दिया जलाकर आप बुझाया

One of four Noor Jehan solos in Master Vinayak's Badi Maa (1945), 'Diya Jalakar Aap Bujhaya' was written by Zia Sarhadi — who also wrote the film's screenplay — and composed by K. Datta. The title carries the whole song: a lamp lit and then extinguished by the same hand. In a war film built around invasion, treachery and sacrifice, this is the number that steps entirely out of the plot's noise and into a private accusation.

K. Datta came to Hindi cinema from Marathi films and from a childhood of bhajan singing in Sawantwadi, and his Badi Maa score is organised less around orchestral display than around voice-type: the adult heartbreak numbers all go to Noor Jehan, and this is the slowest and most inward of them. In 1945 a Bombay film song was still cut to a single 78-rpm side, singer and studio orchestra recorded together in one take, which put the entire weight of a number like this on the vocalist's ability to hold a slow line steady. Noor Jehan, at the top of her Indian career, was one of the very few singers who could carry that with no visible effort.

Zia Sarhadi was a screenwriter and an 'unaffiliated Marxist' before he was a film lyricist, and his verse tends towards the plain, hard image rather than the ornamental one. The image here — a lamp lit and then put out by the person who lit it — is one of the oldest in the Urdu-Persian repertoire, where the diya or chirag stands for hope, for the beloved's attention, and for life itself. What makes the line bite is the 'aap': not the wind, not fate, not an enemy, but you yourself. The accusation is not that love ended; it is that the same hand that gave the light took it away, which converts an ordinary sorrow into a charge of deliberate cruelty.

Badi Maa was made by Master Vinayak for his own Prafulla Pictures banner, made on the Indian home front in the last months of the Second World War. Noor Jehan plays Hema, the moneylender's daughter who does not know that her brother is spying for the Japanese and who is in love with Dinesh, the man returning from the London Blitz to find his village under attack. Four of the film's ten songs were built for her, and it was these — not the war footage — that the gramophone-buying public took away. Filmindia reviewed the film in September 1945 with a single star and the phrase 'the year's most rotten show'; it nevertheless finished as the third highest-grossing Indian release of the year.

Noor Jehan left India for Pakistan at Partition in 1947, and everything she recorded in Bombay after 1945 belongs to a window of about two years. Badi Maa sits inside that window, which is why its four solos are collected and re-posted so persistently by listeners tracing her Indian period. The film has a second, stranger claim on posterity: on the other side of the same soundtrack a fifteen-year-old Lata Mangeshkar sings a bhajan. Very few Hindi films place the voice that defined film song before Partition and the voice that redefined it afterwards in the same film score.