किसने दिया है हमको सहारा

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. MySwar is the only catalogue that assigns a form to any Piya Milan track, and it calls this one a ghazal - a plausible fit for a composer trained in the Kirana gharana writing for a Patiala-trained voice. Nirmala Devi sings it; hindigeetmala's listeners place it second among the eleven.

The title is a question with the answer folded into it: 'who has given us support?' is asked in the manner of Urdu ghazal, where a rhetorical question is a way of stating an absence rather than seeking information. Sahara - support, shelter, the thing one leans on - is among the ghazal's standard counters, and to ask who supplied it is to say plainly that nobody did. M. Naseem wrote the words.

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 song belongs to the group of five Nirmala Devi solos that make up nearly half the album and that give Piya Milan whatever musical identity it still has. Baburao Patel, the famously severe editor of filmindia, dismissed the film but described Nirmala Devi as the only good performer in it.