ये आँसुओं का तार नहीं

'Ye Aansuon Ka Taar Nahin' is the ninth song of Begum (1945) and the only one in the film for which no singer credit survives. Both hindigeetmala and MySwar list the title with Gopal Singh Nepali as lyricist and Hari Prasanna Das as composer, and leave the singer field empty. It is recorded here with that gap intact rather than filled by inference.

Nothing can be said about the music: the recording is not in circulation and the one credit that would have anchored a description — who sang it — is missing. Six of the film's other eight songs went to Naseem Banu and one to Ashok Kumar, so it would be easy to guess; guessing is exactly what the record does not support, and the singer is left unnamed.

The title is a denial, and what it denies depends on how 'taar' is read. The word carries several senses at once in this period's Hindi-Urdu: a string or thread, the string of an instrument, and — very live in the 1940s — a telegram, the form in which bad news actually arrived. 'This is not a thread of tears' can therefore be a refusal of grief, a refusal of the instrument's lament, or a refusal to read what has come. Without the full lyric, which is not reproduced here, the ambiguity cannot be resolved, and it is worth leaving open.

Begum was directed by Sushil Majumdar for Taj Mahal Pictures, with a screenplay credited by MySwar to Saadat Hasan Manto and with Ashok Kumar and Naseem Banu in the leads. Missing singer credits are ordinary in pre-Independence song lists: entries were compiled from 78-rpm labels and trade catalogues, and where a label was damaged, unlabelled or never located, the field simply stayed blank and has stayed blank ever since.

There is no reception history to report. The song is preserved as the last line of Begum's documented song list, and its main value is as a reminder of how partial the record for 1945 actually is — a complete soundtrack can be catalogued while one of its nine voices is lost entirely.