हम किस से करें शिकवा

One of Shamshad Begum's two solos in the Hamara Sansar score and the number HindiGeetMala files under its 'shikwa-shikayat' — complaint — category. Some catalogues index it under the longer opening line, in which the complaint is answered in the same breath by the observation that weeping is what fate has written; the shorter form is the one the album and the record label carry. Gobind Ram and Shamshad Begum worked together repeatedly through the 1940s — the Millennium Post profile of the composer names Hamara Sansar, Ratnawali, Doosri Shaadi and Ghar Ki Izzat among their films together — and the partnership is audible here: he writes slow, plainly, and lets that famous metallic, forward-placed voice do the work without dressing it up.

The setting is a slow, low-lying tune in the ghazal manner — long phrases, a lot of air between them, harmonium and light strings under a barely-there rhythm — which is unusual writing for Shamshad Begum, whose reputation rests on brisk, rhythmically insistent songs. Gobind Ram's talent, as the vintage-music literature keeps noting, was rhythm and orchestration, and part of what makes this record interesting is that he suppresses both. The voice is left exposed at the top of the mix, and the characteristic hard edge of her tone, which normally reads as brightness in a fast song, here reads as something closer to a refusal to soften.

Shikwa is the specific Urdu word for a formal complaint or remonstrance — the kind you lodge with someone who owes you an answer — and Ramesh Gupta opens by asking who that someone could possibly be. The construction is a trap that closes on itself: to ask whom one should complain to is already to have discovered that there is no addressee, no party responsible, nobody who can be held to account. What is left is muqaddar, fate, which cannot be argued with because it does not negotiate; and the lyric moves accordingly from grievance to resignation without ever passing through anger. The nautical figures the poem reaches for — the storm, the small boat, the shore that does not arrive — are the standard furniture of Urdu-Hindi complaint verse, and they let the singer describe a whole life as weather rather than as anyone's fault.

The film was a Prakash Pictures social — Shanti Kumar directing, Girish Pandit writing — released in a year when the studio was consciously stepping away from the mythologicals that had made it famous. It did not repeat that success, and the picture is now lost; the cast was led by Jeevan and Ranjana, with Sumati Gupte among the supporting players. Which character sings this number, and against what turn of the story, is not recorded in any source consulted. The soundtrack itself is unusually tidy for the period: eight documented titles, one composer, one lyricist, and four singers between them.

The record has survived better than the film. It sits on the Saregama reissue of the Hamara Sansar album, has been transferred from shellac and reposted by 78-rpm archivists, and was written up on Atul's Song A Day in 2020 as an example of the Gobind Ram–Shamshad Begum partnership at work. That partnership is the song's real historical interest: where Naushad and O. P. Nayyar would later use Shamshad Begum for propulsion and swagger, Gobind Ram was willing to give her slow, sombre material as well. Songs like this are the evidence that her range was wider than the reputation that outlived her.