ओ कली मतवाली ओ मतवाले फूल

MySwar gives this side its longer title, 'O Kali Matwali O Matwale Phool' — O intoxicated bud, O intoxicated flower — while HindiGeetMala lists it under the shorter 'O Kali Matwali'. It is one of Kanan Devi's four songs in the film and, with 'Ab Chand Na Sharmaye', the best rated of them by HindiGeetMala's users. A transfer of roughly three minutes circulates on Kanan Devi's official artist channel.

A solo female side of about three minutes. The refrain form is visible in the title itself — a two-part address, bud and then flower, the kind of paired call that gives a composer a natural antecedent and consequent to set. What the orchestration behind it actually does is not something that can be described honestly from the transfer in circulation, and no contemporary account of the scoring of this film has been traced, so it is left undescribed.

'Matwala' is the word doing all the work — drunk, intoxicated, reeling, and by extension utterly absorbed in something. Applied to a bud and a flower it is straightforward spring imagery, of the kind that carried a great many Hindi film lyrics of the 1940s. It is worth noting that Suresh Chaudhari uses the same word again in this film, in Talat Mahmood's 'Tu Sun Le Matwale', where it is addressed to a person rather than to a plant. Whether the two songs were written as a deliberate pair is not documented and is not claimed here. Beyond the title, no lyric text for this song has been traced.

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 side survives on Kanan Devi's official artist channel, which is effectively the whole of its present circulation. Kanan Devi went on to make her last Hindi film, Chandrashekhar, in 1948 with Ashok Kumar, after which she worked in Bengali cinema and production; the Raj Laxmi songs sit near the end of her Hindi-language run.