ऐ वतन मेरे वतन

The longest track on Ghulami's nine-song album at three minutes and forty seconds, and the one that gives the film its political temperature. It is a duet for Masood Parvez and Renuka Devi, composed by S. K. Pal to a lyric by Josh Malihabadi — the Urdu poet known across north India as Shair-e-Inquilab, the poet of revolution, who was on the payroll of W. Z. Ahmed's Shalimar Pictures at Poona through exactly these years. A song addressed to 'my country' inside a 1945 feature named Ghulami is the clearest surviving trace of what that studio's progressive hiring policy actually produced on record.

S. K. Pal writes it as a two-voice address rather than a march: the male and female lines answer each other across the verse instead of stacking into a chorus, which is the shape the period gave to a watan song meant for a dramatic scene rather than a parade. At 3:40 it fills a full side of a 78-rpm disc, the longest single statement Pal allows himself on this album, and the extra length is what lets Josh's long Urdu lines land without being compressed.

Josh Malihabadi's watan poetry is not the decorative patriotism of the period's typical film song. His register is direct address — the poet speaking to the country as one speaks to a person one is bound to and angry for at once — and his vocabulary comes out of the same Urdu tradition that produced his reputation as Shair-e-Inquilab. Placing that voice inside a film called Ghulami sets up an obvious double reading, in which the beloved country and the enslaved country are the same addressee. The recording preserves that voice at a moment when Josh's non-film nazms on the same theme could not be printed freely.

Ghulami was directed by Mohan Wadhwani and released in 1945 under the Shalimar Pictures banner, with Renuka Devi — the screen name of Begum Khurshid Mirza — and Masood Parvez in the leads. Shalimar was W. Z. Ahmed's Poona studio and the one Bombay-era production house that kept Progressive Writers' Association members on staff: Josh Malihabadi joined it as a lyricist in 1941, and it was Josh who brought Akhtar-ul-Iman to Poona in 1944, where he joined the studio's story department. Ghulami's credits are where that circle is most visible on a single soundtrack, and this song is where it is most audible. No detailed plot record of the film survives, so the scene this duet accompanied is not documented.

The film has effectively vanished — no restored print circulates and no plot summary survives in the standard reference works — but the soundtrack was preserved in the HMV/Saregama catalogue and has been reissued digitally, which is why this recording can still be heard. Its value now is documentary: it is one of the few available film recordings of a Josh Malihabadi lyric from his Shalimar years, and it fixes a date and a studio to a poet whose film work is usually mentioned only in a list. Josh migrated to Pakistan in 1956; the Indian film songs he left behind are few enough that each surviving one matters.