मस्त नज़र वालियाँ

HindiGeetMala lists this song as 'Mast Nazar Waliya' and MySwar reproduces the same eight-song set for Hatimtai Ka Beta (1945); the singer, lyricist and music-director columns are blank in both, and Cinemaazi's film-level credit names Bulo C. Rani as composer. No recording, print or contemporary notice of the number is known. The title is a noun phrase rather than a statement — 'those with the intoxicated gaze' — and its feminine plural ending is the single formal feature this entry can point to with confidence.

The score is credited to Bulo C. Rani — born Bulo Chandiram Ramchandani in Hyderabad, Sind, in 1920, at Ranjit Movietone from 1939, and an assistant to Khemchand Prakash on Tansen and Sukh Dukh before he took films of his own. 1945 was the year he broke out: Moorti, which carried Mukesh's 'Badariya Baras Gai Us Paar', and Chand Chakori both belong to it. A fantasy picture for a small Bombay banner in the same twelve months is a useful reminder that a working 1940s composer's calendar did not separate the prestige assignment from the costume quickie. What this particular number sounded like, however, cannot be recovered — no disc, no print and no contemporary notice of it is known, so its instrumentation, its tempo and even the sex of the voice that carried it are all beyond statement.

Nazar — the gaze — is the working unit of Urdu love poetry, the organ through which the entire transaction of desire is conducted, and mast attaches to it the vocabulary of wine: a gaze that is itself drunk and that makes its object drunk in turn. The compound mast nazar is old and thoroughly conventional; what the title does with it is grammatical rather than imagistic. By making it a plural attribute of a group of women — waliyan — the phrase moves from the ghazal's single unattainable beloved to a company of them, which in film usage is the language of an ensemble: a court scene, a garden, a caravan, a chorus. That inference sits at the edge of what the evidence supports and is offered as an observation about the title's form, not as a description of the song, which nobody living has heard.

Hatimtai Ka Beta — catalogued in English as Son of Hatimtai — was a 1945 costume fantasy from Bharat Productions of Bombay, 122 minutes, certified U/A, directed by Nanubhai Vakil (Cinemaazi adds a second director, Dharam Kumar) with Sarojini, Navinchandra, Prakash, Ansari, Nariman and Azara Mumtaz in the cast. Its title attaches it to the dastan of Hatim Tai, the pre-Islamic chieftain of the Tayy tribe whose name became the Urdu byword for boundless generosity and whose seven quests were staple Parsi-theatre material long before Bombay filmed them in 1929, 1933, 1947, 1956 and 1990. 'Ka Beta' was not an adaptation but an invented continuation — the sequel habit that let a small banner reuse a proven property's sets, costumes and audience recognition without paying for a remake.

The song's afterlife is a blank column. Eight titles from this film survive in the HFGK-derived listings that HindiGeetMala and MySwar reproduce, and for all eight the singer and lyricist fields are empty. A production that carried eight numbers past the censor in 1945 has left behind not one identifiable voice. That is not a failure of this entry but its subject: the gramophone companies documented what they pressed, the B-circuit fantasy film was frequently not pressed, and so a measurable slice of 1945's musical output exists today only as a row of titles. Keeping the row on the record — accurately, with the empty fields left empty — is the one thing still worth doing for it, until a Geet Kosh page or a surviving disc says more.