चलो मिलकर चलें

The fourth and last song of Kishore Sahu's Veer Kunal (1945), composed by Khan Mastana to the film's only lyric by Ambikesh Kuntal. Wikipedia's song list, Hindi Geet Mala and MySwar all record it with those two credits and no third; the singer column is blank on every one of them, and Hindi Geet Mala's page for the song adds that no lyrics have been transcribed and no authorised video exists on any channel. Nothing of the number survives but its title and its two credits.

Khan Mastana is credited with the score of Veer Kunal by every source consulted — Wikipedia, Hindi Geet Mala, MySwar and the Filmindia credit block of January 1946 all name him, and Wikipedia's 'List of Hindi films of 1945' gives the film's music to him as well. Beyond that credit remarkably little about the man is firmly documented: his Wikipedia article is a stub that records the alias Hafiz Khan Mastana and his death in 1972 and nothing else, and no source reachable for this entry establishes his birthplace, his training or his year of birth, so none is asserted here. What he delivered on this film is the one thing about the score that a contemporary source does describe. Baburao Patel wrote in Filmindia, January 1946, that Kishore Sahu had given only four songs in the whole picture and that three of those four were mood-and-theme songs 'without the primary intention of entertaining', music used as an extra medium to express the emotional background of the theme; Patel added that this was the first time since Indian talkies came to be made that a producer had given so little music and so much of it in harmony with the spirit of the situations. Which three of the four he meant he never said, and no such label is assigned to any individual song here. No raag, taal, tempo, orchestration or duration for this number is recorded anywhere consulted.

Ambikesh Kuntal is credited with this one lyric and no other in the film, and the title is a first-person plural imperative: an invitation, addressed by someone to more than one listener, to set out together. That grammatical fact is the only thing about the poetry that can be stated without guessing, and it is worth stating, because the other three titles of Veer Kunal are all singular and interior — a veena addressed, a sky described, a pair of eyes possessed — while this one is collective and outward-facing. The film contains an obvious situation for a song in that register, the sequence in which the townspeople of Pataliputra gather behind the blinded prince and walk with him to the palace gates, and Sahu had also woven an explicit contemporary argument for democracy through the legend. Whether the song belongs to that sequence is not documented, and it is not claimed here. No lyric text survives in any catalogue and none is reproduced.

Veer Kunal, also released as Son of Ashoka, was a Ramnik Productions picture and in an unusually literal sense one man's film: Kishore Sahu produced it, directed it, wrote the story and screenplay, designed costumes and art, and played Kunal. The legend it retells is that of the Mauryan emperor Ashok's favourite son — refused by him, his young stepmother Tishyarakshita has him falsely charged with murder, imprisoned and blinded; his other stepmother Kuruvaki helps him escape, the people of Pataliputra rally behind him, and Ashok finally convenes a durbar and gives judgment against his own queen. Sahu introduced Kunal to the audience through his eyes alone, holding the rest of him in darkness, so that the blinding would register as the loss of the first thing the viewer had known about him; Baburao Patel reported that women in the audience screamed at the scene. The film premiered at the Novelty Talkies, Bombay, on 1 December 1945, at a ceremony inaugurated by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Nothing of this song has come down except its entry in the catalogues. Hindi Geet Mala keeps a page for it that records two blanks — the lyrics have not been transcribed, and no authorised video exists on any channel — while MySwar and Wikipedia give the title with its composer and lyricist and stop there. It is listed here on the same principle that governs the rest of the film's soundtrack in this catalogue: the numbers that left no recording behind are part of the record precisely because their absence is what the record has to show. For a picture whose claim to attention was that it proved a Hindi film could be built on almost no music, the total disappearance of that music is the sharpest thing about its afterlife.