दिल बेक़रार सो जा

The second of Radharani's three solos in Kurukshetra (1945), documented by Wikipedia, Hindi Geet Mala and MySwar with Pandit Ganpat Rao's music and Jameel Mazhari's words. No audio is known to survive. The title is a lullaby addressed not to a child but to the singer's own restless heart, a form common enough in 1940s film songs to make its emotional function legible even without the text: the singer is talking herself towards a sleep she does not expect to get.

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. Because no copy of this recording is accessible, its scoring, tempo and structure are unknown, and are left blank here rather than guessed.

Bekaraar - restless, without repose - is the pivot of the title, and it is one of the most heavily worked words in the Urdu-Hindi film lyric of the period. To tell a restless heart to sleep is to admit that it will not, which is why the form works: the instruction is really a confession. Beyond the opening phrase no text of Mazhari's lyric is available.

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. Radharani, the singer of three of the film's songs, was born in 1903 at Jiaganj in Murshidabad, into a Marwari family long settled in Bengal. She was trained first by the kirtan singer Harimakhan Das and then in thumri and ghazal by Ustad Dabeer Khan, was brought to Calcutta by the zamindar of Jiaganj after he heard her perform, and moved from silent films through New Theatres - Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933), Kashinath (1943) - to playback work in the 1940s. She worked in Hindi films only until 1947 and died in Calcutta on 22 August 1997, aged 94. A Bombay-based singer-actress of the same name is a separate person.

Like most of the film's non-Saigal songs, this one left no trace beyond the catalogues. Its value now is as part of the record of what a Kirana gharana classical vocalist actually wrote when the film industry gave him one chance to do it.