मैं शरमायी क्यूँ शरमायी

The third of Kanan Devi's four sides in the film. A transfer of about three and a quarter minutes circulates. The title is a self-interrogation rather than an address to anyone else, which is a slightly less common shape for a 1940s film lyric than the direct plea or the direct compliment, and it is the most interesting thing that can be said about the song from the documentation that survives.

About three minutes and a quarter, a single female voice, a studio ensemble behind it. The repeated question in the title implies the commonest and most useful device available to a composer working at this length — a refrain that returns with the same words and a different weight each time — but that is an inference from the lyric's shape, not a description of the record, and nothing more detailed is claimed. No contemporary notice of the scoring has been traced.

'Main sharmayi, kyun sharmayi' — I blushed; why did I blush? The line puts the singer in two positions at once, as the one who blushed and as the one asking about it, and the whole small comedy of the song is in that split. In the poetic convention of the period the answer is always known to everybody including the speaker, which is why the question can be asked lightly. What the verses go on to do with it is not recoverable: neither HindiGeetMala nor MySwar carries a text, and no other source traced does either.

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.

The song circulates today through a single collector upload on a channel that specialises in reissuing 1940s Hindi film sides. That is the ordinary fate of the Calcutta Hindi productions of these years: the films are gone, the discs are not, and what remains of them is held up by private enthusiasts rather than by any archive.