ऐ ग़म-ए-दिल क्या करूँ

A slow duet for Renuka Devi and Masood Parvez, three and a quarter minutes long, credited on the Ghulami song list to Majaz — Asrar-ul-Haq Majaz Lucknawi, the Progressive Writers' Association poet whose refrain 'ae gham-e-dil kya karoon' became one of the best-known lines in twentieth-century Urdu. The line is far more famous in its 1953 form, sung by Talat Mahmood for Thokar; this S. K. Pal recording for Ghulami is the earlier film setting, and it is the version almost nobody has heard.

Pal sets it slow — the slowest tempo on the album — and gives it to two voices rather than one, which is the notable structural choice here, because the line is a solitary lament and every later setting has treated it as a solo. Splitting it across a male and a female voice turns an interior complaint into an exchange, and the arrangement has to keep the ghazal-style phrasing intact while accommodating that handover. The recording is 3:15, well inside a single 78-rpm side.

Majaz's refrain is a question that refuses its own answer: it names the grief of the heart and then asks what is to be done with it, which in his hands is never merely private. Majaz was the romantic of the Progressive Writers' circle, the poet whose personal desolation and political despair were written in the same breath and could not be separated, and this is the line that carries that fusion. In a film called Ghulami the question acquires a second floor of meaning without a word being changed. Full text is withheld here for copyright reasons; the poem is widely available in Majaz's collected work.

Ghulami (1945) was made at Shalimar Pictures, the Poona studio where the Progressive Writers' Association had a standing presence — Josh Malihabadi on the song staff, Akhtar-ul-Iman in the story department. Majaz's single credit on this soundtrack belongs to that same network. Renuka Devi and Masood Parvez, who sing it, were the film's leads; Renuka Devi was Begum Khurshid Mirza, sister of the Urdu writer Rashid Jahan, herself a founding figure of the Progressive Writers' Movement, so the poem and the voice singing it come from the same literary world. The film's story is not documented anywhere, so what scene this duet served is unknown.

The afterlife of this refrain dwarfs the film that first carried it. In 1953 a version of Majaz's verses set by Sardar Malik and sung by Talat Mahmood for Thokar became one of the most-loved Urdu film songs ever recorded, and the line has since supplied the title of a 2017 biographical film about Majaz himself. Ghulami's setting is the earlier one and is documented in the film's song list, but it never entered public memory the way the 1953 recording did. That makes it a genuine footnote worth keeping: the same words, a different composer, eight years earlier, sung by two voices instead of one.