उनसे जो साहब सलामत हो गई

The first of Shanti Kumar Desai's three songs for Ek Din Ka Sultan (1945) and the last of Amirbai Karnataki's three in the film. 'Saahab-salaamat' is the formal exchange of greetings between two people — the most deniable form of contact there is — and the title turns on what happened after one took place. Wali Saheb wrote it. Of the film's nine songs it is the one that has attracted the most listener ratings on hindigeetmala, which is a thin but real signal that it was the best remembered.

Shanti Kumar Desai (1908–1986) was a Gujarati from Amreli in Saurashtra who came to film composition sideways, from a broadcasting job at His Master's Voice, and who studied under Aman Ali Khan. He was known in the industry as a harmonium player, in a period when, as his own account of it went, film music used little beyond harmonium and tabla. By 1945 he had close to forty scores behind him, starting with Nav Bharat (1934), and he had worked repeatedly with Zohrabai Ambalewali, Rajkumari, Amirbai Karnataki and Sardar Akhtar — so casting Amirbai here was a familiar hand reaching for a familiar voice. The recording has not been traced.

'Saahab-salaamat' is one of Urdu's most useful social fictions. It is the greeting exchanged in passing, formal enough to mean nothing, and it exists precisely so that two people can acknowledge each other while retaining the right to say nothing happened. Wali Saheb's title takes that deniable transaction and dates everything from it — ever since we exchanged greetings with them, since which point, the construction implies, the speaker's life has not been her own. It is the ghazal's habitual method: locate the catastrophe in the smallest permissible gesture, and let the audience supply the size of what followed. Placing it in a woman's voice sharpens it further, since the courtesies available to her are fewer and each one costs more.

Sohrab Modi's Ek Din Ka Sultan was shot at Minerva Movietone with Y. D. Sarpotdar on camera and released in 1945 at 147 minutes. Its nine songs were divided into three equal blocks among three composers, and Shanti Kumar Desai's block closes the film's song list. Amirbai Karnataki, who by 1945 was among the two or three most heavily booked female voices in Bombay, sings three of the nine — more than any other named singer in the film.

Shanti Kumar Desai went on composing until 1964 and died in 1986; his work is now almost entirely out of circulation, which is the ordinary fate of a competent mid-tier 1940s composer who never had a Rattan or a Kismet. This song is the film's best-remembered title by the only quantitative trace available — listener ratings on hindigeetmala — and even that amounts to a handful of votes. No recording has been located and no reissue is known.