किधर है तू ऐ मेरी तमन्ना

This is the Kurukshetra song that has travelled furthest, and the one by which the film is still occasionally remembered. Saigal addresses not a woman but his tamanna - longing itself, personified - and asks where it has gone, wanting it back as a source of light in a darkened interior. The middle of the poem moves to a garden whose flowers are described as depressed rather than beautiful, having lost the habit of happiness, and asks the presiding figure of that garden to return. The closing section abandons plants for weather, asking that stalled air be set moving and cold ash be made to burn again. It is a nazm of revival rather than of complaint.

Pandit Ganpat Rao - Ganapatrao Gurav, a Kirana gharana vocalist from Ratnagiri district who was among the first batch of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's disciples and served for years as a court musician at Jamkhandi - scored only two films in his life, Kurukshetra and Bebus (1950), before returning to the concert platform. On the evidence of this song his instinct as a composer was to keep the frame bare and let the singer carry the argument - which is what a khayal musician would do, and the opposite of what the big Bombay film scores of 1945 were doing with massed strings. Saigal takes the line at his own pace and lets the refrain return like a call across a distance. MySwar classifies the film's two most Persianate Saigal numbers, this and Mohabbat Ke Gul-Haa-e-Tar, as ghazals.

Mazhari's central device is to make the beloved abstract. By addressing tamanna - desire, aspiration, the thing one wants - rather than a person, he lets the song be read two ways at once: as a lover's summons, and as a man calling his own will back to life. The garden imagery that follows (gulistan, gul, gulshan) is standard Urdu furniture, but it is put to an unusual use here: the flowers are not beautiful, they are depressed, and have forgotten how to laugh. The closing verse abandons the garden for weather - stopped wind, extinguished embers, restlessness scattered until it catches - which turns a love poem into something closer to an invocation of energy. In a film whose whole argument is that the country needs to stop being idle, that is not an accident.

Kurukshetra (1945) was made by Unity Productions of Calcutta and directed by Rameshwar Sharma, whose entire filmography runs to three titles for the same banner. It welds the Mahabharata to a modern social story: documented plot descriptions have it open on a contemporary strand about social workers campaigning against idleness before moving into the epic proper - the Draupadi swayamvar, the humiliation in the sabha, and the march to the war at Kurukshetra - cutting between the two registers and drawing lessons from the Bhagavad Gita as answers to national problems. K.L. Saigal played Karna. Among Saigal's admirers this is the number that carried the film's name forward; when Atul's Song A Day posted it in April 2011 it was introduced simply as a rare song from a rare movie, and the note that both lyricist and music director were new names to a blog that had already covered a hundred Saigal songs is a fair measure of how far outside the mainstream this production sat.

Hindi Geet Mala's user ratings are a crude instrument, but they are one of the few traces of afterlife this film has: Kidhar Hai Tu has drawn more votes than any other Saigal number from Kurukshetra. It is the song by which the title is indexed in Saigal discographies and the one that appears first in almost every listing of the film. Beyond that the picture is bleak - no commercial reissue, no restored print of the film, and the composer's own name absent from the standard histories of Hindi film music.