रात अँधेरी और चमके सितारे

'Raat Andheri Aur Chamke Sitare' — the night is dark and the stars are shining — is one of the nine songs Roopbani wrote and Damodar Sharma composed for Nanubhai Vakil's Alladin (1945). Its title is pure scene-setting, the kind of nocturne that costume fantasies used to open a desert journey, a rooftop wait or a moment of solitude before a turn in the plot. Neither its singer nor its picturisation is documented in any accessible source.

No recording circulates, so the music itself cannot be described. The convention it would have worked inside is documented, however: night songs in 1940s Hindi cinema were typically slow, sparsely accompanied and given a long open vowel on the first line so that the singer's voice could carry over an image of empty sky — a shape that survived intact into the 1950s and 1960s and is one of the most stable forms in the whole repertoire.

The pairing of a dark night with shining stars is one of the reliable engines of Urdu-Hindi lyric: the darkness supplies the loneliness, the stars supply either hope or indifference, and the poet's work is deciding which. In the ghazal tradition the stars are usually witnesses — they watch and do not intervene — and a night song titled this way is nearly always addressed to an absence. Roopbani's title alone cannot fix the tone, but its placement in a score that also contains 'Kaun Hamara Hai Nigahban' suggests the film gave its characters more than one occasion to look up at an unhelpful sky.

Alladin was made at Mohan Pictures in Bombay under a director who had by then spent nearly two decades inside the Arabian Nights genre. Nanubhai Vakil had been making Baghdad and Arabian Nights subjects since the silent period — Baghdad Nu Bulbul (1931), Baghdad Ka Badmash (1932), Bulbule Baghdad (1932) — and, as Wikipedia puts it, 'later remade several of the silent films based on Parsi theatre plays'. The fantasy pictures were the core of his output, and he returned to the same material as late as Baghdad Ka Chor (1946) and Hatimtai Ki Beti (1955).

No trace of the song's life after release has been found — no disc, no radio listing, no later citation. Like the rest of the Alladin score it is preserved only as a line in the film-song catalogues, which is why an entry of this kind can record the fact of the song without being able to say anything about the sound of it.