नज़राना लीजिये

The gap in the Chalis Karod soundtrack. Hindi Geet Mala lists the song, credits Gobind Ram with the music and Pandit Indra with the words, and leaves the singer column blank — no other source consulted supplies a name. Rather than fill that space with a plausible guess drawn from the album's other four voices, this entry leaves the singer field empty, which is what the record actually says. The title, 'nazarana lijiye', is the language of formal offering: a nazarana is a tribute or presentation, the thing placed before someone of higher standing, and the imperative 'lijiye' is courteous rather than intimate.

No recording is in circulation, so nothing can be claimed about how this particular number was set. What is documented is Gobind Ram's manner in these years: light melodic writing with a ghazal and thumri inflection rather than a distinctly Punjabi folk one, a small orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi and tabla, and tunes pitched to sit comfortably in the middle of a classically trained voice instead of stretching it. With neither a recording nor a singer on record, this song offers less to work with than any other on the album, and no claim is made here about its setting.

'Nazarana' is a court word before it is a love word. It comes into Hindi-Urdu film lyric from the etiquette of presentation — the offering laid before a patron, a ruler, a shrine — and when a film song borrows it for a beloved, the borrowing itself is the compliment: the addressee is being treated as someone to whom tribute is owed rather than affection merely given. The polite imperative that follows keeps the distance formal. Whether the song sustains that courtly register or breaks it cannot be judged from the title alone, and the text is not reproduced here.

Chalis Karod — 'Forty Crores', the number that stood through the 1940s for the population of undivided India — was directed by Nanabhai Bhatt for Chandra Art Productions of Bombay, a year before Bhatt set up his own Deepak Pictures. Gobind Ram composed, Pandit Indra and I. C. Kapoor were credited with the songs, and the cast paired Nirmala Devi with her husband Arun Kumar Ahuja alongside Yakub, Agha and Gope. No plot summary of the film survives in any source consulted for this entry, so the nine song titles are effectively all that remains of what the picture was about. An unnamed singer is not unusual in the mid-1940s record: playback credits were inconsistently kept, and where a studio's own paperwork has not survived, the catalogue entry preserves the tune's authorship and loses the voice.

This entry exists mainly to hold a place. Its value is negative and documentary: it records that Chalis Karod had a ninth song called 'Nazarana Lijiye', that Gobind Ram set it and Pandit Indra wrote it, and that nobody wrote down who sang it. Nothing of the recording is in general circulation today: there is no known commercial reissue and no print of the film in public availability. Its survival is documentary — a line in the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue and the Cinemaazi credit sheet — which is the ordinary fate of most of the roughly two hundred Hindi films released each year in the mid-1940s.