आबाद दिल की दुनिया बर्बाद हुई है

'Aabad Dil Ki Duniya Barbad Hui Hai' is one of the two Binapani Mukherjee solos in Mazdoor (1945), written by Gopal Singh Nepali and composed by Hari Prasanna Das. It is the album's straight lament — described by the Hindi-film-music writers who have covered it as a melancholic, openly weeping song — and it is one of the tracks for which only the audio is now available; no record of how it was picturised has been located. The Saregama reissue runs it at 3:23.

The one substantive musical description available from published sources is of mood — commentators call it melancholic and weepy, a slow lament — and that description is not extended here by listening. Binapani Mukherjee was one of the Bengali-trained singers working in Bombay in the 1940s; her recorded work is scattered across films from the 1930s and 1940s and she is now among the period's largely forgotten voices. Hari Prasanna Das, a composer whose main body of work was in Bengali cinema, gives her two of the six Mazdoor songs, both on the sorrowing side of the album.

The whole force of the line is in the collision of two words that Urdu-Hindi verse habitually keeps apart: aabad, settled and populous and thriving, and barbad, laid waste. Nepali puts them in the same breath and makes the heart a place with a history — it was inhabited once, there were streets in it, and what has happened is not simply sadness but depopulation. The figure is deliberately civic rather than romantic; it does not describe a feeling, it describes a ruin. In a film about a mill town, a woman singing about a settlement that has been emptied out is doing more than one kind of work at once, though the lyric never has to make that connection explicit.

Mazdoor (1945) was directed by Nitin Bose for Filmistan and starred an almost entirely new cast: Nasir Khan, Dilip Kumar's younger brother, in his first film; Indumati, in the only lead role of her career; and Veera, a Parsi girl from Ankleshwar, as the second heroine. The story turns on a village youth who goes to the city for work, becomes a mill manager after saving the owner's daughter, and is finally forced to take sides in a labour dispute. Where exactly this lament falls in that narrative is not recorded — the writers who have covered the song note that only its audio survives and have asked readers for information about its picturisation.

The song's afterlife is entirely on record. It survives on the six-track Saregama/HMV reissue of the Mazdoor album while the film has dropped out of circulation, and it is one of the few Binapani Mukherjee recordings that a listener today can actually reach — which gives an otherwise minor 1945 track a documentary value out of proportion to its fame.