तुम हम को भुला बैठे हो

The third of Noor Jehan's four solos in Badi Maa (1945), written by Zia Sarhadi and composed by K. Datta. Hindigeetmala records the Devanagari heading with the phrase repeated — 'तुम हम को भुला बैठे हो, हम को भुला बैठे हो' — which is the shape of the song: one accusation turned over and said again, in the way a person actually reproaches someone they have not stopped loving.

Badi Maa's score divides cleanly by voice, and Noor Jehan's four numbers form its slow, adult centre while Baby Alka's three carry the light material and Lata Mangeshkar's carry the devotional and patriotic register. This is one of the slow ones. A 1945 Bombay film song had to fit a single side of a shellac disc with singer and orchestra recorded together in one pass, so a lyric built on repetition — the same phrase returned to — was also a practical way of filling three minutes without new melodic material. K. Datta, trained in bhajan and Marathi film music, used that economy repeatedly across this album.

The Urdu-Hindi construction 'bhula baithe ho' is doing quiet work that no English rendering keeps. 'Baithna' — to sit — attached to a verb turns the action into a settled state someone has lowered themselves into and shows no sign of getting up from. So the charge is not the dramatic one of abandonment but the slower, more insulting one: you have made yourself comfortable in having forgotten me. Zia Sarhadi, whose screenplays were built on social observation rather than romantic flourish, chooses the idiom of ordinary speech over the high Persianate register available to him, and the reproach lands harder for it.

In Badi Maa, Noor Jehan plays Hema, daughter of the moneylender Ghanshyam and sister of Rajinder, who is secretly working for the Japanese. She is in love with Dinesh, who is stranded in London through the Blitz while her family's debt-collecting ruins his father. The romantic songs belong to that separation — a lover far away, a family on the wrong side, a village about to be attacked — before the film's last act turns them both into combatants. Master Vinayak made the film for his own Prafulla Pictures banner under pressure from the colonial Information Department, which was pushing Bombay studios towards war subjects in 1945.

This is the least circulated of Noor Jehan's four Badi Maa solos, which is exactly what makes it useful to anyone reconstructing her Indian discography: her Bombay career effectively ends in 1947, so the standard collections are dominated by the famous numbers from Khandaan (1942), Zeenat (1945) and Anmol Ghadi (1946), and the ordinary working songs from mid-tier social dramas like this one are what fall out of the record. The surviving public-domain print of Badi Maa makes them recoverable in a way that is unusual for the period.