शोख़ आँखों में कालिख लगा दो

'Shokh Aankhon Mein Kaalikh Laga Do' is one of the four Shirin Farhad (1945) songs composed by Pandit Amarnath, sung by Shamshad Begum. It is the least documented item on the album: hindigeetmala carries the title but has never held its text, noting that the lyrics are missing because no audio or video of the song has surfaced, and Pakistan's pre-Partition records give no lyricist for it. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh and MySwar, however, both attribute the words to D. N. Madhok, one of the film's two credited poets.

Pandit Amarnath's four sides on this album were recorded for a single voice, and by 1945 he had a decade of practice at writing for one: he had discovered Zeenat Begum as a child, recorded her earliest sides and built the celebrated Daasi (1944) score around her, and his Pancholi work of these years consistently puts the melody in the singer's hands and keeps the orchestra behind it. A teasing lyric of this kind normally asks for a light, forward-moving setting rather than a sustained one. The disc has not surfaced in any accessible archive, however, so its actual tempo, scoring and instrumentation are unknown and are not guessed at here.

Kaalikh is soot — the black deposit from a lamp or a cooking pot — and it does two quite different jobs in north Indian usage. Applied to the eyes it becomes kajal, the oldest cosmetic in the subcontinent; applied as a dot behind a child's ear or on a cheek it is a charm to spoil the perfection that attracts nazar, the evil eye. Shokh means bright, mischievous, forward — the standard adjective for eyes that do damage. So an instruction to put soot into shokh eyes can be read as flirtation (make them darker still), as protection (they are too fine, blacken them so no one's envy lands), or as a curse (blacken them, let their brightness be spoiled). Without the text of the song the reading cannot be settled, and this entry does not pretend to settle it; the ambiguity itself is characteristic of the register the album's Urdu lyrics work in.

Shirin Farhad was directed by Prahlad Dutt for Pancholi Art Pictures, Lahore, in 1945, with Ragini and Jayant in the leads. Its seven songs were split between Pandit Amarnath, who recorded four, and Rashid Attre, who recorded three. This is one of the four, and it belongs to the half of the album that has left the fainter trace: of Amarnath's four numbers, none has an audio survival comparable to Attre's 'Armaanon Ki Basti Mein'. Amarnath was working for Pancholi across these years — Daasi (1944), Kaise Kahoon (1945) — and this was among his last films for the Lahore studio before his death in 1947.

This is the least recoverable song on a barely recoverable album. Hindigeetmala's page for it says plainly that the lyrics have not been added because no audio or video of the song is available anywhere — an unusually candid admission for a lyrics database, and a fair summary of what eight decades have done to Lahore's 1945 output. What survives is the title, the singer, the composer and the fact of the recording's existence, and that is what this entry records.