तू नहीं तो आसरा मुझको है तेरी याद का

'Tu Nahi To Aasra Mujhko Hai Teri Yaad Ka' is the third of the three Shirin Farhad (1945) songs composed by Rashid Attre, sung by Shamshad Begum to a lyric by D. N. Madhok. The Millennium Post's survey of Attre's career names it alongside 'Armaanon Ki Basti Mein Hum Aag Laga Baithe' and 'Main Kya Hoon Bhala' as his contribution to the film — the three sides on which his reputation in India was made and, effectively, closed.

Attre's training was in tabla first and classical vocal second, and both show in the way his ghazal-side songs are built: the rhythm is stated plainly and then left alone, and the vocal line is given the kind of long, unhurried phrase a trained singer can shape without help from the orchestra. Shamshad Begum's voice — carrying, unsentimental, with its weight in the middle register — is not the obvious instrument for a song of longing, and that is the interest of the pairing: the lyric is about dependence, and the voice singing it does not sound dependent. How the record was actually scored cannot be recovered from what survives, and no description of it is offered here.

Aasra is support in the plainest sense — the thing you lean on, the ledge that keeps you from falling — and it is a word of practical need rather than of sentiment. The title's construction is therefore harder than it looks: not 'I will remember you fondly' but 'you are not here, so memory will have to hold the weight'. In the firaaq poetry of the period, memory is generally the wound; here it has been promoted to load-bearing, which turns absence into an arrangement the speaker has to live inside rather than a state she is protesting. D. N. Madhok, one of the two most prolific Hindi film lyricists of the 1940s, was writing at a moment when film Urdu had settled into a reliable vocabulary for exactly this — separation as an ongoing condition rather than a crisis.

Shirin Farhad was produced by Dalsukh M. Pancholi at Pancholi Art Pictures in Lahore and directed by Prahlad Dutt, with Ragini and Jayant in the leads. D. N. Madhok wrote both the film's screenplay and part of its song text, and he is credited individually on two of the seven numbers — this one and 'Armaanon Ki Basti Mein'. It was Madhok's most productive decade: he had written Rattan (1944) for Naushad the year before, the album that had just changed the commercial arithmetic of Hindi film music, and by 1945 his name on a Lahore picture carried real weight.

The song has left no audio trail in general circulation and no commentary since the film's release. What it does hold is a place in the short list of records that constitute Rashid Attre's Indian legacy: three sides from a single 1945 Lahore film, of which only one is now audible. Attre left for Pakistan in 1948 and became one of that country's leading composers; the songs he made in India, this one included, are the part of his work that stayed behind and was mostly not kept.