पनघट पे अइले साँवरिया

HindiGeetMala and MySwar both list this song, both print the composers and the lyricist against it, and both leave the singer's column empty. That is unusual: for every other side of the film each source names a voice. No transfer has been traced either, so there is no recording from which the voice might be identified. The singers array in this record is therefore deliberately empty.

No copy of this recording has been traced and nothing is asserted about how it sounds. It is worth being explicit about what the empty singer credit does and does not mean: it does not mean the song was an instrumental or a chorus piece, and it does not mean the singer was Kanan Devi because she sang most of the album. It means the attribution was not recorded, or was recorded and then lost, and the honest entry is a blank.

The panghat is the paved landing at the village well or riverside where women went to draw water, and in Braj poetry it is the one place where Radha and her companions could be intercepted by Krishna. 'Sanwariya' — the dark one — is Krishna's standing epithet, and can equally be an ordinary dark-complexioned beloved. 'Aile' is the eastern Hindi form of 'aaya', he came. So the title announces the arrival of the dark one at the water's edge, which in this tradition is the moment a whole scene of teasing, obstruction and flirtation begins. Whether this particular song stayed devotional or turned entirely secular is not determinable from the title, and the verses have not survived to settle it.

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 has no circulation and no reissue. Its value in this record is as a correction: it is the side that shows why the singer credits on the rest of this album should be read as source attributions rather than as a complete account, since the sources themselves ran out of information on one track out of eight and said so by leaving the field blank.