गज वदन गुण सदन

Gaj vadan, the elephant-faced; gun sadan, the abode of virtues. The title is a standard pair of epithets for Ganesha, and the song is a vandana - the invocation with which an Indian performance conventionally begins. Wikipedia and Saregama both credit it to a chorus rather than to a named singer. Its survival is unusual: it is one of just two Kurukshetra tracks still carried in Saregama's catalogue, spelt there as 'Gaj Badan Gun Sadan'. For a Mahabharata film the choice of opening deity is doubly apt, since Ganesha is the epic's own scribe.

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 vandana is the one place in a 1945 film score where a classically trained composer could write exactly what he already knew - the form is fixed, the function is announcement, and the idiom is the devotional one every Indian listener carries. Chorus scoring of the period typically means unison or near-unison voices over a light rhythmic bed; the specifics of this recording have not been examined here, and are not described.

The two epithets in the title do different jobs. Gaj vadan is descriptive and physical - it names the god by his impossible body, the thing a listener pictures. Gun sadan is abstract and moral - it names him as the house in which qualities live. Putting them side by side is standard vandana practice: the form asks the singer to make the deity both visible and thinkable in the same breath before anything else in the performance is allowed to begin.

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. An invocation of this kind would normally sit at the head of the film, before the modern social frame or the epic proper begins - which, if so, makes this the first music an audience at the New West End heard on 17 May 1946.

That an unnamed chorus number outlived four K.L. Saigal solos in the commercial catalogue is the neatest possible illustration of how record archives actually work. Nothing about this song was more valued at the time; it simply stayed in the vault. It is now one of the two remaining commercially indexed traces of a film that ran four weeks and was never revived.