सख़ी की ख़ैर माई बाबा की ख़ैर

A male duet from Laila Majnu (1945) sung by S. D. Batish and Mohammed Rafi, composed by Pandit Gobind Ram to Tanveer Naqvi's words; the 78-rpm index lists the side as Rafi with others, which is consistent with the two-name credit. The title borrows the street cry of the wandering faqir, who blesses the generous giver and invokes the wellbeing of mother and father in exchange for alms — a familiar sound in any north Indian bazaar of the period and, in a film about a lover who ends up a wanderer, a form with an obvious use.

The faqir's call is a genuine folk form with its own musical logic: a short repeated phrase pitched to carry down a street, with the rhythm of walking under it rather than a fixed tabla cycle. Gobind Ram, a Lahore-trained composer with a working knowledge of Punjabi and north Indian folk material, was well placed to take that shape into a film song, and pairing two male voices lets the call be answered rather than merely repeated — one singer calls, the other returns the blessing, which is how the form actually behaves in the street. Batish's classical training gives the line its steadiness; Rafi at twenty supplies a voice that had not yet acquired the weight it would later carry.

The words of the mendicant's cry are a small piece of social poetry in themselves. 'Sakhi' is the generous one, the giver; 'maai-baap' — mother and father — is the honorific with which a supplicant addresses whoever holds power over his day, and the phrase asks blessings on both. Read inside the Laila-Majnu story the borrowing is pointed: the lover who has been stripped of name, home and standing is reduced to exactly this position, asking the world for what he cannot claim by right. Tanveer Naqvi worked in plain, spoken Urdu, which is what a form like this needs — the moment such a line becomes ornate it stops sounding like a voice from the street.

This is the second of the two Laila Majnu numbers on which Mohammed Rafi's name appears beside S. D. Batish's, the other being the qawwali 'Tera Jalwa Jisne Dekha' that carried Rafi's first screen appearance. In 1945 Rafi was a year into Bombay and taking whatever came: a duet in Gaon Ki Gori, a solo for Gobind Ram in Hamara Sansar, and these two ensemble pieces for the same composer. Nazir's Hind Pictures was not a prestige banner, and nobody involved would have thought the assignment historic. The pairing with Batish, a trained and more established singer, was the sensible way to use an untested voice.

The song has no independent reputation and is not revived or covered; it is remembered, where it is remembered, as the other Rafi track on a film famous for one. Its documentary use is narrow but real — it is a dated example of a folk street form being lifted into a Bombay film score, a practice that composers from the Punjab were doing routinely in these years and that would broaden considerably in the decade after Partition, when the migration of Punjabi musicians into Bombay accelerated.