Ho' belongs to the small, durable Hindi-film genre of the insomnia song: the sleepless woman addressing her own sleep as an adversary. The conceit is that sleep is the only door through which the absent beloved can still arrive — in dreams — so when sleep withholds itself, it is not merely refusing rest, it is confiscating the beloved as well. Amirbai, whose voice carried a plainer, more speech-adjacent warmth than the trained classical timbres around her, was well suited to a lyric built on complaint rather than ornament.

The recording does not circulate and the catalogues describe nothing beyond authorship, so how Gyan Dutt actually scored this number cannot be stated. The idiom the period reserved for a night-vigil lyric was a slow, sparsely accompanied line over the harmonium-and-sarangi bed that carried most non-dance numbers of these years, but nothing places this particular song in it. Dutt's melodic instinct, formed over a decade of Ranjit Movietone bhajans and folk numbers, is towards singable directness rather than classical elaboration, and a lyric of plain complaint gets exactly that treatment — a tune that a listener could carry away after one hearing on the radio.

The lyric turns on a single inversion that Hindi and Braj poetry had long kept in reserve: nindiya, sleep, is normally the tender, maternal presence of the lullaby — and here it is named bairin, the female enemy. Everything the song does follows from that reversal. The night lengthens into something serpentine; the eyes are given no rest; the speaker has no one to complain to and no one who would understand the complaint if she made it. Because the beloved appears only in dreams, refusing sleep is the same as refusing the beloved, and so the address to sleep becomes a displaced address to the absent lover. It is a compact piece of writing that gets its force from what it withholds — there is no accusation of the man anywhere in it.

Chhamia (1945) was produced and directed by Protima Dasgupta for her own company, P.D.G. Pictures, from an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with Begum Para in the lead and a supporting company that included the comedian David, the dancer Azurie and Dixit. Gyan Dutt supplied eleven songs to lyrics by Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari. The picture was a commercial success and remained the high point of Dasgupta's short career behind the camera; it is not in circulation today, so its songs are known chiefly through catalogue listings and surviving 78-rpm discs. Amirbai Karnataki is one of only four or five voices the catalogues attribute by name across the film's eleven titles, and this is the song they give her.

This is among the better-documented songs of the Chhamia score: it is one of the minority of the film's eleven titles that the catalogues attribute to a named singer, and it carries a user rating on hindigeetmala. It sits in the middle of Amirbai Karnataki's most productive stretch: 1945 is the year around Zeenat and the run of work that made her, alongside Zohrabai Ambalewali and Shamshad Begum, one of the defining female voices of the pre-Lata era. The recording itself has never been reissued, and the song is remembered as a text rather than as a performance.