हरे मुरारे मधुकैटभारे

The heaviest of the four songs K.C. Dey sings in Devdasi (1945). The title is the opening of a Sanskrit naam-litany long current in bhajan and kirtan practice: 'Hare' (Hari), 'Murare' (slayer of the demon Mura) and 'Madhu-Kaitabh-are' (enemy of the demons Madhu and Kaitabha) are three epithets of Vishnu-Krishna strung in a single breath. Narottam Vyas is credited with the lyric and Krishna Chandra Dey with the tune; the record was issued on the Gramophone Company's HMV catalogue.

Dey's setting is kirtan practice carried onto a film soundstage: an open-throated, high-placed male voice moving in short repeating cycles rather than in the verse-refrain architecture of the commercial film song, with harmonium and light percussion holding a steady pulse underneath. The melody stays deliberately plain so the syllables of the names can be heard whole — the opposite of the ornamented, orchestrally dressed film music that Bombay was moving towards in 1945.

The poetic form here is not narrative but enumeration. A naam-mala of this kind does not describe the deity or ask him for anything; it simply says his names in order, on the bhakti premise that the name and the named are not separable, so that to utter the name is already to have arrived at the presence. Each epithet in the title carries a compressed story — Mura and the demon-pair Madhu and Kaitabha are all adversaries the god destroyed — so the litany is also a quick recitation of remembered rescues. Narottam Vyas, writing out of the Braj devotional tradition rather than the Urdu film-lyric tradition, keeps the register Sanskritic and formal.

Devdasi was made in Bombay by New Maharashtra Productions with Prithviraj Kapoor and Monica Desai in the lead and K.C. Dey both scoring the film and appearing in it. Dey's screen persona — the blind devotee who sings — had been fixed a decade earlier at New Theatres in Calcutta, and a song like this one is where that persona and the plot meet: the singer on screen is doing what the character is for. No detailed plot summary of the film survives in the accessible catalogues, so the exact scene this bhajan accompanied is not documented here.

This is late K.C. Dey — one of the last full scores by the composer-singer who had brought Bengal's kirtan idiom into the Hindi talkie. The devotional line he carried passed directly to his nephew and pupil Manna Dey and, through his teaching, to S.D. Burman; the bhajan as a serious form in Hindi cinema, rather than as decoration, largely begins with him. The film itself is no longer in public circulation, and the song survives as a catalogue entry and a gramophone side rather than as a scene.