रग-रग में जगी उमंगें

The second of the two songs Josh Malihabadi wrote for Ghulami, sung solo by Renuka Devi and running three minutes sixteen seconds. Where his other contribution to the film is an address to the homeland, this one is personal: the title speaks of longings waking through every vein, 'rag rag' being the Hindi-Urdu figure for the whole body pulse by pulse. Film-song credits for Josh are scarce enough that a second lyric on the same soundtrack is itself notable.

Pal gives Renuka Devi the track alone at a moderate tempo — quicker than the album's laments, slower than the dance number — which is the register a song of rising feeling needs if it is to build rather than simply arrive. Writing for an actress-singer meant writing to a voice trained by performance rather than by conservatory, and the melodic line on this kind of number stays within a comfortable range while relying on forward momentum for its effect. It is one of the four tracks on which Renuka Devi sings entirely unaccompanied by another voice.

'Rag rag mein' is one of the most physical constructions available in Urdu-Hindi verse — feeling located not in the heart as an abstraction but distributed through the body's vessels — and Josh Malihabadi, whose reputation rests on force rather than delicacy, is exactly the poet to use it. The word 'umangen' carries eagerness, upsurge, an appetite for what is coming rather than grief for what is gone. Read alongside his other Ghulami lyric, the pairing is characteristic of him: the same energy pointed once at the country and once at a single life.

Josh Malihabadi joined W. Z. Ahmed's Shalimar Pictures at Poona as a lyricist in 1941 and worked there through the years that produced Ghulami. The studio's willingness to keep Progressive Writers' Association members on staff is why a soundtrack this small carries Josh, Majaz and Akhtar-ul-Iman together; it was Josh himself who brought Akhtar-ul-Iman to Poona in 1944. Ghulami was directed by Mohan Wadhwani with Renuka Devi and Masood Parvez in the leads. No plot record survives, so the situation this solo dramatised is not known.

This is a genuinely obscure recording — no independent circulation, no separate listings, known only through the Saregama album and the Hindi Geet Mala song index. Its documentary interest is that it doubles the small surviving corpus of Josh Malihabadi's film lyrics from a single film. Josh migrated to Pakistan in 1956 and his Indian film work is usually reduced in reference sources to a five-title list; the recordings behind those titles are what make the list mean anything, and this is one of them.