आजा बेदर्दी आजा

'Aaja Bedardi Aaja' is Zeenat Begum's principal solo in Shyam Sundar's score for Bhai Jaan (1945). All three surviving catalogues of the film — HindiGeetMala, MySwar and English Wikipedia — agree on her as the singer, which makes it one of the few numbers in this lost film whose credit is not in dispute. HindiGeetMala files it under its romantic-songs category; MySwar simply as filmi. Its lyric, like the rest of the album, is by Partau Lakhnavi.

Zeenat Begum's voice was the other pole of Shyam Sundar's Lahore circle — he had given her a screen duet with the young Mohammad Rafi in the Punjabi film Gul Baloch (1942) — and in Bombay she took the songs Noor Jehan did not. A summons-song of this kind wants a walking pulse rather than a slow ghazal tread: the repeated call at the head of the line sets up its own rhythm, and the composer's job is to let the invitation return often enough to become insistent. Shyam Sundar's arrangements in this period lean on harmonium, sarangi and a light hand-drum bed, with the orchestra thinned out under the voice so that the Urdu stays audible.

'Bedardi' — the one without dard, without the ache of feeling — is one of the oldest terms of address in the Hindi-Urdu love lyric, and it works as reproach and endearment simultaneously: to call the beloved heartless is to concede that one is still calling. The title's structure, the invitation bracketing the insult, is the whole argument of the song in miniature. Partau Lakhnavi is writing in the plain register that Filmindia noted in the picture's Urdu — not the ornamented ghazal diction of the Lucknow school he was named for, but the accessible idiom a 1945 audience would carry out of the hall. Baburao Patel thought the film's lyrics its weakest element, an assessment worth recording alongside the fact that he found the dialogue of the same writing team excellent.

Bhai Jaan is a Muslim social about two brothers in a Nawabi household and the dancing girl Benazeer who comes between them. Noor Jehan played Benazeer on screen; Zeenat Begum, who does not appear in the cast list, sang from behind it. That division — the star singing her own songs while a second voice covers the rest of the score — was standard practice in 1945, the last years before playback singers became separately famous in their own right. Filmindia's synopsis of the film records a household turned in on itself by suspicion, illness and a ward's malice, with the courtesan finally choosing death over the damage her name would do; a song of unanswered summons sits naturally in that world.

Zeenat Begum's Bombay career was brief and is thinly documented; she moved to Pakistan after Partition and the records that carried her name in India were not reissued. Songs like this one survive mainly as catalogue entries — a title, a singer, a composer, a year — which is why it matters that the two fullest surviving song lists for the film, English Wikipedia's and HindiGeetMala's, independently agree in naming her as the singer of 'Aaja Bedardi Aaja'. The film that housed it is lost, and no reissued transfer of the recording is currently traceable.