चले मुसाफ़िर ख़ाक वतन की लेकर

A solo by Khan Mastana, the singer-composer who was one of the busiest male voices of 1940s Bombay before Rafi and Mukesh displaced the older style. The title turns on one of the most durable images in Urdu and Hindi song — the traveller carrying earth from home — and in a film about a household driven out of Chittor it needs no explaining. Credits for the song come from hindigeetmala and the Saregama album listing; it has not been written about in detail.

Khan Mastana's delivery belonged to the pre-Rafi generation — declamatory, weighted, closer to the stage than to the microphone — and the marching-tempo construction Gyan Dutt uses for departure and journey songs suits it. The idiom is the mid-1940s film equivalent of a walking song: steady pulse, phrases that arrive on the beat, nothing that would need a trained classical voice to execute.

The handful of homeland dust is one of those images that carried a double charge in 1945. Inside the film it is the language of a dynasty in exile, a household leaving Chittor with nothing. Outside it, in the last years before Partition and Independence, watan was among the most loaded words available to a Hindi lyricist, and D.N. Madhok — who wrote for a mass audience and knew exactly what it heard — would have understood that a song about carrying one's country away in one's hands was not only about the sixteenth century.

Pannadai (1945) was produced by Kamalabai Mangalorekar for Pradeep Pictures, Bombay, and directed by Ram Daryani, with Durga Khote in the title role and Chandra Mohan, Meenakshi Shirodkar, Master Vithal, Mubarak, M. Ismail, Gope and Nana Saheb Phatak in support. The film retells the sixteenth-century Mewar episode in which Panna Dhai, nursemaid to the child heir Udai Singh II, put her own son Chandan in the prince's bed so the usurper Banbir would kill him instead, then carried the heir to safety at Kumbhalgarh. Gyan Dutt wrote ten songs for it, with lyrics split between D.N. Madhok and Dewan Sharar.

Khan Mastana sang two of Pannadai's ten numbers and took part in the film's chorus battle-cry, making him its principal male voice. His career belongs to the transitional moment in Hindi playback: he had come up singing in the heavy, theatre-derived manner of the 1930s, and within two or three years of this film the lighter, microphone-aware delivery of Mohammed Rafi and Mukesh had taken the field. Records like this one are where that older male sound is still audible.