मन जीवन से उकताना

A reflective, melancholic song from Jawani Ka Rang (1941), directed by Saqi for Radio Sound Pictures. The title speaks of the heart wearying of life — a contemplative, possibly despairing mood befitting the film's social-moral framing. No documentation of the singer, lyricist or composer survives in accessible records.

The word 'uktana' (to grow weary of, to be sated with, to feel revulsion toward) is more precise than 'dukh' (sorrow) or 'akela' (loneliness): it names the state in which the very source of life — jeevan (life itself) — has become the object of weariness. 'Mann Jeevan Se Uktana' (The mind growing weary of life) is not a description of temporary sadness or momentary despair but of a deeper condition in which existence itself has lost its appeal. This is the udaasi (despondency) of the Sufi mystic who finds the world without meaning, the philosophical register that Hindi and Urdu verse explored through the concept of zindagi se bezaar (disgusted with life) — a state Mirza Ghalib famously articulated. In the context of the 1941 social film, such a sentiment would have been attached to a character whose circumstances — poverty, betrayal, abandonment — have exhausted not just their resources but their will to continue. The song transforms private psychological state into a lyric statement that the audience could take for themselves.

The second surviving song from Jawani Ka Rang (1941), directed by Saqi for Radio Sound Pictures, 'Mann Jeevan Se Uktana' shares with 'Khuli Hai Kunj-e-Kafas Me Meri Zaban Saiyad' the film's overall register of existential gravity. The two surviving titles paint a consistent picture: a film unafraid to stage the mind's deepest forms of weariness and defiance as musical sequences. Shakuntala Paranjpye, the lead, was at the centre of a film that seems to have been more intellectually ambitious than the average 1941 social drama. Radio Sound Pictures, the Calcutta-based producer, operated in the tradition of the Urdu literary film that Calcutta and New Theatres had developed since the late 1920s — films in which song was not decoration but argument. The lyricist and music director for this specific song are not documented, which is not unusual for Radio Sound Pictures productions where production records survive only in fragments. What the song's title alone preserves is a lyrical stance of unusual honesty: the mind wearying of life is not dressed up or consoled — it is simply named.