दिल तू ही बता दे (ख़ुशी)

'Dil Tu Hi Bata De' exists twice in Sharbati Ankhen (1945): a happy version and a sad one. This is the happy version, sung by Hamida Banu to Tanveer Naqvi's words and composed by Feroz Nizami. It is among the film's better documented numbers because Atul's Song A Day covered it in 2023, which is also where the split between the two versions is recorded — the bright take to Hamida Banu, the sorrowful take to Amirbai Karnataki. The song catalogue at hindigeetmala credits Hamida Banu with both, and the disagreement has not been resolved.

Twin versions of one melody — a 'happy' and a 'sad' take of the same tune — were a standard device of 1940s Bombay scoring. In the standard use of the device the bright setting comes first and the tune returns after the story has turned, so that the audience registers the reversal through the music before the dialogue explains it; where the two versions actually fall in this particular film is not recorded anywhere. Because both sides were pressed and catalogued separately, the two versions survive in the record lists as distinct songs, which is why they are documented here as two entries rather than one.

'Dil tu hi bata de' — heart, you tell me — hands the question over to the one organ least qualified to answer it. Addressing one's own dil as a separate person is among the oldest manoeuvres in the Urdu ghazal: the heart is treated as an interlocutor with its own opinions, sometimes an accomplice, more often a traitor, and always the party responsible for whatever the speaker has got themselves into. In a film song this convention does practical work as well — it lets a character deliver an interior monologue out loud without breaking the scene, which is exactly why the device recurs so persistently in 1940s Hindi lyrics. Tanveer Naqvi writes it in the plainest possible form here, with no ornament around the question.

Hamida Banu, born in Lahore in 1928, had come up through stage and theatre work in Calcutta, where Prithviraj Kapoor noticed her and used her in his Prithvi Theatre productions before she moved into film playback. By 1945 she was singing regularly for Bombay studios, and Sharbati Ankhen gave her two of its ten songs — this one and the first part of 'Duniya Sharaab Khana'. The film itself, a Wadia Movietone social drama directed by Ramchandra Thakur, is documented only in outline: a middle-class girl, a rich man's son, and a family debt that reverses the two households' claims on each other once it is disclosed.

The song's afterlife is entirely archival. It came back into view in 2023 when a vintage-music blog posted it as part of a ten-year retrospective, and that post is now the main reason anyone knows which of the film's two versions belongs to which singer. Hamida Banu went on singing into the 1960s without ever becoming a first-rank playback name; entries like this one are most of what documents the working middle of the 1940s playback profession, where a great deal of competent singing was done by people the histories do not stop for.