चाहे तू मिटा दे चाहे तू बचा दे

A K.L. Saigal solo from Tadbir (1945), composed by Lal Mohammad to Swami Ramanand Saraswati's lyric. The title hands over the decision entirely: destroy me if you wish, save me if you wish. Placed alongside the film's other Saigal numbers — one calling himself struck by fate, one claiming a bird's freedom, one describing a soul suffering birth after birth — it completes a set that works through every available posture towards providence, and this is the one where argument stops.

A slow devotional address, of the kind Saigal had been recording since the early 1930s and which more than any other category built his reputation with a mass audience. Lal Mohammad's job here was to stay out of the way of the words, and the constraint of the single record side did the rest. The instrumentation of the recording is nowhere documented and no description of it is offered here.

The grammar of the title is the whole point. 'Chahe... chahe...' — whether this or whether that — is the construction of indifference between outcomes, and by applying it to the pair mitana and bachana, erasure and rescue, the speaker withdraws from having a preference about his own existence. This is the vocabulary of sharanagati, taking refuge, in which the devotee's position is defined by having given up the right to an opinion. Coming from a film named for human contrivance, it is the point at which contrivance formally resigns. Some listings give the second verb as 'bana de' (make me) rather than 'bacha de' (save me), which would shift the line from rescue to creation; the more commonly recorded reading is followed here. No lyric text is reproduced.

The lyricist of all twelve Tadbir songs wrote under the name Swami Ramanand Saraswati, a renunciate's title, and this is the song in which that identity is most visible — the film's other numbers argue with fate, and this one stops arguing. Nothing about the scene it accompanied is documented; no synopsis of Tadbir has survived in the reference works.

Like the rest of the film's Saigal sides it survives inside his collected discography, where the devotional numbers have always had a longer life than the film-specific ones.