अब चाँद न शरमाये

One of Kanan Devi's four sides in Raj Laxmi and, with 'O Kali Matwali', the best rated of her four on HindiGeetMala — both score 3.00 there, against 1.00 for her other two. The film's highest-rated song overall is Talat Mahmood's 'Jaago Musafir Jaago' at 4.33. The transfer that circulates runs about three minutes, the standard length of a ten-inch 78-rpm side. The title works a conceit that any listener of the period would have caught at once: the moon is conventionally the standard of beauty, and to tell it not to be shy is to say that something before it has already outshone it.

The recording is a solo for a single female voice over a small studio ensemble, and it runs to the three minutes a shellac side allowed — beyond that, nothing specific about the arrangement can honestly be set down here without a clean restoration to work from; what circulates is a collector's transfer. What can be said is that Kanan Devi's manner is well documented: she was trained at the Megaphone company and later under Bhishmadev Chatterjee, and her singing style is usually described as rapid in tempo and instrumentally exact, the quality New Theatres had built some of its biggest hits around.

'Ab chand na sharmaye' — now let the moon not be shy. The line belongs to a convention so settled in Urdu-Hindi poetry that it needs no explaining: the beloved's face is measured against the moon, and the moon loses. What is slightly unusual is the direction of address. The song does not praise the beloved; it consoles the moon, which is a lighter and more affectionate way of paying the same compliment. Beyond that turn, nothing about the verses is recoverable — HindiGeetMala lists the song without a lyric text, and no other source traced carries one.

Raj Laxmi was made in Calcutta by M.P. Productions, written and directed by the Bengali writer Premendra Mitra, with Kanan Devi and Jahar as its principal actors and Talat Mahmood appearing both on screen and on the soundtrack. No plot summary of the film survives in any reference listing traced, so nothing is said here about the scene this song belonged to. By 1945 Kanan Devi had been freelancing for four years, having given up her New Theatres contract in 1941, and M.P. Productions was one of the banners she came back to — her biggest hit, Jawaab, had been made there.

The song has a modest afterlife on the streaming services: it sits on the official Kanan Devi artist channel alongside two independent collector uploads, one of which prints the full credit line — singer, lyricist and both composers — on the video title itself. For a 1945 Calcutta production whose film is lost, that is an unusually complete piece of surviving metadata.