आई है तू तो कैसे दिल अपना दिखाऊँ मैं

One of the four K.L. Saigal solos in Kurukshetra (1945), this is a song of arrival. The beloved has come, and the singer can find nothing adequate to give her. Jameel Mazhari builds the lyric as a sequence of offerings that are each proposed and then dismissed as too small - his own eyes, the ground she walks on, his blood standing in for tears he no longer has, and finally a garland that could only be made from flowers he has no way of reaching. The beloved is addressed in the language of worship rather than of romance, which suits a film that keeps stepping between a modern social story and the Mahabharata. The recording is genuinely rare: when Atul's Song A Day posted it in 2011 it had to upload the audio itself, no copy being available online.

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. That background shows in what the Kurukshetra songs ask of a singer: long, unhurried lines that leave the voice room rather than crowding it with orchestral incident. Saigal, by 1945 the most imitated male voice in India, was the ideal instrument for such writing - a singer whose authority came from diction and from the weight he put on individual words rather than from range. Contemporary criticism that had nothing good to say about the film reserved its praise for exactly this pairing.

The poem is built as a chain of impossible offerings. Each stanza proposes a gift and then withdraws it as inadequate: eyes as a carpet, the earth beneath her feet given a heartbeat, blood substituted for a supply of tears that has run out, a garland strung from flowers that grow only in paradise. The rhetorical move is old in Urdu poetry - the lover's inability to give is itself the proof of the size of the feeling - but Mazhari sharpens it by addressing the beloved as a goddess rather than as a woman, so the poem hovers between a love lyric and an act of devotion. In a Mahabharata film that keeps quoting the Gita, that ambiguity is doing work.

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 four Saigal solos are the part of the film that survived it. Saigal came to Kurukshetra at the end of his career - he died in January 1947 - and the film is usually described as the odd one out among his last titles: an offbeat mythological made by an unknown director, sometimes cited as a forerunner of the art cinema that came two decades later.

The film failed and the song went with it. What kept it alive was the collector culture around Saigal: his recordings were catalogued, traded and eventually digitised by enthusiasts long after the films that carried them had disappeared. This number is not in any modern reissue catalogue - Saregama's surviving Kurukshetra masters are two other songs entirely - and its presence online today rests on a single blog upload.