ऐ दुखी मन

Documented in every surviving song list of Kurukshetra (1945) as a Radharani solo, with Pandit Ganpat Rao composing and Jameel Mazhari writing. No recording is known to circulate and no text beyond the opening phrase is available, so what can honestly be said about the song is limited to what the title carries: an address to one's own sorrowing mind, the oldest consolation form in Indian devotional verse. It is listed among the film's songs by Wikipedia, Hindi Geet Mala and MySwar alike.

Pandit Ganpat Rao - Ganapatrao Gurav, a Kirana gharana vocalist from Ratnagiri district who was among the first batch of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's disciples and served for years as a court musician at Jamkhandi - scored only two films in his life, Kurukshetra and Bebus (1950), before returning to the concert platform. Nothing further can be said about the scoring of this particular number, because no copy of it is known to survive in any accessible archive; Saregama's catalogue for the film holds only two masters, and this is not one of them.

The title phrase places the song in a long tradition in which the singer speaks to the mind as to a separate person - a device used by the bhakti poets to make grief examinable rather than merely felt. Jameel Mazhari, an Urdu poet by training, uses the plain Hindi mann here rather than dil, which is the same choice he makes in the film's other Hindi-register songs; beyond the title the text is lost.

Kurukshetra (1945) was made by Unity Productions of Calcutta and directed by Rameshwar Sharma, whose entire filmography runs to three titles for the same banner. It welds the Mahabharata to a modern social story: documented plot descriptions have it open on a contemporary strand about social workers campaigning against idleness before moving into the epic proper - the Draupadi swayamvar, the humiliation in the sabha, and the march to the war at Kurukshetra - cutting between the two registers and drawing lessons from the Bhagavad Gita as answers to national problems. K.L. Saigal played Karna. Radharani, the singer of three of the film's songs, was born in 1903 at Jiaganj in Murshidabad, into a Marwari family long settled in Bengal. She was trained first by the kirtan singer Harimakhan Das and then in thumri and ghazal by Ustad Dabeer Khan, was brought to Calcutta by the zamindar of Jiaganj after he heard her perform, and moved from silent films through New Theatres - Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933), Kashinath (1943) - to playback work in the 1940s. She worked in Hindi films only until 1947 and died in Calcutta on 22 August 1997, aged 94. A Bombay-based singer-actress of the same name is a separate person.

The song has no afterlife. It exists as a line in the film's song list, reproduced from the Hindi Film Geet Kosh into the online catalogues, and it is recorded here for the same reason those catalogues record it: a soundtrack is only complete if the songs nobody can hear are counted too.