प्यार करना ही पड़ेगा एक दिन

'Pyar Karna Hi Padega Ek Din' is the second of Mohammed Rafi's three solos in Sharbati Ankhen (1945), written by Pandit Indra and composed by Feroz Nizami. Unlike the film's other two Rafi numbers, no transfer of it has surfaced on the vintage-music blogs, so the song is known only from the catalogue line: title, singer, lyricist, composer. What that title carries is a posture rather than a plea — love stated as an inevitability the listener will have to submit to sooner or later.

No recording of this number is in circulation, so its melody and arrangement cannot be described and are not guessed at here. What can be said is the context around it: Feroz Nizami's Bombay work of the mid-1940s is uniformly built around the voice rather than around the orchestra — a habit that came from his own training as a Kirana-gharana singer and his years as a staff vocalist at All India Radio in Lahore, Delhi and Lucknow — and the two solos from this same film that do survive follow that pattern, a plain singable line over light accompaniment.

The line works on a piece of Hindi grammar. 'Karna hi padega' is the construction of unavoidable obligation — the form reserved for taxes, illness, ageing, the things nobody chooses — and Pandit Indra applies it to falling in love. The joke and the argument are the same thing: the speaker is not begging, he is predicting, and he has put himself in the comfortable position of someone who only has to wait. Pandit Indra, born Indar Chand Dadhich in Calcutta in 1905 into a Rajasthani merchant family, was among the most prolific lyricists of the first two decades of Hindi sound cinema, and he wrote habitually in this plain spoken Hindi rather than in the Persianised register of his co-writer on this film, Tanveer Naqvi.

Pandit Indra wrote five of the ten songs of Sharbati Ankhen, including two of Rafi's three solos; Tanveer Naqvi wrote four and one number is credited to Baalam Pardesi. That split is itself informative about the film: a Wadia Movietone social drama pitched at a mixed audience, with an Urdu poet supplying the interior, ghazal-register numbers and a Hindi lyricist supplying the plainer, more colloquial ones. The picture, directed by Ramchandra Thakur with Ishwarlal in the lead, has otherwise left no synopsis or stills in accessible archives.

Nothing about this particular song entered the standard histories, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Its only claim on attention is arithmetical and biographical: it is one of the three solos that Sharbati Ankhen gave Mohammed Rafi in 1945, at the exact moment when a Lahore newcomer with two recordings behind him was becoming a singer producers would call back. Everything Rafi became rests on a handful of assignments like this one, most of which are now unheard.