कौन हमारा है निगहबाँ

'Kaun Hamara Hai Nigahban' — who is our guardian — is one of the nine songs written by Roopbani and composed by Damodar Sharma for Alladin (1945), Nanubhai Vakil's costume fantasy for Mohan Pictures. The word nigahban carries both a worldly and a divine sense, which lets a lyric of this kind sit ambiguously between a lament for lost human protection and an address to God. No singer is credited for the song anywhere in the accessible record, and no recording of it survives.

The recording is not accessible; the tune cannot be described without inventing it. The conventional treatment for an appeal-and-abandonment lyric in 1940s Hindi cinema was a slow setting in a minor-leaning scale with the refrain returning as a question, sparse accompaniment behind the voice and a chorus entering only at the end if the scene called for it. Damodar Sharma's work in the fantasy genre stayed within that vocabulary, but nothing further about this particular song can be verified.

Nigahban means the one who keeps watch — a guard, a protector, a keeper. Urdu poetry uses the word across the whole range from a literal palace sentry to the divine, and the question 'who is our nigahban' therefore lands differently depending on where the poet stops. As a plot line in a fantasy it belongs to the moment of maximum exposure: the protector is dead, exiled or deceived, and the characters are alone in a hostile court. As a devotional line it becomes a plain question addressed upward. Roopbani's title keeps both readings open, which is precisely what the convention is for — and with the film's text lost, both remain equally available.

Alladin was produced by Mohan Pictures of Bombay and released in 1945, directed by Nanubhai Vakil with a cast headed by Prakash and Shanta Patel. Vakil had been remaking Parsi-theatre adventure material since the silent period; Cinemaazi's profile of him says his films 'helped define the B-movie production in post-WW2 period'. The film's nine songs were all written by Roopbani and composed by Damodar Sharma, a composer whose filmography is almost entirely made up of fantasy and costume titles.

Nothing of the song's reception has come down, and no recording is known. Its documented existence rests on two catalogue entries, one of which spells the title 'Kaun Hamara Hai Nigahaban' and the other 'Kaun Hamara Hai Nigahban'. That is the whole surviving trace — which is the honest and complete account of what remains of a 1945 B-circuit film song, and the reason this database records it without claiming more.