मेरे लिए जहाँ में चैन है न क़रार है

One of the most cherished recordings from Noor Jehan's leading-role debut in Pancholi's Khandaan (1942), this Ghulam Haider solo lets her young voice carry an entire song of restless longing. The title line — 'for me there is neither peace nor repose in the world' — set the tone for the wistful romanticism that would define her early stardom.

Ghulam Haider sets the song at a slow, brooding tempo, keeping the arrangement restrained so that Noor Jehan's melismatic turns sit at the centre of attention. Where his Khazanchi score had thrust dholak and chimta to the front, here the Punjabi composer leans into a more tender, melody-first register suited to a young romantic lead.

The opening line — 'for me there is neither peace nor repose in the world' — belongs to a long lineage of Urdu-Hindi lyric complaint: the lover whose restlessness is total, who finds no comfort anywhere in a world that contains the beloved's absence. 'Chain' and 'qarar' are near-synonyms that together cover the full range of peace (external quiet, internal stillness), their pairing creating an emphasis through redundancy that is a characteristic Urdu rhetorical device. This kind of lyric maps the interior geography of longing as a space from which all peace has been evacuated. Ghulam Haider, who drew heavily on the Punjabi folk-song tradition in which emotional directness and melodic simplicity carry the lyric, set the text as a slow solo that lets Noor Jehan's voice inhabit the complaint fully — no instrumental distraction, no rhythmic urgency, just the young voice and its beautiful, articulated ache.

Khandaan (1942, Pancholi Art Pictures, Lahore) was directed by Shaukat Hussain Rizvi in his directorial debut. The film was written by Imtiaz Ali Taj as a Muslim social drama. Noor Jehan, born in 1925 and approximately sixteen at the time of filming, played her first major adult leading role here opposite actor Pran. Ghulam Haider had already established Noor Jehan's singing career — she had appeared in his Gul-E-Bakavali (1939) as a child — and this film cemented the composer-singer relationship that would define their shared work. The lyric credits for Khandaan were divided among three poets: M.D. Taseer, Nazim Panipati, and D.N. Madhok. The lyricist responsible for this solo has not been individually documented. The song is significant in Noor Jehan's discography as one of the recordings in which her singular melismatic style — a voice that seems to twist and search within a single syllable — is already fully audible, years before her later Pakistan-era peak.

This recording is cited in accounts of Noor Jehan's early career as one of the numbers that demonstrated the full expressive range of her voice before she had turned seventeen. It belongs to the Khandaan soundtrack that, taken together, established both her and Ghulam Haider as major figures in the Lahore film industry. While the individual song has no independently documented later covers or revivals, it is preserved in catalogues of pre-Partition Lahore film music and in comprehensive collections of Noor Jehan's HMV recordings.