A 1933 film rarely survives in cultural memory as anything but a historical footnote, but Puran Bhagat earned a different fate: a box office hit substantial enough that the Punjab Cinema Art Society called it a masterpiece, built entirely around a story the Nath Sampradaya has told about its own founding guru for generations.
The plot follows Prince Puran, born to King Silwan only after years of prayer and raised under a prophecy that forbids his parents from seeing him again until he turns sixteen. When he finally returns home, his stepmother Luna falsely accuses him, and the king has his arms cut off and casts him into a well to die. What happens next is the film's real subject. Gorakhnath, the historical yogi credited as the Nath order's own founding master, finds Puran, restores him whole and takes him on as a disciple, initiating him into the very ascetic discipline the order still traces back to Gorakhnath himself.
Puran goes on to help restore his father's throne and briefly marries, but the story's actual ending is renunciation. He walks away from the kingdom entirely to live as a wandering Nath yogi, and the tradition remembers him under a new name, Sri Chauranginatha, counted among the Navnath, the nine legendary masters of the order. A film built around a genuine box office star in K. L. Saigal was also, structurally, a film about how a prince becomes a yogi, told the way the Nath Sampradaya itself has long told it.