दिल रोते रोते खेलो

The only song in Samrat Chandragupta credited to a fourth female voice, one who appears nowhere else on this soundtrack. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh gives the singer as Saraswati Rane; hindigeetmala and myswar both print 'Saraswati Bai' instead. The name is recorded here in the Geet Kosh's form, with the catalogue variant noted, because the Geet Kosh is the older and better-sourced record for 1945. The title yokes two contradictory verbs — weeping and playing — into a single instruction.

Bringing in a fourth female voice for a single number was not unusual in 1945: soundtracks were assembled around whichever singers a producer could book on the days the recordings were scheduled, and a one-song appearance often marks a specialist placement — a dance number, a stage song, a character's set piece — rather than a lead vocal. Nothing in the sources states which of these applies here, so the observation is offered as context and not as an identification.

The construction 'rote rote khelo' — play on, while weeping — is an imperative addressed to the heart, and its force comes from refusing to resolve the contradiction it sets up. Hindi film lyric of the 1940s used this figure often, because it fits the situation the films kept returning to: a character who must go on performing cheerfulness in public while grieving in private. It is the lyrical form of the courtesan's song and of the wedding song sung by the woman who is losing someone at it.

Samrat Chandragupta (1945) was produced and directed by Jayant Desai for Jayant Desai Productions, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after fourteen years at Ranjit Studios. It is a large-scale historical about Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan empire, built around the legend of his break with Alexander's Macedonians and his marriage to the daughter of the Greek general Seleucus Nicator. Ishwarlal, Renuka Devi, Suraiya, Nayampalli, Sulochana Chatterjee and Mubarak headed the cast; the screenplay was by Mohanlal G. Dave, Shaheed Latif and Sagar Hussain, and Dronacharya photographed it. C. Ramchandra — signing himself Chitalkar Ramchandra at this stage of his career — composed all ten documented songs to lyrics by Buddhi Chandra Agrawal 'Madhur', two years before Shehnai (1947) made him a household name.

The song's documentary value lies in the disagreement over its singer. Two online catalogues and the Hindi Film Geet Kosh preserve different forms of the name for the same track, which is the ordinary condition of single-appearance credits from this period: a voice booked for one number leaves one line in the record, and that line is transcribed differently by each compiler. Resolving such cases is what the surviving label sheets would be needed for.