वीणा ऐसा राग सुना दे

One of only four songs in Kishore Sahu's Veer Kunal (1945), written by Pandit Madhur. Every surviving song list of the film records it — Wikipedia, Hindi Geet Mala and MySwar alike — but none of them, and neither the Filmindia review of January 1946 nor Ramnik Productions' own trade advertisement, names the voice that sang it. No recording is known to circulate. What can honestly be said about the song therefore begins and ends with its title: a request addressed to the veena to sound a particular raag, the oldest way in Indian verse of asking music to do the work that speech cannot.

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. Nothing more can be said about how this particular song was scored, because no copy of it is known to survive in any accessible archive. Hindi Geet Mala credits Pandit Madhur as its composer as well as its lyricist; MySwar, Wikipedia and the Filmindia credit block all give the whole score to Khan Mastana, which is the attribution followed here.

The title is a direct address to an instrument, and that grammatical choice is the whole poetic gesture: the speaker does not describe a feeling, she asks the veena to produce the raag that will hold it. In Sanskrit and Hindi poetics the veena is not a neutral instrument — it belongs to Saraswati, and in a film set in the Mauryan court it carries the weight of learning, of the older order, of something civilised that the palace intrigue is in the process of destroying. Pandit Madhur, who wrote this one number while Neelkanth Tiwari wrote two and Ambikesh Kuntal one, gives the song the shape of a request rather than a lament — which is a more restrained instrument than direct complaint, and consistent with the picture's stated ambition to use songs as dramatic devices. Beyond the title no text is available, and none is reproduced here.

Veer Kunal (1945) was produced, directed, written, costume- and art-designed by Kishore Sahu, who also played the title role. It retells the folk legend of Kunal, favourite son of the emperor Ashok, whose young stepmother Tishyarakshita becomes obsessed with him, is rebuffed, and has him falsely accused, imprisoned and blinded; his other stepmother Kuruvaki helps him escape, the people of Pataliputra march with him to the palace, and Ashok convenes a durbar and condemns his own wife. Shobhana Samarth, typed for a decade as Seeta, Damayanti and Taramati, played the predatory queen and was judged to have given the finest performance of her career. The premiere at the Novelty Talkies in Bombay on 1 December 1945 was inaugurated by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — only the second film premiere he ever attended — and Sahu used the occasion to attack foreign competition in the Indian film trade.

The song has no afterlife on record. It survives as a line in the film's song list, carried from the Hindi Film Geet Kosh into the online catalogues, and it is entered here for the same reason those catalogues enter it: a soundtrack is only complete when the songs nobody can hear any more are counted too. What did survive from Veer Kunal is the argument its four songs made — that a Hindi film could work with almost no music, and that the little it had should belong to the scene rather than to the record shop.