ये दिल ये मेरे प्यार का घर तेरे लिए है

'Yeh Dil Yeh Mere Pyar Ka Ghar Tere Liye Hai' is a duet by Shamshad Begum and S. D. Batish, composed by Pandit Amarnath to words by Nazim Panipati — one of Amarnath's four numbers on the Shirin Farhad (1945) album. It is the only song on the record whose full credit is corroborated on both sides of the border: hindigeetmala and Pakistan's pre-Partition film records give the same two singers, which for a 1945 Lahore production is close to unusual.

S. D. Batish — Shiv Dayal Batish of Patiala, born 1914 — was a classically trained singer whose film work of the 1940s sits high and open in the voice rather than in the crooning manner then coming into fashion, and he had already sung for Pandit Amarnath in Daasi (1944), so the two came to this record with a working relationship behind them. Pairing him with Shamshad Begum gives Amarnath two voices of roughly matched weight, which is what a song of mutual offering needs; neither singer can be allowed to sound like the petitioner. Nothing further about the arrangement can be established from the surviving documentation, and nothing further is claimed.

The conceit is domestic rather than ecstatic. The heart is not a flame or a wound here but a ghar — a house, a place with a door that someone can be invited into — and the line is an act of handing over the keys. That is a quieter and more specific gesture than the film ghazal's usual offering of the self, and it carries an implication the grander images do not: a house has to be maintained, lived in, returned to. In a film built on the Shirin-Farhad legend, where the male lover's devotion is expressed by cutting through a mountain and is rewarded with nothing, an offer of ordinary domestic shelter reads as the alternative the story does not permit. Nazim Panipati's text has not survived in any accessible source, so this reading rests on the title alone and is offered as a reading, not as a summary of the song.

The album's division of labour placed this song with Pandit Amarnath, who was Pancholi's regular composer in these years and had scored Daasi (1944) and Kaise Kahoon (1945) for the same studio. Shamshad Begum was by 1945 the most valuable voice in Lahore's film economy — Ghulam Haider's Khazanchi (1941), also a Pancholi picture, had made her a national name — and Pancholi used her accordingly, on every side of this album. S. D. Batish, meanwhile, was working across Bombay and Lahore productions in the same period; his other 1945 duet with Shamshad Begum, 'Gori Gagar Ki Ganga Udhar Diye Ja', was for Amarnath too, in Kaise Kahoon.

Of the four songs Pandit Amarnath composed for this film, this is the one whose credit is firmest, and it is also the one that connects to the rest of his 1945 work: the same composer, the same male singer and the same female singer appear together on Kaise Kahoon that year. S. D. Batish outlived all of it by a long way — he composed for Hindi films through the 1950s, took the Sur Singar Samsad's Tansen Award in 1964, moved to California in 1970 and taught Indian classical music at Santa Cruz until his death in 2006. Amarnath died in 1947, and the studio the record was made for was gone within two years of that.