सज़ा नसीब ने दे दी नज़र मिलाने की

One of Amirbai Karnataki's three songs in Ek Din Ka Sultan (1945), and the one hindigeetmala files, plainly, under sad songs. The title says that fate has handed down a sentence for the crime of meeting eyes — an entirely conventional ghazal move, and a very economical one. Wikipedia's song table credits the music to D. Gadkar; hindigeetmala credits Shanti Kumar. Wali Saheb wrote the words, as he did for every song in the film.

This is the film's slow number, and it goes to the singer who by 1945 was the most bookable female voice in Bombay for exactly that. Amirbai Karnataki had broken through two years earlier with Anil Biswas's score for Kismet (1943) — the biggest Indian film of the decade — and Film India reported that where other singers of the moment were paid Rs 500 a recording, Amirbai was paid Rs 1,000. A slow ghazal-manner film song of 1945 sits on harmonium and tabla with a sparse string line and leaves the ornament to the voice; whether this one does is beyond verification, since no copy of the recording has been traced.

In the Urdu-Hindi love lyric, nazar milana — the meeting of eyes — is never a neutral act. It is the founding transgression, the moment at which everything that follows becomes inevitable, and the entire architecture of the ghazal's grief rests on it. What Wali Saheb does here is shift the sentencing authority: it is not the beloved who punishes and not society, but naseeb — fate, one's written portion. That is a specific and rather forgiving move. It absolves the beloved of cruelty, lets the speaker keep the memory of the glance intact, and turns the complaint away from a person and toward a cosmology. It is also, for a film built on a story about a man whose fortune turned on one accidental encounter with an emperor in a river, a thematically apt line for the soundtrack to contain.

Ek Din Ka Sultan was Sohrab Modi's 1945 Minerva Movietone historical, from a story by Agha Jani Kashmiri — who had written Kismet (1943), the film that made Amirbai Karnataki a star. The two credits are two years apart and this is the reunion, though a far quieter one. The film's nine songs were divided in blocks of three among Dattaram V. Gadkar, Rafiq Ghaznavi and Shanti Kumar Desai; this song falls in Gadkar's block by Wikipedia's listing and in Desai's by hindigeetmala's, and the conflict is unresolved in the sources available.

Amirbai Karnataki reached her career peak in 1947 and then, as Lata Mangeshkar's arrival changed what a female film voice was expected to sound like, moved back into acting and eventually into Gujarati and Marwari cinema. This song is one of the many mid-1940s recordings of hers that no reissue programme has reached: it survives in listings rather than in sound. Amirbai died in 1965, four days after a paralytic attack, and was buried in her hometown in Karnataka, where a cinema named Amir Talkies is still run by her family.