उन्हें याद आए गुज़रा ज़माना

One of the two Rajkumari ghazals in Nasib (1945), and the song from the film most consistently named in accounts of Gobind Ram's career, which classify both of her solos here as romantic ghazals. It runs two and a half minutes — a short single-side 78 — and it is one of the three Nasib recordings that survive commercially, still catalogued by Saregama and reissued on streaming as part of the 1945 Naseeb album. The title's construction is the whole song: not 'I remember', but 'may the past come back to them', the entire emotional weight loaded onto a third person who is not present.

Rajkumari's instrument was a bright, slightly nasal, extremely agile voice that could place an ornament exactly on the beat, and the ghazal form was where that precision paid off. Gobind Ram sets her in the plain manner the form demanded in the mid-1940s — a slow, unhurried tempo, a light tabla thekaa, harmonium and a sarangi or violin line shadowing the vocal at a distance, and no chorus anywhere. The reference literature describes Gobind Ram's use of light music, ghazals and thumris as one of the clearest windows onto what 1940s film music actually sounded like, and this is that idiom with nothing added: the arrangement does not comment on the singer, it gets out of her way.

Ishwar Chandra Kapoor writes in the third person and in the subjunctive, and both choices matter. 'Guzra zamana' — the passed-over time — is a fixed phrase of Urdu nostalgia, but Kapoor attaches it not to the speaker's own memory but to a wish about someone else's: let the past come back to them, too. That grammatical move converts what could have been simple lament into something sharper, an accusation smuggled inside a blessing, since the beloved's failure to remember is the injury being described. It is also self-protective — the speaker never has to say she is hurt — and that indirection is the ghazal's oldest and most characteristic manoeuvre. Kapoor was the lyricist Gobind Ram worked with more than any other, 56 songs across eight films, and this is the register of that partnership: Urdu diction, restrained emotional temperature, nothing declaimed.

1945 was one of the busiest years of Rajkumari's career. The Bombay playback field before Lata Mangeshkar's arrival was small and heavily worked, and Rajkumari — who had begun in the 1930s and would still be recording decades later, memorably for Pakeezah in 1972 — was one of the handful of voices carrying it. She sang for Gobind Ram again the same year in Ratnavali, and would continue to work with him through Doosri Shadi and Dil Ki Duniya in the later 1940s. Nasib itself was a Silver Films picture, produced by the actress Pramila and her husband Kumar and directed by B. D. Vedi; no print of it is known to survive, and neither a release date nor a censor record for it has been published.

The film disappeared and the record did not. Eighty years on, 'Unhen Yaad Aaye Guzra Zamana' is one of the three Nasib sides still in the Saregama catalogue, which is the reason it appears at all in surveys of Gobind Ram's work while five of the film's eight songs do not. Among 1940s Rajkumari solos it belongs to the quieter tier — it never became a standard the way her Mahal and Pakeezah recordings did — but it is a clean, unpadded example of what the mid-1940s film ghazal was before the form was enlarged by the orchestras of the 1950s.