मोहब्बत के गुल-हा-ए-तर गूँथता हूँ

Catalogued in most listings under the shortened title 'Mohabbat Ke Gul', this is a ghazal in the strict sense - a compact sequence of couplets rather than a film song with a refrain. Its conceit is domestic and small: the lover is threading a garland of fresh flowers for the beloved, decides that ordinary buds are beneath her, and concludes that what he is really threading is himself. Saigal's admirers have long treated the recording as one of the clearest examples of what he did to simple verse - a plain sentiment given the weight of lived experience.

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. A ghazal setting is the least film-like thing a 1945 score could contain, and it is exactly what a Kirana vocalist would be most comfortable writing: the tune serves the couplet, the couplet is allowed to finish, and the accompaniment stays out of the way. The result belongs less to the Bombay film-song tradition than to the drawing-room and gramophone ghazal that Saigal himself had helped make into a national form a decade earlier with his non-film Ghalib recordings.

The Persian construction of the title - gul-haa-e-tar, fresh flowers, a plural formed the Persian way - is the giveaway that this text was written by a poet who worked in the classical tradition rather than by a songwriter. Mazhari takes a single physical action, the threading of a garland, and lets it carry three turns of thought: the garland as tribute, the garland as inadequate, the garland as substitute for the body of the person making it. The last turn is the old Urdu equivalence of dil and jigar, heart and liver, as the seat of feeling and endurance - offering them is offering everything. Nothing in the poem is decorative; each couplet moves the argument on.

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. The essay that accompanied this song's recovery on Atul's Song A Day in June 2011 made the case that Saigal's method was total identification with the text - that he emptied himself into each take and was, by contemporary accounts, physically and mentally spent afterwards. Whether or not that is literally true, it is the received image of the singer, and this ghazal is one of the recordings people reach for to support it.

Along with Kidhar Hai Tu, this is the Kurukshetra number that stayed in the Saigal collector repertoire, and MySwar is one of the few catalogues that still indexes it by genre - as a ghazal - rather than simply as a film song. It has never been commercially reissued. Its survival is entirely a function of Saigal's posthumous standing: had any other singer recorded it for this film, it would almost certainly be lost.