बदला दिलवाएगा या रब तू सितमगरों से

'Badla Dilwayega Ya Rab Tu Sitamgaron Se' is one of the seven songs of Alam Ara (1931), India's first sound film — a plea for divine justice in the Parsi-theatre register, commonly attributed to the heroine Zubeida's own voice. Sung live on camera and never put on disc, it is lost except for its title line.

Like all of Alam Ara's seven songs, this one was performed live on the studio floor into hidden microphones, with harmonium and tabla beside the camera and the Tanar system cutting sound straight onto film. Nothing of its melody is documented — early talkie publicity never printed notation or even composer names — so the music exists today only as an entry in filmographies and in the memories its first audiences left unwritten.

The title line is pure Parsi-theatre Urdu: ya Rab (O Lord), sitamgar (oppressor), badla (requital) — the melodramatic register of the 1910s–20s Urdu stage from which Joseph David and Alam Ara's whole idiom came. A captive's plea that God himself will exact the reckoning, it carried the stage's grandest emotion — mazloom versus zaalim, the wronged against the tyrant — into the new medium.

Alam Ara's plot turned on palace intrigue — the scheming queen Dilbahar, the wronged general Adil cast into prison, his daughter Alam Ara raised among nomads. A song pleading for vengeance upon oppressors belongs naturally to this story of injustice and restoration, though no surviving source records exactly where in the film it fell or who sang it on screen; tradition assigns it to Zubeida, the film's heroine, who like all early talkie actors would have sung with her own voice.

The song survives as a single line in the filmographies — and that single line is precious: it is among the earliest evidence of what the first Hindi talkie actually sang about. Together with the fakir's song, it shows Alam Ara's score already spanning the two poles Hindi film music would inhabit for decades: the devotional street song and the high-melodrama cry of the wronged.