मैं राजा को अपने रिझा के रहूँगी

One of two songs Gyan Dutt recorded with Begum Akhtar — still billed then as Akhtari Faizabadi — for Pannadai (1945). It is startling in her discography for its lightness: a boast rather than a lament, a woman announcing she will win her king over and keep him won. Atul's Song A Day notes it as perhaps the first playful song its writer had come across from a singer known almost entirely for grave ghazals, dadras and thumris. Only the audio survives in circulation, so who the song was picturised on is not established.

Gyan Dutt writes for the ghazal singer rather than against her: the tune stays inside the light-classical register that Akhtari Faizabadi could inhabit without effort, but keeps the phrases short and forward-moving so the song reads as banter rather than as a recital piece. The result sits at the meeting point of the film song and the light thumri — the idiom Gyan Dutt used repeatedly with his semi-classical voices at Ranjit through the early 1940s.

Dewan Sharar's lyric is built on a declaration rather than a plea, which is what makes it unusual for its period and for its singer. The speaker does not ask whether she will be loved; she states as settled fact that she will charm her raja and go on charming him. In the Urdu-Hindi film idiom of 1945 the female voice is far more often the one waiting, reproaching or enduring, so a woman claiming the initiative — and claiming it with amusement rather than defiance — gives the song a tone that has almost no counterpart in Begum Akhtar's recorded work.

Pannadai (1945) was produced by Kamalabai Mangalorekar for Pradeep Pictures, Bombay, and directed by Ram Daryani, with Durga Khote in the title role and Chandra Mohan, Meenakshi Shirodkar, Master Vithal, Mubarak, M. Ismail, Gope and Nana Saheb Phatak in support. The film retells the sixteenth-century Mewar episode in which Panna Dhai, nursemaid to the child heir Udai Singh II, put her own son Chandan in the prince's bed so the usurper Banbir would kill him instead, then carried the heir to safety at Kumbhalgarh. Gyan Dutt wrote ten songs for it, with lyrics split between D.N. Madhok and Dewan Sharar.

The song belongs to the last stretch of Begum Akhtar's first film career. In 1945 she married the Lucknow-based barrister Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi and, under the restrictions of that household, did not sing publicly for roughly five years; she returned to films only with Dana Pani (1953) and Ehsan (1954), and her last screen appearance was in Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar (1958). The two Pannadai recordings therefore matter more for the singer than for the film — they preserve a voice on the point of disappearing from the studios, and this one preserves a mood she is not otherwise known to have recorded.