इस नश्वर संसार में

The one track on Ghulami sung by a single male voice, and the one where Bharat Vyas is entirely alone: he wrote it and performs it himself, three minutes twenty-eight seconds, with S. K. Pal's setting behind him. The title places the song in the vairagya tradition — 'nashwar' means perishable, that which must pass — a strand of Hindi devotional verse that reaches back through the bhakti poets and that Vyas drew on throughout his career.

Pal keeps this slow and unadorned, which is what the form asks for: a vairagya song is argued rather than felt, and the setting has to leave the words room to be followed. Vyas was a lyricist who sang occasionally rather than a trained playback singer, and a composer writing for that voice writes within a narrow, speech-adjacent range — no high sustained notes, no ornamental passages, the melody staying close to the natural cadence of the line. The result is the plainest recording on the album and, in its own way, the most legible.

'Nashwar' is a heavy word to open a film song with. It names the doctrine of impermanence directly, and in Hindi verse it summons a whole lineage — Kabir, the nirgun bhakti poets, the sant tradition of addressing the listener as someone who has forgotten what is temporary and what is not. Vyas is writing in that inherited voice rather than inventing one, which is precisely why it works in a film: the audience of 1945 already knew the register and did not need it explained. Placed on an album whose other songs are about the nation, the monsoon and desire, it supplies the counterweight.

Bharat Vyas appears three ways in Ghulami: as a supporting actor, as lyricist of five of the nine songs, and as a singing voice on two of them. This is the one where all three converge on a single performance — his words, his voice, and presumably his own on-screen presence, since in 1945 an actor who could sing generally sang his own numbers. Ghulami came early in his career; the songs that made his name — for Do Aankhen Barah Haath, Navrang and Rani Rupmati — were still a decade or more ahead. The film's plot is undocumented, so the dramatic occasion for this meditation is unknown.

This is among the most obscure recordings in Bharat Vyas's discography and it survives for one reason: HMV kept the Ghulami masters and Saregama reissued them. Its value is biographical. Vyas went on to a four-decade career in which he was almost never heard as a singer, so a full solo in his own voice from 1945 is a genuinely scarce document — and the fact that he chose, or was given, the album's one piece of renunciatory philosophy says something about where his instincts already lay at the start.