घर आजा बलम

One of the eight songs documented for Nasib (1945), and one of the two whose singer is not recorded in any index consulted. Both HindiGeetMala and MySwar list the title under the film with Gobind Ram as composer, but neither carries a vocal credit, and the account of Gobind Ram's career that names the album's highlights does not mention it — so the singer array here is left deliberately empty rather than filled with a guess. The title itself is one of the oldest formulas in north Indian song: the woman calling the absent man home, the viraha or separation address that runs from folk and thumri repertoire straight into film music.

Nothing is documented about the setting, so what can honestly be said is what the form implies. A 'ghar aaja' song is built on the dholak, in a medium cycle that keeps the singer walking rather than pleading, and the melody usually stays in a small compass and returns often to the tonic — a folk shape rather than a raag exposition. Gobind Ram, whose particular strength the reference literature places in rhythm and orchestration, worked this idiom regularly, and Nasib's album shows him moving between it and the Urdu ghazal within the same eight sides. Whether this side used a solo voice, a duet or a chorus is not recorded.

'Balam' is the folk word for husband or lover, and 'ghar aaja' is its most common companion phrase, so the title announces its tradition before a line is sung. This is the domestic, non-Persianate end of the Hindi film lyric — the vocabulary of Braj and eastern Hindi rather than of Urdu — and it is the same register Rammurti Chaturvedi uses for the film's lullaby and its street song. Within an album that also contains two Urdu ghazals, the effect is a deliberate split: the film's respectable interior world sings in Urdu, its village and street world in Hindi, which is how a 1945 social ordinarily organised its own soundtrack. The lyricist attribution should be treated with care — HindiGeetMala credits Rammurti Chaturvedi and MySwar credits Ishwar Chandra Kapoor, and the two cannot both be right.

Nasib was produced by Silver Films — the banner run by the actress Pramila and her husband Kumar — and directed by B. D. Vedi, in 1945. Its eight songs were divided between three lyricists and sung by Rajkumari, Zohrabai Ambalewali, Hamida Banu and Khan Mastana; which of them sang this one has not been recorded. That gap is normal for the period rather than exceptional: gramophone labels credited the singer, but song indexes compiled decades later from surviving discs and studio publicity have holes wherever a disc was not located, and Nasib was a small picture whose print has not survived either.

The 'ghar aaja' address is one of the most persistent lines in Hindi popular song and has been rewritten in every decade since, which means this particular 1945 instance of it is effectively invisible: search for the phrase and fifty later songs answer first. What the entry preserves is the fact of it — that Nasib carried a folk-register separation song alongside its ghazals and its street numbers, and that whoever sang it has been lost from the record while the composer and the writer have not.