ग़रीबों की दुनिया है तेरे हवाले

A duet by Suraiya and K.L. Saigal from Tadbir (1945), composed by Lal Mohammad to Swami Ramanand Saraswati's words. It is the one title in the film's documented song list that widens from the individual to the collective: not my fate but the world of the poor, and it is placed, like the film's other prayers, in God's keeping. It is also one of the first recordings on which Suraiya sings opposite Saigal, the pairing that would define the next two years of her career.

A slow duet between a voice at the end of its career and a voice at the beginning of one. Suraiya was fifteen when Tadbir was made, and the contrast of registers — Saigal's low, worn, deliberate delivery against a very young soprano — is the structural interest of any Saigal–Suraiya side from this period. Lal Mohammad's setting is not preserved in written form and the recording's arrangement is undocumented.

'Tere hawale' is a legal-sounding phrase from everyday Urdu-Hindi — into your custody, handed over to you — and applying it to garibon ki duniya, the world of the poor, does two things at once. It states that the poor have nobody else, and it quietly transfers responsibility to the addressee. Devotional poetry of this kind carries an edge that pure resignation does not: putting something in God's charge is also a way of pointing out that it is not being looked after. In a 1945 Bombay film, a year of famine memory and wartime scarcity, the line reads less as consolation than as a bill presented. No lyric text is reproduced here.

Suraiya got the female lead in Tadbir because Saigal, hearing her rehearse a song for Jayant Desai's Samrat Chandragupt, recommended her to the director for the part opposite himself. She played Saguna; he played Kanhaiyalal. The two would work together again in Omar Khaiyyam (1946) and Parwana (1947), the last released a month after Saigal's death. No synopsis of Tadbir survives, so the situation this duet accompanied is unknown.

The Saigal–Suraiya duets are the reason Tadbir is still named in accounts of Suraiya's career, which otherwise treat 1945 as the year she stopped being a child performer. This is one of only two of them documented in the film's song list.