कूक रे तू प्राण पपीहे

One of only two songs in the Bisvi Sadi score with a named singer: MySwar credits Parul Ghosh, who was both the film's playback voice and the composer's wife. The title addresses the papiha — the pied cuckoo whose call arrives with the rains and which Hindi and Braj poetry has used for centuries as the bird of viraha, separation. Calling it 'pran papihe', the papiha of my life-breath, folds the bird and the longing together so that the woman is telling her own grief to cry out. No lyricist is credited.

No recording has surfaced, so the setting cannot be described. The credit itself is the substance here: Parul Ghosh singing a Pannalal Ghosh composition. They had married in 1924, when she was nine and he thirteen, and she was the younger sister of his friend Anil Biswas; she had sung on Dhoop Chhaon (1935), among the first playback recordings in Indian cinema, and would close her career singing 'Vande Mataram' with Manna Dey and Sudha Malhotra in Andolan (1951) — again to her husband's music.

The papiha is not a decorative bird. Its call is heard in north India at the start of the rains, and the folk ear hears in it the syllables piu kahan — where is my beloved — which is why it became the standing emblem of the woman waiting through the monsoon in kajri, in barahmasa, in thumri and eventually in film song. The convention has a cruelty built into it: the bird's cry is what makes the separation unbearable, so the woman is usually pleading with it to stop. This title does the opposite. It tells the papiha to cry out — and by naming it 'pran papihe', the papiha of the life-breath, it identifies the bird with the speaker's own body, so that silencing it would mean silencing herself. That inversion is the most interesting thing in the film's surviving song list.

Bisvi Sadi — 'The Twentieth Century' — was produced and directed by Mohan Bhavnani for Bhavnani Productions and released in 1945, with Motilal and Nargis heading a cast that also included Mazhar Khan, Gope, Ashalata, Bhudo Advani, Navin and Majumdar. Pannalal Ghosh, the flautist who made the bansuri a Hindustani concert instrument, wrote all fifteen songs; the records went out on Columbia. HindiGeetMala names Parul Ghosh as the film's singer at the film level without attaching her to individual tracks; MySwar attaches her by name to exactly two — this song and 'Maang Rahi Hoon Tujhse'. Whether she sang the other thirteen as well is unresolved.

Parul Ghosh's reputation rests on her work for her brother Anil Biswas and on being among the first playback voices in Indian cinema; her songs for her husband are far less written about, and this is one of them. Bisvi Sadi is out of circulation and no print is known to be accessible, so the song exists today chiefly as a catalogue line in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived databases. Its claim on attention is that it belongs to one of the very few complete Hindi film scores signed by Pannalal Ghosh, whose reputation otherwise rests entirely on the concert platform.