रूठा है आसमान गुम हो गया महताब

'Rootha Hai Aasmaan Gum Ho Gaya Mehtab' is one of the seven songs of Alam Ara (1931), India's first sound film. Attributed to Zillo (also known as Jillo), a secondary performer in the film, it belongs to the classical Urdu lament tradition — the moon and sky as witnesses to human grief — transplanted onto a motion-picture stage for the first time in Indian history.

Ferozshah Mistri and B. Irani shared the music direction for Alam Ara, working under conditions that would be unrecognisable to later generations of Hindi film musicians. There was no playback system; no separate recording session; no studio mixing. The harmonium and tabla were placed just out of camera-frame, the performers sang with full voice, and the Tanar single-system camera captured everything simultaneously onto a single strip of film. The imagery of this title — sky, moon, night — suggests a song of the raat or shaam variety, the classical evening-lament mode, though no musical notation or transcription of any Alam Ara song was ever published.

The opening line folds two of classical Urdu poetry's most powerful tropes into a single breath: rootha (to sulk, said of a beloved or a god withholding grace) and mehtab (the moon, emblem of the beloved's face). Joseph David, the playwright-lyricist who wrote Alam Ara's seven songs, came from the Parsi theatre tradition, where such imagery was stock-in-trade for the most melodramatic scenes. In using aasmaan — the sky itself — as the sulking party, the line elevates the personal grief to the cosmological: the universe itself has turned its face away from the singer.

Alam Ara's plot revolved around Adil, a general unjustly imprisoned by the scheming queen Dilbahar, and his daughter Alam Ara, raised in secret among nomadic performers. A lament in which sky and moon vanish would suit a moment of deepest isolation — possibly Alam Ara herself in exile, or a secondary character voicing the mood of injustice that pervades the film. That Zillo, rather than the lead Zubeida, was assigned this song suggests it belonged to a supporting scene or interlude, though no contemporary account records the exact dramatic placement.

Among the seven Alam Ara songs, this is the one most firmly in the raga-poetry idiom rather than the popular street-song mode. That Ferozshah Mistri composed in both registers on the same soundtrack anticipates what would define Hindi film music for decades: the stylistic plurality that moved freely from qawwali to classical lament to folk-devotional within a single score. Zillo's name, appearing in filmographies for this song, represents one of the earliest documented singer credits in Indian cinema history — even if the voice itself is gone.