या इलाही दे लुगाई

Composed by Khurshid Anwar to Zia Sarhadi's lyric, and by its title the comic song in Yateem's eight. The singer of this track is not recorded in either of the two surviving song catalogues for the film, and no name is guessed here.

No commercially reissued recording of this track has been located, so its melody and arrangement are not described here from listening. Khurshid Anwar, who composed five of Yateem's eight songs, came to films from All India Radio Delhi, where he had been Programme Producer (Music) from 1939, and from formal training under Khansahib Tawakkal Hussain begun in 1934; Naushad publicly rated him among the finest composers in the subcontinent. A comic number in the score is consistent with the film's casting, which included three well-known comic performers of the period — Yakub, Bhudo Advani and David Abraham — though no source records who this song was picturised on.

The comedy is entirely in the register clash. 'Ya Ilahi' is high devotional address, the opening of a supplication; 'lugai' is colloquial North Indian for wife, blunt where a formal prayer would say something else. Putting the two in one line makes the petitioner ridiculous without making him unsympathetic — a standard mechanism of the 1940s comic film song, which routinely borrowed the shape of a serious form and filled it with an ordinary want. Zia Sarhadi wrote the lyric. Unusually for a director, he was a practising film lyricist in his own right — credited with the words for Kokila (1937), Hum Tum Aur Woh (1938), Teen Sau Din Ke Baad (1938), Ladies Only (1939), Sajani (1940) and later Anokha Pyar (1948) — so on Yateem he was writing the songs of a picture he was himself directing. No lyrics are reproduced here.

Yateem (1945) was directed by Zia Sarhadi at Central Studios, Bombay, produced by C.L. Divan and photographed by Keki Mistry, with Yakub, Chandraprabha, Lalita Pawar, David Abraham, Bhudo Advani and the young Suraiya in the cast. No plot summary for the film survives in the accessible record; the title, Urdu for 'orphan', is the only clue to its subject. It is the last of Khurshid Anwar's five songs for the film.

The comic song was a fixed slot in the 1940s Hindi film programme, usually written for a specialist performer rather than the lead pair, and it is the part of the era's soundtracks least likely to have been reissued. Yateem's example survives only as a title and a set of credits — which is itself the most common fate of the form.