गुज़र गई है चमन की बहार

The most admired and least attributed song on the Wasiyatnama record set. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh carries no singer for it, and neither hindigeetmala nor MySwar supplies one; a reader of Songs of Yore's 1945 survey ranked it sixth among the year's best female solos and credited Ila Ghosh, Atul's Song A Day guessed Sumitra Devi from the cast list, and a commenter there reported that listeners on YouTube say Utpala Sen. This entry therefore records no singer.

A slow female solo in ghazal idiom, and the one Wasiyatnama track that listeners return to on its own musical merit rather than for the film — the reader of Songs of Yore who ranked it called it as good as any ghazal produced at the time.

Chaman ki bahaar — the garden's spring — is the most worked image in Urdu poetry, and Zakir Hussain uses it in its bleakest tense: not spring arriving, not spring at its height, but spring already gone past. The garden is still there and the season is not. For a film about a widow in a house she cannot leave, the figure is doing plain narrative work as well as decorative work.

Wasiyatnama was made at New Theatres, Calcutta, directed by Soumyen Mukherjee, and is the studio's Hindi telling of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's 1878 Bengali novel Krishnakanter Uil — a household destroyed by a tampered will and a widow's forbidden attachment. R.C. Boral composed the six songs and Munshi Zakir Hussain wrote all of them, the same lyricist-composer pairing New Theatres used that year on Bimal Roy's Hamrahi. No print of the film is known to be in circulation; the songs survive on record.

It was the first Wasiyatnama song to be posted on Atul's Song A Day, in August 2014, and eleven years later its singer is still an open question there. The song is a compact example of what the vintage-film-music internet is for: the record survived, the paperwork did not, and the attribution is being argued out in blog comments rather than settled in a catalogue.