Mor Bani Thanghat Kare

The song begins with Rabindranath Tagore. His poem “Navavarsha”, New Rain, greets the first monsoon with a heart that dances like a peacock. Jhaverchand Meghani, the poet and folklorist of Saurashtra, had heard Tagore sing it at his home in Calcutta in 1920. In 1944, after Tagore’s death, Meghani published a free Gujarati rendering in his collection Ravindra-Veena, in the cadence of the Charan bards.

The folk singer Hemu Gadhavi later gave the Gujarati poem the melody it is known by, and in that form it became a folk standard. It was his rendition that stayed with Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

According to Osman Mir’s official biography, Bhansali had wanted the song for one of his films ever since hearing Hemu Gadhavi sing it some eighteen years earlier. Speaking to DNA in 2013, Osman Mir said the director had heard him sing folk songs before approaching him. The official biography adds that Bhansali found him on YouTube and called him to Mumbai without an audition, and that the song was recorded in two takes.

In the film the song plays over the opening titles, sung by Osman Mir and Aditi Paul. Bhansali adapted and arranged the folk melody for the film, and the soundtrack, released by Eros Music on 4 October 2013, credits the words to Jhaverchand Meghani and the composition to Hemu Gadhavi.

Before the film’s release, Meghani’s grandson Pinaki Meghani objected to the song being labelled “traditional”. In October 2013 Bhansali Productions gave an assurance that Jhaverchand Meghani would be credited in the film’s opening titles, along with his photograph.

The song brought Osman Mir a nomination for Best Music Debut at the 2014 GiMA Awards, and it has followed him onto every stage since. In 2018 Divya Bhaskar reported that when he began it at a dayro in Mumbai, the audience showered the stage with bundles of notes. The Times of India, reviewing a 2014 Ahmedabad concert, called it the song he is best known for.