परदेसी से प्रीत लगाई

This is the title song in everything but name: the film is called Pardesi Balam, 'the beloved from elsewhere', and this is the number that states the idea outright. The Geet Kosh's first line has a woman whose heart weeps again and again for having loved a pardesi, answered by the flat proverb that a wanderer's love is a bad bargain because a wanderer belongs to no one. The Kosh marks it female-male, so it was sung as an exchange; myswar and Saregama's digital reissue independently agree in naming Dilshad Begum on the record, but neither names a second voice.

A folk duet of this kind is built to be answered: a woman's complaint and a rejoinder, which in a 1940s soundtrack usually means a steady mid-tempo cycle, a mukhda that returns as a refrain both voices can share, and short antaras. myswar files the track simply as Filmi with no further classification and no surviving description of the arrangement is available, so anything beyond the form itself would be invention.

The pardesi — the man from elsewhere, the traveller who will move on — is one of the deepest grooves in North Indian folk song, and it carries a specific social meaning: the woman who loves him is not merely unlucky but has broken with the settled order that would have kept her safe. Kashmiri writes this in Hindi folk idiom rather than Urdu, and the second half of the opening does the classic thing of stepping out of the woman's grief into proverb, so the song both feels the loss and pronounces judgement on it. Read against the film's other songs it forms a pair with 'Yeh Ishq Na Tujhko Bhaye', the male number in which the traveller ties up his bedding and leaves — the same story from the other side.

Pardesi Balam was a Parkar Films production of Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza for the producer Dr Anand Prakash Parkar, with the young Pran among a cast the Geet Kosh could only list because a collector in Karachi supplied the names decades later. All ten of its songs were written by Zahir Kashmiri and composed by Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi. No print, poster or synopsis survives, and myswar records the picture as unreleased, so the Geet Kosh's song index — first lines and a bracketed note on who sang each number on screen — is very nearly the whole of what is known about the film.

Because the film itself has no surviving print and no confirmed release, its title idea survives mainly through this song's entry in the Geet Kosh — the clearest single piece of evidence for what Pardesi Balam was actually about. It is also one of the four sides Saregama reissued digitally, and both that reissue and myswar carry the same singer name for it, which places it among the better-documented of the film's ten sides.