डूबती नाव को तिनके का सहारा

This is the one song of the thirteen that the catalogues assign to a lyricist other than Pandit Indra: hindigeetmala.net credits it to Wali Saheb, the Bihar-born writer who had already supplied lyrics for Gul-e-Bakavali (1939), Yamla Jat (1940) and Khazanchi (1941) and who would soon move into direction. Amirbai Karnataki sings it and Bulo C. Rani composed it. The title takes a proverb that exists in almost every Indian language - the drowning man reaching for a straw - and gives it a boat instead of a man, which shifts the image from panic to something slower and more resigned: a vessel going down by degrees, and a straw offered to it as though that were help.

No transfer of this recording has been located and its arrangement is not described here. The song's documented facts are its three credits, and the most interesting of them is the lyricist, since Wali Saheb's presence on this one title suggests he was brought in for a specific number rather than engaged for the picture - a normal enough practice at Ranjit, where a house composer worked with whichever writers a particular sequence needed. Amirbai Karnataki's voice, plain and forward rather than ornamented, was well suited to a lyric built on a proverb; nothing further about the setting can be said honestly.

The proverb behind this title is one of the most widely travelled in South Asia, and its ordinary use is faintly contemptuous - the straw is worthless, the grasp is futile, and the phrase is usually deployed to describe someone deceiving themselves. A song that takes it as a first line does something the proverb does not: it stops treating the straw as an object of ridicule and starts treating it as the last available comfort. That reframing is exactly what film lyric writing of the 1940s was good at, taking a piece of common speech everyone in the audience already carried and slowing it down until the feeling inside it became audible. Substituting a boat for the drowning person deepens the effect, because a boat is what is supposed to do the saving. Nothing of the text past the opening line has been recovered.

Wali Saheb, born Walli Mohammad Khan in Bihar in 1908, had entered films in 1935 as a song writer and won wider notice when Ghulam Haider set one of his naats to music in Lahore in 1937; by 1945 he was writing for pictures on both sides of what would soon be a border, and he began directing the following decade before migrating to Pakistan. Wikipedia's article on Mumtaz Shanti, the leading lady of this film, identifies Wali Saheb as her husband and as the man with whom she left India for Lahore after Partition. If that identification is correct, then the lyricist of this song was writing words for his own wife to be given, in Amirbai Karnataki's voice, on screen.

Among the Chand Chakori titles this is the one that reads least like a film song and most like a line of ordinary speech raised into verse, and that is why it stands out on the list. It is also the only place in the film's record where a second lyricist can actually be located, which makes it useful evidence about how a Ranjit soundtrack was staffed in 1945: a house composer, a principal writer, and one outside hand brought in for a particular number. The recording itself has not survived in circulation, so the entry is a credit and a reading of a title rather than an account of a song.