कब अइहो रे सजन विदेसिया

The last of Kanan Devi's four sides in Raj Laxmi, and one of the three songs from the film that have not been traced in circulation — it survives as a catalogue entry in HindiGeetMala and MySwar and nowhere else that could be found. The title is the only substantial thing that survives of it, and the title is unusually informative, because it is not in standard Hindi.

No transfer of this recording has been traced, so nothing whatever is said here about how it sounds. The one structural expectation the title sets up is that of the birha or viraha song — the separation lament — which in the film music of the 1940s was usually taken slow and given to a single voice; but that is a statement about the genre, not about this record, and it should not be read as a description of a performance nobody involved in this entry has heard.

The language of the title is the point. 'Aiho' for 'aaoge', 'videsiya' for one who has gone to a foreign place, 'sajan' for the husband or lover — this is the Bhojpuri-Awadhi register of the eastern Gangetic plain, not the Hindi-Urdu of the Bombay film song. 'Videsiya' in that tradition is a whole genre of its own: the songs of the woman left behind when her man migrates for work, a form so identified with the region that Bhikhari Thakur's play of the same name had become its emblem. Suresh Chaudhari is writing in that idiom here, and for a Calcutta studio it was a natural one to reach for, since the migration those songs describe largely ran towards Calcutta. What the verses themselves say has not survived.

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. Kanan Devi's Hindi diction had been coached from the beginning by Rai Chand Boral, which is part of why a Bengali singer in a Calcutta studio could carry a lyric in an eastern Hindi dialect at all.

The song is not known to circulate in any form. Its interest now is documentary: it records that a 1945 Hindi film made in Calcutta reached for the videsiya idiom of the Bhojpuri belt, which is a small piece of evidence about how migration and its music travelled into the Hindi film song a long time before the folk revivals that made the connection obvious.