माँग रही हूँ तुझसे

The other song MySwar credits to Parul Ghosh. Its title is built on two grammatical choices that do all the work: the feminine verb form rahi hoon, which fixes the speaker as a woman, and the pronoun tujhse rather than aapse or tumse, which is the most intimate second person Hindi has — used for a lover, a mother, a child, or God, and for nobody in between. What is being asked for is not in the title, and no lyric text survives.

No recording is accessible. The one solid fact about the performance is the voice: Parul Ghosh, singing to her husband's composition, a decade into a career that had begun with one of Indian cinema's first playback recordings and would run until Andolan in 1951.

Hindi keeps three second persons and a lyricist's choice among them is never neutral. Aap is distance and respect; tum is warmth with a boundary; tu collapses the distance entirely. A woman who says maang rahi hoon tujhse is therefore not petitioning a stranger — she is claiming a relationship that entitles her to ask. Whether the addressee was a lover, a parent or a deity is exactly the ambiguity this pronoun creates, and the devotional and the erotic have shared it in Indian poetry since the bhakti poets. Without the verse there is no way to resolve which one this song meant, and it is worth noticing that in 1945 a film lyricist could rely on an audience that heard both at once.

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. Nargis was fifteen or sixteen during this production. Her breakthrough was still four years away, in Barsaat and Andaz, both 1949; Bisvi Sadi belongs to the stretch of early work that is rarely listed when her career is summarised.

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.