आज किरनों का कर के सिंगार चली

Listed by Wikipedia as a chorus number and by MySwar under 'various artists', this is one of the Kurukshetra songs for which no individual singer is named in any surviving credit. Pandit Ganpat Rao composed it and Jameel Mazhari wrote it, as he wrote every song in the film. No recording circulates. The title carries a single strong image - someone setting out having adorned herself with sunbeams - which places the song in the film's mythological register rather than in its modern social frame, but nothing beyond that can honestly be claimed.

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 chorus number in a 1945 mythological normally exists to carry a scene rather than a character, and it is the kind of writing most likely to be handed to the studio's group singers and least likely to be pressed as a saleable single - which is one reason it did not survive on disc. Nothing about this song's actual scoring can be described, because no copy of it is accessible.

Kirnon ka singaar - to make one's ornament out of rays of light - is the whole of what is left of Mazhari's lyric. It is a compressed and slightly unusual figure: not light falling on someone, but light worn. In a poet who spent his working life on marsiya and qasida rather than on film songs, that kind of economy is unsurprising; what it was in service of here cannot be recovered.

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. Song lists for the film run to thirteen documented titles, while the researcher who has written most fully about it puts the film's total at fourteen songs - meaning at least one number is not documented anywhere at all.

There is none to report. The song exists as a title in a list, and this entry records it so that the film's soundtrack is counted whole rather than reduced to the four Saigal numbers that happen to have survived.