मुरली मधुर बजा कन्हैया

One of the eight songs documented for Nasib (1945), and — with 'Ghar Aaja Balam' — one of the two whose singer is not recorded in any index consulted. HindiGeetMala and MySwar both list the title under the film with Gobind Ram as composer and Aziz Kashmiri as lyricist, and neither carries a vocal credit; the survey of Gobind Ram's career that picks out the album's notable sides does not mention this one either. The singer array is therefore left deliberately empty rather than filled from the film's other voices. The title places the song squarely in the Krishna repertoire: 'murali' is the transverse bamboo flute, 'Kanhaiya' the affectionate name for the boy Krishna, and 'madhur' the adjective — sweet — that attaches to that flute more often than to anything else in Hindi devotional verse.

No detail of the setting has been preserved, so only what the form implies can honestly be offered. A film bhajan of this address — a request to Krishna to play — is normally built on a slow-to-medium cycle with the tabla or dholak kept soft, a melody that stays in a narrow compass and returns often to the tonic, and, wherever the budget allowed, a flute answering the voice between lines so that the instrument the lyric asks for is the instrument the listener actually hears. Gobind Ram, whose particular strength the reference literature places in rhythm and in the range of voices he was willing to use, was moving across a wide idiomatic spread on this single album, which also holds two Urdu ghazals, a lullaby and a street-hawker's duet. Whether this side was a solo, a duet or a chorus is not recorded.

Aziz Kashmiri wrote two of Nasib's eight songs, and they sit at opposite ends of the album's register: the freedom duet 'Hum Panchhi Hain Aazad' and this Krishna piece. The vocabulary here is the Braj-inflected Hindi of bhakti poetry rather than the Urdu of the film's ghazals, and the grammatical shape announced by the title is the imperative of request — the devotee telling Krishna what to do, which in this tradition is a form of intimacy rather than of command. The flute is doing double duty as it almost always does in that repertoire: it is an instrument, and it is the summons that pulls the listener out of the ordinary world towards the god playing it. Nothing beyond the title is documented, so no reading of the verses themselves is offered here.

Nasib was produced by Silver Films — the banner the actress Pramila ran with her husband, the actor Kumar — and directed by B. D. Vedi, in 1945. Its eight songs were split between three lyricists and sung by Rajkumari, Zohrabai Ambalewali, Hamida Banu and Khan Mastana; which of them, if any of them, sang this one has not been recorded. A single devotional number inside an otherwise secular social film is entirely ordinary for the period — the bhajan was a standard slot in a 1940s soundtrack, usually placed at a moment of family crisis or of a woman's endurance — but with no print of Nasib known to survive and no synopsis in the reference literature, where this song sat in the story cannot be established.

This is one of the five Nasib sides that did not make the transition to the digital catalogue: three of the film's songs are still carried by Saregama and can be heard, and this is not among them. Nor is it picked out in the one substantial survey of Gobind Ram's career, which lists six Nasib titles and passes over this one. What survives of it, then, is a line in two song indexes — a title, a composer, a lyricist and a blank where the singer's name should be. That blank is the ordinary condition of most 1940s film songs rather than an exception, and recording it accurately is the only thing this entry can usefully do.