अरमानों की बस्ती में हम आग लगा बैठे

'Armaanon Ki Basti Mein Hum Aag Laga Baithe' is the best-remembered number from Shirin Farhad (1945) and the one song from the film that collectors of pre-Partition Hindi music still write about and post. It is a Shamshad Begum solo, composed by Rashid Attre to a lyric by D. N. Madhok — one of the three numbers on the album that Attre took, the other four going to Pandit Amarnath. The standard account of Attre's career treats Shirin Farhad as the most successful of his eight Indian films, and this is the song that is always named when the film is.

Rashid Attre came to composing sideways. Born in Amritsar in 1919 to the singer-musician Khushi Mohammad, trained on tabla and then in classical music under Ustad Ashfaq Hussain, he followed his father to Calcutta and took a job in New Theatres' sound department; it was K. L. Saigal, hearing him sing, who told his father the boy belonged in the music department instead, and Rai Chand Boral who took him on. By 1945 he had four films behind him and a manner of his own — a preference for the ghazal's economy over the folk exuberance that Lahore's other composers were selling. A lyric of self-accusation is exactly the material that manner suits: it wants a line that stays low and does not decorate, and a singer whose weight is in the middle of the voice rather than at the top of it. What the record actually sounds like cannot be described from documentation alone, and is not described here.

The image is unusual and it is the reason the title has stuck. Armaan is longing, the thing wished for; a basti is an inhabited settlement, a quarter of a town where people actually live. Putting them together builds desires into a place with streets and houses — and then burns it down. The verb form does the rest of the work: aag laga baithe, in the -baithna construction, means an act completed in a way that cannot be undone and was not quite deliberate, the grammar of blundering into ruin. So the speaker is not accusing a lover of destroying her hopes; she is confessing to having done it herself, and to having done it almost carelessly. That reversal — self-arson rather than betrayal — is what lifts the line above the ordinary complaint of the period's film ghazal.

Shirin Farhad was a Pancholi Art Pictures production made in Lahore, directed by Prahlad Dutt, with Ragini and Jayant leading a cast that also included Ghulam Mohammad, Gyani, Zahoor Shah, Nafees Begum and Wazir Begum. The screenplay was by D. N. Madhok, who wrote this song's words as well, with dialogue by Imtiaz Ali Taj — the author of the 1922 Urdu Anarkali — and the humourist Shaukat Thanvi. Of the album's seven numbers this is the one that has been transcribed and discussed by the enthusiasts who work through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh film by film, and it was through that route, in December 2016, that the film received its first proper write-up in eight decades.

This is the survivor of the album. Where the other six numbers exist as catalogue lines, this one exists as audio: it is the track through which Shirin Farhad is still occasionally heard, and it carries whatever reputation Rashid Attre's Indian period retains in India. Attre himself left for Pakistan in 1948, composed for some eighty films across his whole career, won the Nigar Award for best music three times and died in 1967 at forty-eight; his son Wajahat Attre became a composer in turn. Shamshad Begum stayed in Bombay, and by the time this record had gone quiet she was one of the two or three most recorded voices in India.