जुगनुमा

Released on 7 September 2025 by Bhonpoo Records as the title track for Raam Reddy's magical-realism film Jugnuma: The Fable, this song is entirely the creation of Piyush Mishra — who wrote, composed, and sang it. Backed only by Shrey Gupta's acoustic guitar and Amey Ghule's sparse production, Mishra's gravelly voice transforms the firefly (jugnuma) into a philosophical metaphor for the blurred boundary between reality and illusion. The song perfectly mirrors the film's unsettling tone: the Himalayan orchard is beautiful but something sinister stirs beneath. In four minutes and nineteen seconds, Mishra distills the film's entire world — its 1989 setting, its folk sensibility, and its dread.

Piyush Mishra strips the arrangement to its essence: a lone acoustic guitar, minimal ambience, and a voice carrying decades of theatre, cinema, and folk poetry. There is no percussion to anchor the listener — only the floating quality of the guitar chord and the breath between lines. The melody moves in gentle, slightly irregular curves, avoiding the predictable resolution of commercial film songs. This deliberate unsteadiness mirrors the film's own refusal to explain its mysteries. Mishra draws from a folk-ballad idiom without quoting any specific tradition, creating something that sounds ancient and completely original at once. The four-minute-nineteen-second runtime is unhurried — a quality rare in 2025 Bollywood promotionals.

The title word 'jugnuma' — a firefly-like creature, or something that resembles a firefly — is itself a riddle. Mishra's lyric uses this diminutive glimmer as a stand-in for the fragile, flickering truth that the film's protagonist Dev pursues across his burning orchard. The language circles between wonder and dread, never settling into either. The imagery of darkness, burning, and a small hovering light echoes both the film's literal fires and its philosophical core — who or what is setting things ablaze, and can a firefly's light be trusted to show the way?

Piyush Mishra joined Jugnuma: The Fable after the film had already completed its festival run — winning the Special Jury Award at MAMI 2024 and making history as the first Indian film to win Best Film at the Leeds International Film Festival. His involvement came specifically to create the title track, giving the film a sonic identity for its theatrical release. The song was released five days before the film's September 12, 2025 premiere. Rolling Stone India covered the song's release, noting Mishra's philosophical and unsettling touch perfectly matched Raam Reddy's world of magical realism.

Though Jugnuma: The Fable had a limited theatrical run, the title track by Piyush Mishra earned its own life online, drawing listeners who discovered the film through festival coverage. For admirers of Mishra's work — his iconic songs for Gulaal (2009) and Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) — this track stands as further proof of his singular ability to fuse theatrical craft with film song. It belongs to the small body of 2025 film songs that prioritise mood and poetry over commercial hooks.