ऐ मेरे स्वप्न के वासी

Kalyani Das sings the film's only female solo outside Radharani's three numbers. It is a summoning song: the singer calls the figure who lives in her dreams to come to her, invites him into a spring festival, asks that his music take up residence inside her, and - after a turn towards grief and a wait that has tired her eyes - asks simply to be allowed to see him, the gardens outside already busy with bees at work on the buds. The vocabulary is Hindi rather than Urdu and noticeably more literary than the film's other lyrics.

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. This is the song in which his classical training is most audible in the writing rather than merely in the credits: the melodic line is more shapely than the film's other tunes and is built to be sustained rather than delivered. Arunkumar Deshmukh, who has spent decades documenting the music of this period and was frank that the rest of the score left him unmoved, singled this number out as much better in tune, in scoring and in performance - a rare piece of contemporary-standard criticism of a film nobody has heard.

Mazhari, a poet of the Urdu tradition, writes here in something close to shuddh Hindi, and the shift changes the emotional temperature. The Urdu songs of this film address longing as an absence to be argued with; this one addresses it as a guest to be invited. Its images are seasonal and gentle - spring, a festival to be kept, bees in a garden - and its single dark turn, the ocean of sorrow and eyes that have grown tired of waiting, is placed where a classical bandish would place its emotional pivot rather than where a film song would place a climax.

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. Kalyani Das was a Calcutta playback singer whose Hindi film career ran from P.C. Barua's Jawaab (1942) to Iran Ki Ek Raat (1949) - thirty-seven songs in eleven films, eight of them for the composer Kamal Dasgupta. She is regularly confused with Kalyani Bai, an actor-singer of the same period who worked in Bombay; the two are distinguishable by period and city, Kalyani Bai's Calcutta work ending in 1937 and Kalyani Das's beginning in 1942.

The song was out of circulation for seventy-five years before it was posted online in November 2020, in the research note that remains the fullest account of this film anywhere. Its recovery matters less for the song than for what came with it - the release date, the four-week Bombay run, the Filmindia verdict and the biographies of two singers who would otherwise be only names in a list.