सजा कर मेरी उम्मीदों को

'Saja Kar Meri Ummeedon Ko' is a Bulo C. Rani solo — the composer singing his own tune — to a Wali Saheb lyric. It is the last of the thirteen tracks in HindiGeetMala's listing and the third of the film's three Urdu-register songs.

Wali Saheb's Urdu asks for the ghazal manner, and in a 1945 film score that meant something specific: a slow, unhurried line, a pause built in after each phrase where a mehfil audience would once have said wah, and orchestration kept thin enough that the words are never competed with. Bulo C. Rani sings it himself, so the tune is written to a composer's voice rather than a professional one. The arrangement is not documented.

Sajana is to decorate — the verb used of dressing a bride, arranging a room for a guest, laying out a shrine — and Wali Saheb applies it to ummeedein, hopes. The image is of expectations groomed and set out for an arrival, with the phrase left grammatically incomplete at saja kar, 'having decorated', so the sentence hangs on what came next. In the Urdu tradition that suspension is the point: the listener already knows that whatever was expected did not arrive, because the poem would not exist otherwise. The full text is not reproduced on this page.

HindiGeetMala and MySwar both credit 'Saja Kar Meri Ummeedon Ko' to Bulo C. Rani, with Wali Saheb as lyricist and Bulo C. Rani as composer. Preet was made at Krishin Movietone, the Bombay banner Ram Daryani had set up with his brother K. S. Daryani in 1938, and Daryani directed it himself. Bulo C. Rani composed all thirteen songs; D. N. Madhok wrote ten of them and Wali Saheb the other three. MySwar records the discs as a Columbia Records release. Cinemaazi and the Wikipedia list of 1945 Hindi films give the cast as Snehprabha Pradhan, Chandra Mohan, Nazir Ahmad, Pahari Sanyal, Swarnalata, Gope, Miss Gulab and Majid. No plot summary of the picture survives in any source that can be consulted without a paywall, and the film has no Wikipedia article of its own, so nothing is asserted here about what happens in it.

Bulo C. Rani (1920-1993) not only composed Preet but is credited as a singer on four of its thirteen tracks — a composer putting his own voice on the disc, which was still ordinary practice in 1945. He was about twenty-five here and had been composing on his own account only since 1944, after joining Ranjit Movietone in 1939 as an assistant to Khemchand Prakash; his best-known score, Jogan, was five years away. Preet itself survives today only as a catalogue: a thirteen-song list preserved through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the databases built on it, with no print known to circulate and no plot summary in open circulation.