नैन बाण से करके घायल रूपवती कहाँ जाए

A duet for Surendra and Shamshad Begum from Ratnavali (1945), lyrics by Vrajendra Gaur and music by Pt. Gobind Ram. The title poses the conceit as a question — having wounded with the arrow of her eyes, where can the beautiful one now escape to — which turns the standard complaint of the wounded lover into a flirtation with a challenge in it. Only the audio is known to survive.

The recording circulates as audio only and its scoring is undocumented. What the credit fixes is the pairing: Surendra, who sang for himself, opposite Shamshad Begum, the voice Gobind Ram used more than any other — eighty-six songs across nineteen films, the largest single body of work she recorded with any composer of the period. Pt. Gobind Ram is credited with about thirty Hindi films and is remembered chiefly for the singers he advanced: he recorded eighty-six songs with Shamshad Begum across nineteen films, did as much as anyone to establish Zohrabai Ambalewali, brought Zeenat Begum into films and gave early encouragement to Mohammed Rafi. His idiom of these years mixes light music, ghazal and thumri with folk material and a distinct Punjabi tinge.

Nain baan — the glance as arrow — is among the oldest images in Sanskrit and Braj love poetry, where the eyes of the beloved are Kamadeva's flower-tipped shafts. Vrajendra Gaur keeps the diction firmly Hindi (nain, baan, ghaayal, roopwati) rather than reaching for the Urdu equivalents a Bombay lyricist of 1945 would have had ready to hand, and the choice fits a film set in a Sanskrit-drama court. The twist is in the second half of the line: instead of lamenting the wound, the singer asks where the wounding beauty thinks she can now go — the injured party turning prosecutor.

Ratnavali was directed by Surendra Desai for Amar Pictures, Bombay, and starred Surendra and Ratnamala; no source consulted assigns the individual roles. Vrajendra Gaur wrote two of the film's eight songs, this duet and 'Ye Mere Hain Main Inki Hoon'; he would go on to a long career as a screenwriter and dialogue writer in Bombay. Filmindia dismissed the picture as a waste of time and predicted failure, and was wrong about the business.

The song survives as a specimen of the Surendra–Shamshad Begum pairing, which Gobind Ram used repeatedly through the 1940s and which almost nobody now associates with either singer: Surendra is remembered for his Mehboob Khan films and Shamshad for her work with Naushad and O. P. Nayyar, so the sizeable body of work they both did for Gobind Ram has fallen out of the standard account.