सखी कैसे कहूँ

One of the three Din Raat songs that Hindi Film Geet Kosh credits to the professional playback singer Rajkumari, listed on hindigeetmala with Santokh Nadim as lyricist and Dada Chandekar as composer. Its audio has not resurfaced, so nothing survives but the title and the credit line. The title marks it as a sakhi-geet — a song addressed to a woman friend — which is the standard Hindustani device for saying something the speaker cannot say to the beloved directly.

No recording is known to circulate and the music cannot be described from the sound. What is documented is the composer: Dada Chandekar, a Kolhapur-born harmonium player who spent fifteen years on the Marathi stage — part of them as a partner in Master Dinanath Mangeshkar's Balwant Sangeet Mandali — before entering films after the coming of sound, and whose surviving Din Raat tracks are all built on harmonium and tabla with a small string group. A sakhi-geet in that idiom would conventionally sit at a moderate tempo with a returning refrain, but for this particular song that remains an expectation rather than a description.

The text has not survived and cannot be reported. The title alone identifies the form: sakhi kaise kahoon — 'friend, how do I say it' — opens the sakhi-geet, in which a woman confides to a female friend what convention forbids her to address to the man himself. The device is inherited by Hindi film lyric from thumri and folk song, and its power lies in the double audience: the friend on screen hears a confession, the man in the scene overhears it, and the listener at home is placed in the friend's position. Whether Santokh Nadim's verses used the form for longing, for reproach or for joy cannot be determined from the title.

Din Raat was a Navyug Chitrapat Ltd. social directed by Shori Daulatavi. Its two leads sang four of the eight songs themselves, and Rajkumari was engaged for three of which this is one — a division that suggests these numbers belonged to a character other than the heroine, though with no surviving synopsis this cannot be established. Hindi Film Geet Kosh records a singer for this song, which places it among the seven of eight for which the catalogue holds full details.

This is one of the four Din Raat songs still unheard. Rajkumari, its credited singer, remained a major playback voice through the late 1940s before the arrival of Lata Mangeshkar reshaped the field, and her recorded work is comparatively well preserved — which makes the absence of this particular track a matter of the film's obscurity rather than the singer's. If any Din Raat disc survives in a private 78-rpm collection, this is one of the likelier candidates to be identified, since Rajkumari records were collected on the strength of her name alone.