जाग उठो नारियो

Feroze Nizami trained in classical music under Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan of the Kirana gharana and came to Bombay from a singer's post at All India Radio; Piya Milan is one of only two scores credited to him in 1945, the other being Sharbati Ankhen. Given to Zohrabai Ambalewali, the strongest and most carrying of the album's five voices, which suits a song written as an address to a crowd. Nothing is documented about where it fell in the film.

The title is an imperative addressed to women in the plural vocative - naariyo - telling them to wake. Awakening as a metaphor for social or political stirring was common currency in Indian lyric writing of the 1940s, and a song built on it sits oddly in a film otherwise organised around separation and reunion. Saraswati Kumar Deepak is the credited lyricist, his only contribution to the album.

Piya Milan (1945) was produced by Wadia Movietone and directed by S. M. Yusuf, with Motilal as the male lead and the eighteen-year-old Nirmala Devi as his leading lady. Wikipedia's list of Hindi films of 1945 classes the picture as a social, and the surviving record catalogues agree on an eleven-song album, every number composed by Feroze Nizami. No print of the film is known to circulate, so the songs and their credits are effectively all that survives of it. The song is documented in both hindigeetmala's and MySwar's track listings for the film, which agree on its singer and, where one exists, on its lyricist.

The presence of this song is the main evidence that Piya Milan carried a reformist strand alongside its romance; the film was classed as a social by contemporary listings. No review of the number has been traced.