ग़रीबों की दुनिया जहाँ से निराली

The second of Rafiq Ghaznavi's three compositions for Ek Din Ka Sultan (1945) and the second of Amirbai Karnataki's three songs in it. Of the film's nine titles this is the one that speaks most directly to its subject: a story in which a water-carrier is lifted onto an emperor's throne for a day needs, somewhere in it, a song that says the poor live in a separate world. Words by Wali Saheb.

Ghaznavi's block in this film runs from an Urdu ghazal for a male voice to a chorus number, and this sits between them: a reflective solo in the middle register, the kind of song that in 1945 was carried on a plain melodic line so the words stay audible. Ghaznavi came to composition as a singer — he had played the lead, composed and sung in Heer Ranjha (1932), the first Punjabi film — and his settings tend to trust the voice rather than the orchestra. Amirbai Karnataki, fluent in Kannada and Gujarati as well as Hindi, was known as Kannada Kokila and had the kind of clear, forward delivery that a text-led song needs. No copy of the recording has been traced.

'Nirali' is a gentler word than it looks. It means singular, other, of a different order — and applied to the world of the poor it can be read two ways at once: as pity, and as a claim of superiority. The Hindi-Urdu film song of the 1940s used that ambiguity constantly, because it let a lyricist say something about the social order without saying anything a censor could act on. Wali Saheb, writing under the Bombay industry's wartime conditions, takes the safer and older of the two readings — the poor are not merely deprived, they are elsewhere, and the elsewhere has its own arithmetic. In a film whose premise is that an emperor's throne can be handed to a water-carrier for a day and then taken back, the line does more work than it first appears to.

Sohrab Modi produced and directed the film for Minerva Movietone from Agha Jani Kashmiri's story, and the film historian Amrit Gangar records it as a 'minor historical' that was nonetheless well received for its direction and production values. Rafiq Ghaznavi was returning to Modi after Sikandar (1941). The song title appears in three different transliterations across the sources — Garibo Kee Duniya, Garibo Ki Duniya, Garibon Ki Duniya — which is the usual signature of a title travelling from a 78-rpm label through several hands; the form used here follows Wikipedia's song table.

The song has not been reissued and no recording has been traced. It is worth keeping in the record chiefly for what it shows about the 1940s Hindi film's habit of putting its thesis into a song rather than a speech — and because it is the clearest thematic bridge between this film's soundtrack and its subject. Amirbai Karnataki's mid-1940s catalogue is very thinly reissued in general; a handful of Kismet and Rattan titles carry her name today, and dozens of others, this among them, exist only as entries in film song listings.