बाँके नैना से

A Naseem Akhtar solo from Tadbir (1945), composed by Lal Mohammad to a lyric by Swami Ramanand Saraswati. It is the only one of the film's twelve documented sides sung by a voice other than K.L. Saigal's or Suraiya's, and on the evidence of its title the only one in a light romantic register — banke naina, playful or crooked eyes, is the standard idiom of flirtation in North Indian song.

Nothing is documented about this recording beyond its credits, and it is the most obscure side in an already obscure score. Naseem Akhtar was a working playback and stage singer of the 1940s who recorded across a number of Bombay productions in this period; a single light number given to an outside voice was a routine arrangement in a film whose two leads both sang their own songs, usually for a secondary character or a dance sequence. That reading of its function is inference from the shape of 1940s film scores, not a documented fact about this film.

Naina — eyes — is the busiest single noun in Hindi film lyric writing, and banke naina is its flirtatious form: eyes that are not looking straight, that are doing something on purpose. That the lyricist who supplied Tadbir's four addresses to God also supplied its one eye-song is a reminder that the film-lyric trade of the 1940s did not let a poet specialise. No lyric text is reproduced here, and the full text of this side does not appear in any accessible source.

Nothing is recorded about the character or scene this song belonged to. Tadbir's cast list includes Jilloo, Rehana, Raja Rani, Ameena and Shalini among the women besides Suraiya, and no source assigns a role to any of them, so the number cannot be attached to a performer on screen.

It survives as a catalogue entry. Unlike the Saigal sides it has not been carried forward by reissue compilations, and it is the Tadbir title least likely to be found in circulation.