रोने दे मुझे ऐ दिल

The fourth and last of Nirmala Devi's songs in Chalis Karod, and the one that stands apart from the others. Where 'Ganga Kinaare More Sasur Ji Ka' and 'Pardesi More Nind Churaye' speak in the Braj-Awadhi of folk lyric, this title is in the Urdu diction of the ghazal — 'ae dil', an address to one's own heart, is a formula that belongs to that tradition and to almost no other. A film that lets the same character speak in both registers is doing something deliberate with her, though without a plot summary it is impossible to say what.

No recording is in circulation, so nothing can be claimed about how this particular number was set. What is documented is Gobind Ram's manner in these years: light melodic writing with a ghazal and thumri inflection rather than a distinctly Punjabi folk one, a small orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi and tabla, and tunes pitched to sit comfortably in the middle of a classically trained voice instead of stretching it. Gobind Ram's own record notes his ghazal and thumri leanings, and a lyric in this diction would conventionally have drawn the ghazal side of that; but the number is not in circulation and no description of its setting survives.

The grammar of the title is worth pausing on. She is not asking a person for permission to cry; she is asking her own heart, which has evidently been telling her not to. That split — the self divided into the one who grieves and the one who polices the grief — is a standard move of the Urdu ghazal, and it produces a very specific emotional posture: weeping becomes an act of defiance rather than of weakness, something claimed against an internal censor. It is a harder, more adult register than the reproach songs elsewhere on this album. Pandit Indra could write in it as easily as in the folk idiom; none of his lines are reproduced here.

Chalis Karod — 'Forty Crores', the number that stood through the 1940s for the population of undivided India — was directed by Nanabhai Bhatt for Chandra Art Productions of Bombay, a year before Bhatt set up his own Deepak Pictures. Gobind Ram composed, Pandit Indra and I. C. Kapoor were credited with the songs, and the cast paired Nirmala Devi with her husband Arun Kumar Ahuja alongside Yakub, Agha and Gope. No plot summary of the film survives in any source consulted for this entry, so the nine song titles are effectively all that remains of what the picture was about. Nirmala Devi's four songs cover most of the album's emotional range — an ornament song, a sasural song, a motor-car duet and this — which is a fair indication of how much of the film rested on her.

Nothing of this recording is in circulation and no reissue is known. Nirmala Devi's own legacy went in a different direction entirely: she left film acting behind, built a career as a Hindustani classical vocalist of the Patiala Gharana, and returned to films only occasionally as a playback singer, most visibly in Bawarchi (1972) and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985). Songs like this one are what her early film years actually consisted of, and almost none of them can be heard today. Nothing of the recording is in general circulation today: there is no known commercial reissue and no print of the film in public availability. Its survival is documentary — a line in the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue and the Cinemaazi credit sheet — which is the ordinary fate of most of the roughly two hundred Hindi films released each year in the mid-1940s.