जनम जनम का दुखिया प्राणी

A K.L. Saigal solo from Tadbir (1945), music by Lal Mohammad, words by Swami Ramanand Saraswati. It is listed twice in the HFGK-derived song lists, as a first and a second part, which on a 78-rpm disc means it filled both sides of a single record — a mark of how much weight the production placed on it. The subject is stated in the title with no preamble: a being who has been in sorrow through birth after birth.

Written for the slowest and most spacious register Saigal worked in — the philosophical geet, closer to a bhajan than to a film romance. That the number ran to two record sides is the only documented structural fact about it, and it implies a setting with room to unfold rather than the tight single-side form the rest of the score had to accept. Nothing about the instrumentation survives in the record, and none is described here.

'Janam janam' — birth upon birth — puts the song's grief on a scale no single lifetime can hold, which is the standard move of the nirgun bhajan: the complaint is not about this misfortune but about being embodied at all. The word praani rather than aadmi or insaan matters here too; praani means simply a living creature, without the dignity that 'man' would import, and it places the speaker in the same category as everything else that breathes and suffers. In a film organised around the question of whether human effort can alter fate, this is the position that says the question has already been answered many lifetimes ago. No verse is quoted: the poet's dates are unknown and the term cannot be shown to have expired.

Saigal played Kanhaiyalal in Jayant Desai's production, opposite Suraiya's Saguna. The film has left no preserved synopsis, so the dramatic placement of this two-sided number cannot be reconstructed; its length alone suggests it was one of the film's set pieces. By 1945 Saigal's dependence on alcohol was affecting both his health and his work, and Tadbir sits in the last stretch of a career that had begun with Puran Bhagat and Devdas more than a decade earlier.

This is the Tadbir song most often named alongside 'Hasratein Khamosh Hain' when the film's music is discussed, and it belongs to the strand of Saigal's work — the philosophical and devotional recordings — that outlived the films they were made for by the widest margin.