मेरे नैनों के तारे

The second of Neelkanth Tiwari's two lyrics among the four songs of Kishore Sahu's Veer Kunal (1945), set by Khan Mastana. Wikipedia's song list, Hindi Geet Mala and MySwar all carry it and all three agree on the lyricist and the composer; Hindi Geet Mala spells the title 'Mere Naino Ke Taare' against the 'Mere Nainon Ke Taare' of the other two, a routine transliteration variance rather than a different song. No source names a singer, and Hindi Geet Mala's own page states that neither the lyrics nor any authorised video is available. The title alone survives, and it is the one title of the four that speaks directly to the film's governing image.

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. Beyond that the score is undocumented: no raag, taal, orchestration or duration is recorded for it in any source consulted, and none is guessed at here.

Naina is the poetic Hindi word for the eyes, and taare are stars; the title places one inside the other, so that whatever the lyric said, it said it by calling someone's eyes the stars of the speaker's own. That figure is entirely conventional in north Indian film verse of the period, but in this particular film it is not decorative. Sahu's whole formal conceit was to withhold Kunal's face from the audience and introduce him through his eyes alone, so that the blinding in the last act would land as the destruction of the first thing the viewer had ever known about him; Tishyarakshita's obsession is likewise written as an obsession with those eyes. A song titled on eyes and stars sits directly on that spine. What it actually said is unrecoverable — no lyric text survives in any catalogue and none is reproduced here. The reading offered above is a reading of five words and is not put forward as the song's content.

Veer Kunal, also advertised as Son of Ashoka, was made at Ramnik Productions by Kishore Sahu, who produced, directed, wrote the story and screenplay, designed the costumes and art, and played Kunal himself. It retells the folk legend of the Mauryan emperor Ashok's favourite son: his widowed father marries the young Tishyarakshita, she becomes fixated on the prince, and when he refuses her she engineers a false murder charge, has him imprisoned and blinded. His other stepmother Kuruvaki helps him escape, the people of Pataliputra march with the blinded prince to the palace, and Ashok — ill and long deceived — convenes a durbar and passes judgment against his own queen. Shobhana Samarth, typed for a decade in goddess and virtuous-wife roles, played Tishyarakshita, and it was widely judged the best work of her career. The film premiered at the Novelty Talkies, Bombay, on 1 December 1945.

This song's afterlife consists of its line in a catalogue. Hindi Geet Mala carries a page for it that records two absences — no lyrics available, no authorised video on any channel — and MySwar and Wikipedia list the title and the writing credits and nothing further. That is the whole surviving trace, and it is entered here for the reason any complete soundtrack listing exists: a film's music is only honestly documented when the numbers that vanished are counted alongside the ones that did not. The irony is particular in this case, because Veer Kunal was the film that argued a Hindi picture could work with almost no songs at all, and its four songs are now the least recoverable thing about it.