नुक्ताचीं है ग़मे-दिल

In New Theatres' Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933), Pankaj Mullick set Ghalib's 'Nuktacheen hai gham-e-dil' for the young K.L. Saigal, and the result became early sound cinema's first immortal ghazal record — Agha Hashar Kashmiri's Rome-set drama suddenly carrying Delhi's greatest poet to every street with a gramophone. Saigal's slow, conversational reading made Ghalib singable for a mass public, and made Saigal the voice of Urdu poetry on film.

Mullick's spare setting — voice forward, accompaniment hushed — lets the sher breathe; Saigal lands the radif 'na bane' differently each time, like a thought re-arriving.

Ghalib's wit at its tenderest: complaint, helplessness and a lover's small curse folded into two couplets.

Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933) was produced by New Theatres, Calcutta, and directed by P.C. Barua — who would go on to direct the celebrated Devdas (1935) with Saigal. The film was based on Agha Hashar Kashmiri's Urdu play of the same name, a property that had been widely performed on the Parsi theatre circuit and was well known to north Indian urban audiences before its cinematic adaptation. The story, set in an ancient milieu, involves a Jewish woman and a Muslim man and explores forbidden love against communal persecution. Pankaj Mullick — simultaneously the film's music director, one of its actors, and a singer — made the decisive creative choice to set Ghalib's ghazal 'Nuktacheen hai gham-e-dil' for Saigal's principal romantic moment. No living lyricist of the era could have supplied a text with Ghalib's depth and authority; the posthumous collaboration between the 19th-century poet and the 20th-century singer gave the sequence a weight that a newly commissioned lyric could not. The Ghalib ghazals from this film were among its most talked-about elements, and the record was a significant seller.

The fountainhead of the filmi ghazal; from Begum Akhtar's radio generation to Jagjit Singh, every singer of Ghalib answers this record first.