सजनवा भूल हमें ना जाना

'Sajanva Bhool Hamein Na Jaana' is the fourth song on the Parinde (1945) record listing and the film's parting duet: it is picturised on Vanmala and Surendra at the point where Ashok leaves for his posting on the Burma frontier. The female voice is billed in the catalogues as Srimati Ghosh and identified by Sadanand Kamath, writing after seeing the film, as Parul Ghosh. It was also the first Parinde song ever posted on Atul's Song A Day, in September 2016 — the film's debut in the standing online record of 1940s Hindi film music.

This is a slow farewell duet in the folk-inflected manner that Hindi film music used for departures through the 1940s — a simple, repeating melodic phrase that both voices can carry, pitched so that Surendra's actor-singer voice and the lighter female line meet without strain. Kamath, who has heard it, calls it a sweet song and notes that its emotional weather is close to 'Baalpan Ke Saathi Chhaila Bhool Jaiyo Na', a comparison that places it in the register of the parting song built on a plea rather than on grief. A song of this kind asks its composer for restraint rather than for colour, and by the one account available Gobind Ram supplies it.

The whole song rests on a single request repeated from both sides — don't forget me — and on the answering assurance not to lose heart. That is the oldest shape a parting song can take, and Rammurti Chaturvedi keeps it deliberately plain, using the folk vocative forms sajanva and sajaniya rather than a literary Urdu register. The choice matters in context: the man leaving is not a merchant going to a distant country in the old poetic convention but a pilot going to a war, and the lyric declines to say so. By keeping the words in the old idiom of separation, it lets a 1945 audience hear their own wartime departures inside a form they already knew, which is a more durable effect than any topical reference would have been.

The song sits at the hinge of the film. Ashok has resigned from one school after a quarrel with his principal, taken a second post where he met Shyama, and — with the war's recruitment drives running in the background — decided to enlist like the father he never knew, who died in service. He completes pilot training and is ordered to the Burma front, and this duet covers the parting. Everything the film does afterwards is a consequence of it: the rescue of Neela, the doctor's manoeuvre, Shyama's decision to become a nurse, and the three-way meeting in the base hospital where the deception comes apart.

Writing on Pandit Gobind Ram calls 1945 the most successful year of his career — he also scored Laila Majnu and Hamara Sansar that year — and this is the song that brought Parinde into modern circulation at all, when Sadanand Kamath posted it with a full reconstruction of the film's plot in September 2016. Almost everything now written online about Parinde descends from that post. The film itself has not recovered: what exists is a truncated, partly soundless print, and the songs are in better condition than the picture.