किसी तरह से मुहब्बत में चैन पा ना सके

One of the four Noor Jehan solos in Badi Maa (1945), and the only one of them written by Anjum Pilibhiti rather than Zia Sarhadi; K. Datta composed. The title is a statement of exhausted effort: by no means whatever could peace be found in love. It is the most inward song on a soundtrack that otherwise spends its time on war, prayer and patriotism.

Badi Maa's score is divided by voice: Noor Jehan takes the four adult heartbreak numbers, the child singer Baby Alka three light ones, Lata Mangeshkar the devotional and patriotic register, Meenaxi one. K. Datta — born Datta Korgaonkar in Sawantwadi, raised on bhajan singing, and a Marathi film composer before he crossed into Hindi with Mera Haq (1939) — was never a fashionable name in Bombay; his value to a producer was that he could write credibly in all of those registers on one film. In 1945 the whole song had to fit one side of a shellac disc, recorded in a single pass with the orchestra in the room, so the interpretive burden fell on the singer. The specific arrangement of this recording is not documented in the sources consulted and is not described here.

The opening phrase 'kisi tarah se' — by any means at all — is what gives the title its weight. It presupposes a whole sequence of attempts already made and already failed, so the song begins after the effort rather than during it. That is a harder position to write from than ordinary lament: there is no one left to plead with and nothing left to try. Anjum Pilibhiti also wrote the film's patriotic title song, addressed outward to the nation, which makes this its exact inverse — the same lyricist at the two poles of what a 1945 soundtrack was expected to contain.

In Badi Maa, Noor Jehan plays Hema, whose brother Rajinder is spying for the Japanese and whose father's moneylending has ruined the family of the man she loves. Master Vinayak made the film for his own Prafulla Pictures banner, from a story by V. S. Khandekar and a screenplay by Zia Sarhadi, under pressure from the colonial Information Department, which in 1945 was pushing Bombay studios towards war-effort subjects. Filmindia gave it one star; the box office made it the year's third biggest Indian earner.

Together with 'Aa Intezar Hai Tera', this is the Badi Maa song that listeners tracing Noor Jehan's Indian period most often return to. Her Bombay career closes in 1947 with Partition, and after that the standard collections are dominated by the famous scores — Khandaan (1942), Zeenat (1945), Anmol Ghadi (1946) — so the working songs from mid-tier social dramas are the ones that fall out of the record. That this one has not is partly a function of the film itself surviving complete in the public domain, and partly of what else is on the same soundtrack: an early Lata Mangeshkar recording made when nobody had yet decided her voice was too thin.