घिर आए रे पतंग

One of the two Neelkanth Tiwari lyrics among the four songs of Kishore Sahu's Veer Kunal (1945). Wikipedia, Hindi Geet Mala and MySwar all list it; none of them records a singer, and neither does the January 1946 Filmindia credit block or Ramnik Productions' own advertisement, so this entry carries no singer credit. No recording is known to circulate. The title itself is the only surviving text, and it is ambiguous in a way worth stating plainly: patang can mean a kite, and in Urdu-Hindi verse it can equally mean the moth that circles a flame, while ghir aaye is the verb used for clouds gathering and closing in.

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 is recorded for this number in any source consulted, and none is guessed at here.

Neelkanth Tiwari wrote two of the film's four songs, and this is the one whose title leans on natural imagery rather than on the palace. Ghir aana is the verb Hindi keeps for weather closing in — clouds gathering over a horizon — and attaching it to patang produces a picture that can be read two ways: kites crowding a monsoon-edge sky, or moths gathering around a light. Both readings sit inside standard north Indian poetic stock, and both would work in a film whose central image is the destruction of a pair of eyes; the moth reading in particular carries the old parwana-and-flame figure of a desire that consumes the one who feels it, which is precisely Tishyarakshita's situation in the story. No text beyond the title is available, and none is reproduced here — what is offered above is a reading of four words, not a paraphrase of a lyric.

Veer Kunal (1945) came out of Ramnik Productions and was, in an unusually literal sense, one man's film: Kishore Sahu produced, directed, wrote the story and screenplay, designed costumes and art, and played Kunal. The story is the folk legend of the emperor Ashok's favourite son, blinded on the orders of a stepmother whose advances he has refused, and vindicated at last in a full durbar. Sahu's formal idea was to introduce Kunal to the audience only through his eyes, keeping the rest of him dark, so that the blinding would register as the loss of the thing the viewer had known first — a device Baburao Patel judged more skilfully handled here than in a contemporaneous V. Shantaram picture on a similar motif. The film opened at the Novelty Talkies, Bombay, on 1 December 1945.

Nothing of this song survives except its place in the list. Its title travelled from the Hindi Film Geet Kosh into Hindi Geet Mala, MySwar and Wikipedia, and is recorded here for the same reason — a film's soundtrack is only fully documented when the numbers that left no record behind are counted with the rest. Hindi Geet Mala's own page for the song states plainly that no lyrics are available and no authorised video exists, which is as accurate a summary of its afterlife as can be written.