क्या करना है पूछ रहे

Satya Choudhary sings once in Kurukshetra, and this is it. The song matters out of proportion to its obscurity for an archival reason: it is one of only two tracks from the film still carried in Saregama's catalogue. The label on which the film's 78s were originally issued is not documented in any catalogue that could be checked. The title - a question about what is to be done - sits naturally in a film that repeatedly interrupts its epic to quote the Bhagavad Gita on action and duty, though no source confirms where in the narrative it falls.

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. That this track and one other are the two the label kept is itself a piece of information: it means physical masters of them existed when the catalogue was consolidated, while the Saigal songs from the same film - commercially the more valuable ones - did not make it across.

The title is a reported question: someone is asking what is to be done. In a film organised around the Gita's argument about action, a lyric that opens by putting that question into somebody else's mouth is doing recognisable work, but the body of Mazhari's text is not available and the song's dramatic placement is undocumented, so the reading stops there.

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. Satya Choudhary is credited as one of the film's four playback singers by Wikipedia, MySwar and the Osianama song-booklet record alike, and Saregama's own artist index carries the name in the spelling Satya Chowdhury. Beyond the credit almost nothing about the singer is documented in accessible sources, and nothing has been invented here to fill the gap.

Two songs from Kurukshetra are still commercially catalogued eighty years on - this one and the invocation Gaj Vadan Gun Sadan. Neither is a Saigal song, which is a good illustration of how arbitrary musical survival is: what lasts is not what was loved but what happened to stay in a company's vault.