मन फूले नहीं समाए

An exultant number from R.C. Boral's score for Wasiyatnama, sung by Asit Baran, the tabla-player-turned-actor who sang his own songs on screen. It is one of two songs from the film that Songs of Yore included in its list of the memorable songs of 1945, and the fourth and most recent Wasiyatnama song to be posted on Atul's Song A Day, in 2025.

A bright, forward-moving number in the light-melodic manner Boral had settled into by his last New Theatres years, pitched for an actor-singer's unforced delivery rather than for a trained playback voice. Listeners who have heard the surviving record note that a female voice answers Asit Baran on it, though the catalogues credit him alone.

The title turns on phoolna — to bloom, to swell — used of the mind rather than a flower: a joy so large the heart cannot contain it. It is an ordinary Hindi idiom for happiness rather than an ornate Urdu figure, which places the song at the plain-spoken end of Zakir Hussain's writing for this film, away from the Persianate register of the ghazals he supplied for the same score.

Wasiyatnama was made at New Theatres, Calcutta, directed by Soumyen Mukherjee, and is the studio's Hindi telling of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's 1878 Bengali novel Krishnakanter Uil — a household destroyed by a tampered will and a widow's forbidden attachment. R.C. Boral composed the six songs and Munshi Zakir Hussain wrote all of them, the same lyricist-composer pairing New Theatres used that year on Bimal Roy's Hamrahi. No print of the film is known to be in circulation; the songs survive on record.

Along with 'Kahe Mann Bechain Sajni', this is one of the two Wasiyatnama songs that Songs of Yore's survey of 1945 carried in its list of memorable songs of the year, and a reader of the same survey placed it second among the year's best duets. That is effectively the whole afterlife of a film otherwise described as forgotten.