लाखों सितम झेलेंगे हम

One of Zohrabai Ambalewali's three solo sides in Sanyasi (1945), "Laakhon Sitam Jhelenge Hum" is the score's most straightforwardly Urdu-inflected number, its title drawn from the vocabulary of the ghazal rather than from the village-Hindi register of the film's folk songs. Naushad set it, Pandit Madhur wrote it, and the transfer preserved on collector channels runs a little over three minutes at a deliberate, unhurried pace.

The setting is slow and vertical — a sustained melodic line with long held notes rather than the rhythmic swing Naushad used for the film's duets — which is what allows Zohrabai's chest register to carry the weight. Her training in the khayal and thumri lineages shows in how little ornament she spends: the phrases are shaped by breath and by where she chooses to lean on a note, not by taans. The accompaniment is the standard Kardar Studios grouping of the period, sarangi and harmonium under the voice with tabla marking a spacious cycle.

'Sitam' is one of the load-bearing words of Urdu love poetry: it means cruelty or oppression, and in the ghazal convention it is what the beloved inflicts and the lover accepts, because accepting it is the proof of constancy. To open with 'laakhon sitam jhelenge hum' — a hundred thousand cruelties, we will bear them — is therefore not a lament but a boast, the lover claiming the strength of their own devotion in advance. Pandit Madhur's line reverses the direction of a complaint: the speaker is not asking for the cruelty to stop, but announcing that it will not work. What follows in the verse is undocumented and is left undescribed here.

Sanyasi was made and directed by A. R. Kardar under his own Kardar Productions banner, with Ghulam Mohammed — the actor, not the composer of the same name — in the title role, Shamim Bano as Radha and Amar as Mohan. Naushad had been Kardar's house composer since Nayi Duniya (1942), and 1945 was the year he had to follow the extraordinary success of Rattan; Sanyasi was his only release of it. Zohrabai Ambalewali, who had sung five of Rattan's ten sides the year before, is again the dominant voice here, singing three of the ten numbers alone and appearing on four more.

The song did not become one of the standards of 1945, and no anthology of the year carries it. What it documents is the last full stretch of Zohrabai Ambalewali's primacy: within three years of this recording the arrival of Lata Mangeshkar reset the entire market for female playback, and singers of Zohrabai's heavier, classically grounded type moved to the edge of the industry. Sides like this one are where that voice can still be heard doing the ordinary work of a film score rather than a famous hit.