नज़र की चोट जब दिल में लगी

The Hindi Film Geet Kosh credits this song to Rajkumari, one of the leading playback voices of the 1940s. The trade catalogues that carry the film — hindigeetmala, hindilyrics4u and myswar — all print the composer and the lyricist but leave the singer column blank, so the Geet Kosh is the only source that names her. The title is the most classically Urdu of the film's ten: the wound of a glance, felt once it reaches the heart.

Nothing survives of the recording itself in public access, so the musical setting cannot be described from evidence. What can be said is the context: C. Ramchandra was writing in 1945 for a historical made by an independent producer, before the brass, clarinet and Latin-rhythm experiments that began with Shehnai (1947) and peaked in Albela (1951). A slow ghazal-adjacent line in this year and this idiom would have been built on sarangi or violin with harmonium, and left the diction exposed.

The conceit is one of the oldest in Urdu poetry: the beloved's glance is a blade, an arrow, a wound. What the title adds is the delay built into 'jab' — when the wound of the glance struck the heart — which converts a static image into a moment with a before and an after. That is a lyricist's decision rather than a poet's flourish: it gives a film singer something to enact. Madhur's work across this soundtrack moves between this Urdu register and the plainer Braj-folk one of the Suraiya songs, which is the ordinary bilingual range a Hindi film lyricist of 1945 was expected to command.

Samrat Chandragupta (1945) was produced and directed by Jayant Desai for Jayant Desai Productions, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after fourteen years at Ranjit Studios. It is a large-scale historical about Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan empire, built around the legend of his break with Alexander's Macedonians and his marriage to the daughter of the Greek general Seleucus Nicator. Ishwarlal, Renuka Devi, Suraiya, Nayampalli, Sulochana Chatterjee and Mubarak headed the cast; the screenplay was by Mohanlal G. Dave, Shaheed Latif and Sagar Hussain, and Dronacharya photographed it. C. Ramchandra — signing himself Chitalkar Ramchandra at this stage of his career — composed all ten documented songs to lyrics by Buddhi Chandra Agrawal 'Madhur', two years before Shehnai (1947) made him a household name.

The song is a small illustration of how uneven the surviving record for 1945 is. The online trade catalogues leave its singer blank; the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, compiled from record labels and studio publicity, supplies the name. Where the two kinds of source disagree or one is silent, the Geet Kosh is generally the better witness for this period, and it is what allows nine of this film's ten titles to be attributed at all.