आँखों का उजियारा तू

'Aankhon Ka Ujiyara Tu' is one of seven documented songs from the 1941 Hindi film Mere Raja, with lyrics by Ishwar Chandra Kapoor and music by Damodar Sharma. The title — addressing the beloved as the light of one's eyes — places it among the film's romantic numbers. As with most of this little-documented production, the playback singer is not recorded in the surviving catalogues, and no audio is presently in circulation.

Ishwar Chandra Kapoor's lyric 'Aankhon Ka Ujiyara Tu' employs one of Hindi verse's oldest and most enduring metaphors: the beloved as light. 'Ujiyara' — the Hindi and Awadhi form of 'ujala' (brightness, illumination) — connects this lyric to the folk-devotional tradition in which the guru, the god or the beloved is the only source of light in a world of darkness. The specific use of 'aankhon ka' (of / belonging to the eyes) creates a physiological intimacy: the beloved is not just an abstract light but the sensory brightness through which the speaker literally perceives the world, the necessary condition of all seeing. This metaphor runs through multiple traditions: Kabir's guru-devotion ('Guru diya aankhon mein ujiyara'), the bhakti hymn, the Braj Bhasha padavali. Kapoor domesticates this sacred metaphor into the romantic film song without losing its weight: to say 'you are the light of my eyes' in 1941 carried the full resonance of centuries of devotional verse applied, tenderly, to a human beloved.

'Aankhon Ka Ujiyara Tu' is the second song in this batch drawn from Mere Raja (1941), produced by Paramount Film Company and directed by T. S. Mani. The cast — Mazhar Khan, E. Billimoria, Kanta and Bibbo — included E. Billimoria, one of the most recognisable stuntman-actors of 1930s Indian cinema, whose physical charisma made him a staple of action and social films well into the early 1940s. Damodar Sharma's music was set to Ishwar Chandra Kapoor's lyrics across seven documented songs. 'Aankhon Ka Ujiyara Tu' belongs to the film's tender, romantic register — a direct address to the beloved as the light of one's eyes. As with most of Mere Raja's soundtrack, no audio has been located in accessible archives; prints and gramophone records of smaller Paramount Film Company productions from 1941 have largely not survived the decades of institutional neglect that followed the studio's closure, making this among the era's undiscovered musical artefacts.